Donald Trump Wants To Cancel Karl Rove. For Real.

It’s like watching Alien v. Predator, and I can’t look away.

Most of Trump’s long press missives out of Mar-a-Lago aren’t worth considering or repeating in any form, but where a towering figure in the GOP is their target, underscoring the ruinous civil war that the GOP now finds itself in, attention should be paid.

Image from Beckernews.com

In an OpEd to the Wall Street Journal yesterday, longtime GOP strategist and one-time Trump campaign advisor Karl Rove criticized Trump’s speech the prior weekend at CPAC, saying, “There was no forward-looking agenda, simply a recitation of his greatest hits. People like fresh material. Repetition is useful to a point, but it grows stale."

Rove also noted that Trump “only” garnered 68% support in a straw poll for president among the CPAC participants, while 32% did not want him to run or had no opinion.

Now, Rove is no fool. He must have known his piece, as well as his statements on Fox News, would bait Trump to attack. The reasons for Rove’s offensive aren’t clear, but if he has run the numbers, he may have concluded that Trump at the top of the ticket in 2024 would likely be a repeat of 2020 or worse. His call for “fresh material”—knowing that Trump is incapable of anything but rehashing of his greatest hits—feels like a barely veiled hope for a different contender.

After the OpEd ran, it took only a few hours before Trump struck back. In a press release that Larry Sabato of the UVA Center for Politics aptly describes as Trump “just string[ing] together the tweets he might have written before he was banned,” Trump laid into Rove hard. “He’s a pompous fool with bad advice and always has an agenda.” Trump continued, “Karl Rove has been losing for years, except for himself. He’s a RINO of the highest order, who came to the Oval Office lobbying for 5G for him and a group.” 

Trump went on to blame Rove for the Georgia senate losses, which many GOP insiders believe actually were undermined by Trump’s attacks on the GOP establishment there. “He ran the campaign for two Senators in Georgia, and did a rotten job with bad ads and concepts. Should have been an easy win, but he and his friend Mitch blew it with their $600 vs. $2,000 proposal. Karl would be much more at home at the disastrous Lincoln Project. I heard they have numerous openings!” 

Thus, with zero irony, did the man who gave the keynote speech at the “America Uncanceled” CPAC conference call for Karl Rove to be canceled. (Trump also used the opportunity to attack others with whom he has deep grievances, including FOX News, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Pat Toomey, and Liz Cheney.)

Why would Karl Rove choose now to draw Trump’s ire and fire? My money is on a strategy of weakening Trump attack by attack, with establishment GOP hurling spears at the elephant until it tires and collapses of its own weight. Rove, McConnell and others know they only have a brief period before Trump begins to exert undue influence over the GOP primaries, and they are no doubt concerned that extremists within their own party who may handily win those primaries (especially if backed by Trump himself) might still fail miserably in the general. Worse still, they fear that 2022 will not unfold as a referendum on Biden’s first two years, which is traditionally what happens in the president’s first term, but rather as a pushback against the lingering specter of Trumpism. That would bring out the anti-Trump voters once more, just like in 2018, and the GOP might fail to retake the House and Senate.

Responding to Trump, Rove seemed to shrug off the criticism and emphasize his long history of working for the party. He told Reuters, “I’ve been called a lot of things in my career, but never a RINO. I’ve voted for every Republican presidential candidate since I turned 18 and have labored only for GOP candidates since then.” 

With the Trumpian bull elephant still in the GOP china shop, Rove’s labors for his party may have only just begun.