President Donald Trump lashed out at Republican strategist Karl Rove after he suggested the GOP prevailed in the 2024 election because voters didn’t like the Biden-Harris ticket.
During an appearance on Wednesday’s edition of Fox and Friends, host Charles Hurt asked Rove what advice he has for the Republican party as Democrats attempt to unite around a party message and a candidate at this week’s Democratic National Committee summer meeting.
Rove encouraged his party to aim beyond the “hard-core base of the party” and broaden the Republican coalition by appealing to independent voters, ticket splitters and “people who might be suspect of the Republicans but need to be wooed to win elections.”
“They got wooed in 2024 because the idea of four more years of the Biden-Harris administration was anathema to them,” he continued. “They voted for Republicans because they didn’t want to vote for Democrats.” Trump won the popular vote in 2024 by 77.30 million to 75.02 million—although he fell short of securing more than 50 per cent of the popular vote, with 2.89 million votes going to neither of the two main candidates.
“Now Republicans need to find a way to say, ‘Vote for us because of positive feelings about what it is that we’re doing, and what it is that we’re offering for future of the country,’” Rove concluded.
While that may seem like fairly innocuous advice, Trump—who tends to cater exclusively to his base—had other ideas.
Calling Rove a “Republican in name only,” the president fumed in a Truth Social post, “RINO Karl Rove, when asked on Fox & Friends this morning how to explain the tremendous success of the Republican Party, with millions of people joining it, and the Dems losing millions, was unable to give an answer. He just couldn’t utter the words, PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP! But that’s OK, the PEOPLE get it, and always have!!!”
The president has long clashed with Rove, who in May blasted Trump’s handling of tariffs, the economy, and the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the wrongly deported Maryland dad, during an interview with Fox.
Trump attacked Rove then as well, writing, “I don’t need to have Karl Rove of Fox News to tell me what to do. The guy’s a total Loser who’s been wrong about almost everything!”
That hasn’t tempered Rove’s criticism.
In July, the former adviser to President George W. Bush warned in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that there would be political “hell to pay” for the administration’s botched handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, unless the president provided more answers in the case of the late sex offender.
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