A veteran Republican strategist who built two winning presidential campaigns warned the GOP is stumbling into the final stretch before the midterms.
Karl Rove, a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, wrote in a Wednesday op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that President Donald Trump’s messaging over the past week did almost nothing to sway undecided voters. After a modest start, Rove wrote, “things went south.”
Rove noted the week opened with Trump’s October 5 executive order allowing long-haul truckers to use dyed diesel, a fuel exempt from the federal highway tax that’s meant for farm equipment and home heating. The move “sounded good to the untrained ear,” he wrote, but distributors have already promised most of it to their regular farm and ranch customers.
What came next was “troubling,” Rove wrote. Trump’s two top political operatives traveled to Bosnia and Herzegovina to consult for a Kremlin-backed party in the breakaway region of Republika Srpska. Rove noted that U.S. consultants usually take foreign work in the off-season, “not in the final days of a crucial American campaign.”
He also cited The Journal’s report that Kimberly Guilfoyle, Trump’s pick for ambassador to Greece, asked a Republican donor to pay off $100,000 on her American Express card just before her July 2025 Senate confirmation hearing. She resigned from the post this week.
Rove then pointed to the Pentagon’s announcement that the 2009 Fort Hood shooter would be executed by firing squad on a livestream, and the Trump administration’s halt on green-card applications for eight tech companies, including Microsoft and Adobe. Vice President JD Vance accused Microsoft of replacing every worker it laid off “with one and a half foreign indentured servants.”
On Friday, Trump said he would lift sanctions on Russian diesel, a move Rove wrote “may violate U.S. law,” then promised on Truth Social that diesel prices would fall fast. “That’s very unlikely,” Rove wrote.
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