President Donald Trump ripped into Republican strategist Karl Rove after the former White House aide offered some hard truths about the Trump administration’s unforced errors.
In an unvarnished interview on Fox News, Rove attacked the president as “Mr. Scrooge,” whose economic approval was plummeting while he mishandled the rollout of tariffs and misled the public about their real impact on prices.
“We elected him for a variety of reasons that were important: inflation, the border, DEI, the military, respect for America,” Rove said Sunday during an interview with Fox News. “[But] things like tweeting out a picture of you as the pope is deeply offensive to a great many people.”
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Last week the president sparked a backlash among some of the MAGA faithful after he posted an AI-generated image of himself wearing papal robes and mitre and joked with reporters that he would like to be the next pope.
Rove also criticized Trump’s handling of the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland dad who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT mega-prison. Despite admitting the error, the Trump administration has refused to bring Abrego Garcia home and has claimed he’s a member of the criminal gang MS-13 without providing any evidence in court.
“This guy from Maryland—I don’t know if he’s a good guy or a bad guy, I don’t know if he’s a gang member not. The fact is, bring him back to the United States. Lay out the facts in a court of law, and get it done,” Rove said.
“I don’t need to have Karl Rove of Fox News to tell me what to do,” Trump shot back in a late-night post on Truth Social. “The guy’s a total Loser who’s been wrong about almost everything!”
But during Sunday’s interview, Rove warned that the Abrego Garcia case had dragged on for weeks and was eating away at the president’s approval rating on immigration, even as Trump gets strong marks for border security.
“That shows discernment of the American people,” he said. “Bring him back and do it the right way, and the American people will give you better credit.”
The remarks came just days after Rove, who served as President George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff and was an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, warned Trump was “in very bad shape” on the economy—a warning he reiterated on Sunday.
“It’s inflation—the president is saying gas is $1.90. I just filled up my tank. It ain’t $1.90,” he said. “We do not have inflation tamped down to 2 percent, and we run the risk of having a jump up—at least in a one-time way—if these tariffs are put in place.”
He also blasted the president for his “offhand remarks” on tariffs and joined liberals in saying the comments sounded like they came straight from the mouth of the cold-hearted miser Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol.
During a Cabinet meeting last week, Trump addressed warnings from the CEOs of retail giants that prices would spike and shelves would remain empty if the president didn’t de-escalate his trade war with China.
The White House has imposed a 145-percent import duty on products from China, while Beijing has retaliated with 125-percent tariffs on all American goods.
“Somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are gonna be open,’” Trump told reporters during the Cabinet meeting. “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.”
“It sounds like Mr. Scrooge,” Rove said on Sunday. “The ordinary American is like, ‘Wait a minute, I thought you were on my side. I didn’t think you were on the side of saying I need to do with less. You’ve got plenty of money, [but] I’ve got to make mine stretch as far as I can?’”
