Karl Rove Says Trump ‘Made a Mistake’ by ‘Gaslighting’ Americans About Economy

Fox News contributor and veteran GOP political operative Karl Rove pulled no punches on Friday in hammering President Donald Trump over his messaging on the economy.

After a segment on a recent Fox News poll, anchor Gillian Turner noted, “Mark Meredith just reported the first piece of bad news for El-Sayed, which is that he’s trailing Rogers by four points. The other piece of news for him from this latest round of Michigan polling is that only 30% of registered voters in the state say that they support the DSA and the ideology that accompanies it.”

Rove replied, “Yeah, and look, he’s got two sets of problems, and one of them is the ideological problem. You’re absolutely right. He’s got very extreme views — calls Israel guilty of genocide and apartheid. He called for defunding the police and defunding prisons. He called for the abolition of ICE and open borders.” Rove added:

He was caught in a phone conversation saying, “Well, I don’t want to comment on the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, because there are a lot of Arab Americans in Dearborn who are upset about that.” I mean, this is an avowed enemy of America, and he didn’t want to comment on it because he was afraid of offending some fellow Arab Americans in Dearborn.

And he brought in Hasan Piker to campaign for him on his final day of the primary. This is a guy who said America deserved 9/11 and has so many obnoxious views that we could spend the rest of the hour talking about him — and that’s who he campaigned with. And then, finally, if you look at it, he really does have some very odd, anti-American comments. He’s clearly not proud of our country, its history, its great story, or its promise.

Turner added, “The vice president, on Fox News yesterday, had a succinct warning about socialism. Take a listen.”

Vice President JD Vance is then shown in a clip from yesterday saying, “If we don’t get this right, don’t blame young people for being sympathetic to socialism — we’ve got to blame ourselves. You don’t stop socialism by throwing slogans at people about the free market. As much as I love the free market, you stop socialism by making people’s lives better. And that’s what we’re trying to do every single day.”

“He’s right — the challenge for him and for the president is that the most obvious way to make people’s lives better right now, according to voters themselves, is to bring the cost of living down in this country, something they’re not really managing to do yet,” Turned added.

Rove replied, “Well, and as I said in my column yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, you start by not gaslighting. The president made a mistake, in my opinion, last week saying, ‘We’ve got the greatest economy in the history of the world,’ and that prices for groceries, gasoline, and everything are coming down rapidly.”

“That’s not the experience of the American people. And I have a slight disagreement with the vice president. I think he’s right — you don’t need to call them names. You need to depict what is wrong with socialism,” Rove continued, adding:

But frankly, free markets are one of the reasons we’ve been successful as a country, and one of the reasons socialism is a mistake. Think about this: the DSA platform calls for, in essence, nobody having a landlord and nobody having a mortgage — why? Because housing is given to you by the government. So really, do we want the government to decide what kind of place we get to live in?

And second, why do we miss out on the opportunity? One of the great ways people have risen in wealth is by buying a house, having a mortgage, paying down that mortgage, and seeing the value of their home grow over time. And socialism says, “Nope, we don’t want you to have that ability, we don’t want you to have that right — we’re in charge of deciding where you live and what kind of housing you receive.”

Watch the clip above via Fox News.

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