‘A Loser’: Fox News’ Karl Rove Warns Trump That His Latest National Guard Gambit Is Bad Politics
Fox News contributor and legendary GOP operative Karl Rove warned President Donald Trump that his effort to deploy the National Guard to Portland and Chicago is bad politics during an appearance on Journal Editorial Report Saturday.
After host Paul Gigot observed that a pair of recent polls suggest a majority of Americans oppose oppose the deployment of National Guard troops in U.S. cities, he asked Rove to weigh in.
“Well, I think you touched on an important point. If you take a look at the Reuters-Ipsos poll, 58% of those surveyed said they believe that you should send troops only for external threats. However, we’re deeply, and the Republicans are 51%, Democrats 72 and other, their way to get independents ,is 53. But if you look deeper, there’s another question, which was, should the president send troops even if a governor objects. That was 37 ‘Yes,’ 48 ‘No,’ and it was 70-18 among Republicans, 13-79 among Democrats, and 28-50 among independents. So yes, we don’t like him, we believe he shouldn’t deploy. If a governor objects, though, the partisanship starts to be felt. Republicans say ‘Yeah, override the governor,’ Democrats say no, and independents tend to side with the Democrat voters and say, ‘No, I don’t think that should happen,” replied Rove. “This ultimately I think will tend to be a loser if the question is: Should the president do this or should he have done it? On the other hand it might get him a slight improvement among the people saying-, who are concerned about crime by saying well at least he’s taking action. But overall I think this is going to end up being a loser for the president.”
“Well, he’s of course making the case, and certainly his lawyers are in court, that these National Guard troops are there to protect federal buildings and to protect ICE agents as they’re doing their jobs. And you have this obstruction by the mayor of Chicago, and certainly at a minimum just a lack of cooperation. And they they literally say Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, and Brandon Johnson say explicitly: ‘We’re not going to cooperate with ICE.’ So, I mean, there’s a kind of logic to what he’s doing to try to protect these agents, is there not?” followed up Gigot.
“Yeah, well, look, he has authority to deploy the National Guard to do-, to protect federal facilities. I think the public, though, is going to look at this and make a decision whether are they seeing what they saw during the summer of 2020, and riots in Portland, nightly attacks on the federal courthouse? Or is this going to be, you know, protesters outside a facility in suburban Chicago? I mean, how this plays out is going to depend upon how the locals take this in stride,” answered Rove. “If it heats up, yes, the president’s going to look better. If it doesn’t heat up, if it really is just sort of meeting the needs of protecting the federal facilities, I’m not certain it’s going work to his advantage. We saw this a little bit in Portland where the president was asked about it and he said, ;Well, you know, I am hearing that there are fires ,and riots, and lots of violence every night. I don’t know where he was getting that because that’s not what they’re seeing on Portland TV.”
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