Karl Rove Warns Trump Against Too Much ‘Happy Talk’ as Consumer Sentiment Plummets

Fox News contributor and longtime GOP operative Karl Rove warned President Donald Trump and his team not to engage in too much “happy talk” on Friday amid widespread concern over the health of the economy.

After a White House press briefing that included a number of questions about tariffs, Rove appeared on America Reports to weigh in.

“The focus was on tariffs and for a good reason. It has a huge economic impact on our country. They’ve got to get this thing right. Think about this: The U.S. population is only 4% of the world population, 96% of our customers for American businesses and goods and services are outside of the United States, and our economy is 27% of the world economy. But that means 73% of world’s economy is out there, the purchasing power of people who are going to be buying things. So we really want to have the best trading posture we can possibly have,” began Rove, who acknowledge Chinese malfeasance in the global marketplace, but nevertheless submitted that “the important thing to remember is, is that trade makes us richer.”

“You know, Karl, I was reading your op-ed and I was kind of fascinated,” replied anchor Trace Gallagher. “You said that you think the president should look for an off-ramp now for a couple of reasons. One, the economy that you just talked about, and two, because of the midterm elections. And I would think, isn’t it awfully risky for Democrats to be putting a lot of weight on something that they have no idea what the outcome is going to be, especially a year, a year and nine months down the road?”

“Well, they can’t talk about their vision because they don’t have one and they can’t talk about their record because it’s a pretty lousy one. So yeah, they’re going to stay focused on it. And remember, one of the problems that we had under Biden was we had happy talk, ‘Bidenomics is working,’ and people didn’t believe it. Inflation was going growing dramatically,” answered Rove.

“And look, we’ve had good inflation numbers, but it’s only one month. We got to be careful about that. And the administration needs to temper, in my opinion, its language because you’d mentioned this earlier, the University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey, last month it was 50.8 points, which is down 11 points from the previous month, and it is the second lowest number since 1952. The only number that is worse in consumer sentiment was during the Great Recession of 2008-2009. So the administration has got to temper its talk by saying, ‘Look, we’re in an important moment. Things will get better, but we got to push through it,’ and that’s going to require delivering results quickly on the tariff actions,” he concluded.

Watch above via Fox News.