Rove Is Innocent! Why Republicans Can't Play Trump's Blame Game
Defending Karl Rove isn't something that comes easily to anyone who observed his Machiavellian machinations during the second Bush administration. But whatever guilt he may bear from that era, the political strategist his boss called "Turd Blossom" is getting a bum rap from the current president.
Donald Trump wants to pin blame on Rove for the impending Republican disaster in Texas, where James Talarico now looks like he can edge Ken Paxton in the U.S. Senate race. Losing the Lone Star State would be an epoch-making event for the GOP — and in a lengthy Truth Social post, Trump is already attempting to deflect blame for the disaster.
At this point it must be said -- simply in order to avoid bad juju -- that the current opinion polls cannot predict what will happen in Texas or any of the midterm elections next month. What can be stated with great confidence is that should Paxton and a host of other red-state Republican Senatorial nominees suffer such a momentous loss, the fault will not lie with Rove or any other MAGA scapegoat.
No, that responsibility will fall squarely on Trump, whose ranting and raving will achieve nothing except to reinforce the widespread sense that he is losing the plot. Whatever the ultimate results may be, Republicans now face the likelihood that they will lose dozens of House seats and the possibility that they will lose the Senate too — an unexpected set of perils that can only be attributed to one man (along with his eager stooges).
Trump proclaimed that Rove and Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), the incumbent ousted in the primary after he endorsed Paxton, "are doing everything possible to make it hard for Ken Paxton to win." But Trump unintentionally revealed the real obstacle for Texas Republicans in that post's delusional description of Paxton as "the Greatest Attorney General in the History of Texas, and one of the Best in the United States." In fact, Paxton is a credibly suspected crook who narrowly escaped removal from office by the Texas legislature — and whose own staff thought he should be prosecuted for corruption.
Beyond all that, Paxton campaigns under the shadow of Trump himself, a president who won Texas by a wide margin and now suffers negative approval ratings there.
None of this would have happened if Trump had merely stifled his own dislike of Cornyn and his irrepressible impulse to promote any politician who kisses his rump with sufficient gusto.
If Republicans lose any of other battleground Senate races — again underlining if — then Trump assuredly will assign culpability to someone else, just as he has resisted answering for any failure, bankruptcy, or defeat throughout his long life. But in each and every instance, if the Republican loses, there will be nobody else to hold accountable but him.
Look at the two races that the Senate Republican leadership has apparently abandoned as hopeless by canceling millions of dollars in advertising. Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent, was seen as highly vulnerable when the cycle began last year. But that was before Trump intervened to tilt the Republican nomination to Rep. Mike Collins, a tainted MAGA politician under investigation by the House Ethics Committee and surrounded by loud-mouthed white supremacistswhite supremacists on his staff and campaign.
Or consider North Carolina, where Trump first drove Sen. Thom Tillis, a decent Republican bet for reelection, into retirement — and then pushed the nomination to Michael Whatley, a party hack with no record of accomplishment. Best known for screwing up the state's recovery from Hurricane Helene as Trump's appointed "czar," Whatley wrecked any chance he had — despite Trump's fulsome description of him as "a great man" and "a great leader."
As for the incumbent Republicans whose tenure now seems threatened, they too can trace their woes to Trump. Without his burdensome presence around their necks, GOP senators like Ohio's Jon Husted, Kansas's Roger Marshall and Nebraska's Pete Ricketts surely would have cruised into another term without a drop of sweat. The front line keeps moving deeper into red territory, while the early vote data appears to show low Republican enthusiasm and a surging Democratic turnout.
Those Republicans all may win on November 3. Yet should they lose, or win by a razor-thin margin, everyone except Trump will understand why — and that realization will underscore just how gravely he has damaged his own party as well as the country.
Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024). The paperback version, with a new Afterword, is available wherever books are sold.
