After declaring the Republican Party to be in disarray after the violence on Capitol Hill Wednesday, political strategist Karl Rove slammed President Trump’s declaration of peace as “too little, too late.”
Speaking with Martha MacCallum of Fox News, Rove said that President Trump only admitted defeat after building up his supporters’ hopes by “peddling a bunch of nonsense theories” for weeks.
Rove said Thursday that President Donald Trump’s new video condemning the riots at the U.S. Capitol and promising a peaceful transition of power to the Biden administration was “too little, too late.”
“Too little, too late,” exclaimed Rove. “He said that he’d exhausted every appeal to overturn the election after weeks of pedaling a bunch of nonsense theories, including on Saturday, when he told the secretary of state of Georgia that 50,000 Georgians had shown up at the polls and been turned away because someone had already voted for them. That’s one out of every 20 voters that appeared on election day. He said we need to have tempers cooled the day after he gave an hour and 20-minute long speech inciting tens of thousands of people to march to the Capitol and show strength. Don’t show weakness, he said. [He] talked about reconciliation a day after he threatened his own vice president unless he did an unconstitutional act.”
“He said we’re going to have a smooth transition now 13 days before the next president takes office and nearly two months after the election,” he continued. “And he finally decried violence 27 hours after people broke into our Capitol, broke through police lines, broke through barricades, and attempted to take control of the House and Senate chambers. Yesterday, all he could do [was] muster a tweet, a video in which he called them special people and said, I ‘love you.’ No, Martha, too little, too late. This will be a stain on Donald Trump, despite all of the good things he may have done as president, this is going to be the stain that remains.”
As to what President Trump should do over the next 13 days, Rove said that he does not believe that the president should resign or that he should be impeached, and Rove simply advised him to lay low and stay out of the public eye.
In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Rove lamented that the riots on Capitol Hill Wednesday has left the Republican Party in disarray.
“President Trump may have been correct at his Monday rally when he said of Georgia Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler: ‘If they win I’ll get no credit, and if they lose they’re going to blame Trump.’ But Tuesday’s election and Wednesday’s mob assault on Congress were stark examples of the destructive reactions the president can generate,” wrote Rove.
“It’s a mess. The GOP is bitterly split, Democrats will control the presidency, Senate and House, and 34% of Americans wrongly believe the election was rigged,” he concluded. “The Trump presidency is ending with his followers violently shutting down the Capitol. Helluva way to start 2021.”