Karl Rove Warns Trump Of The 1 Move That Will Backfire

Longtime GOP strategist Karl Rove is warning President Donald Trump that finding fraud in public spending won’t be enough when Democrats actually start demanding prosecutions related to those purported findings from his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Trump claimed last week that billionaire DOGE leader Elon Musk has already found “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud,” and while many Republicans applauded the claim, Rove believes relying on such figures will backfire without actual legal follow-through.

Rove, one of the primary architects of the Iraq War and a senior adviser to former President George W. Bush, made his case on “Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy,” urging Fox News viewers and Republican lawmakers to “listen to James Carville.”

Carville, a Democratic strategist, recently suggested his party should “play possum” until public fervor against the GOP reaches fever pitch and then pounce on the Trump administration for failing to fulfill its promises, rather than fecklessly and constantly criticizing its leadership.

“If there’s fraud, you want to go after the fraudsters and you want to indict them and recover the money,” Rove said Sunday in agreement. “So the Democrats could conceivably wait a reasonable period of time and then start to say, ‘Where are the prosecutions?’”

“‘Where are the people that you say defrauded the government, and when are you gonna start putting them in jail?’” he continued about the imminent outcry, adding “Carville is right” in noting that mere anger from the Democrats at this juncture isn’t doing anyone any good.

Carville suggested in a New York Times op-ed last month Democrats should embark on a “strategic political retreat” from flooding the zone with criticism of the Trump administration and instead allow the Republicans “to crumble beneath their own weight.”

“I don’t think a lot of Americans are waiting around for us to use the same old arguments and same old language to pile on Donald Trump,” he wrote at the time, adding: “They’re tired of it, and our Democratic voters are tired of watching us moan and groan to cover up our impotency out of power. They want us to be smarter than that.”

Whether it’s more effective to thwart the administration now or wait for a lack of judicial follow-through is arguable, though the claim that DOGE has uncovered “hundreds of billions” in fraud is dubious already — evidence for the figure hasn’t been independently verified.

Carville nonetheless suggested last month that Democrats do “nothing” at this juncture.

“Just when they’ve pushed themselves to the brink and it appears they could collapse the global economy, come in and save the day,” he wrote at the time to polarized reactions, as many readers weren’t convinced the party that lost to Trump twice can actually do so.