Former Bush
Adviser Karl Rove on Trump
'Populism Isn't Sustainable Over the Long Haul'
In an
interview, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, a longtime
adviser to former President George W. Bush, argues the Republican Party will
lose in the long term if it continues following Donald Trump's path.
Interview
Conducted by René Pfister in Washington, D.C.
January 02,
2020 05:06
DER
SPIEGEL: Mr. Rove, you wrote a book about William McKinley, the 25th president
of the United States. In it, you describe him as a politician who modernized
the Republican Party at the beginning of the 20th century. McKinley welcomed
the influx of new immigrants and tried to unite the U.S. after the Civil War.
Is it fair to say that McKinley is the opposite of Donald Trump?
Rove: Well,
I'll leave that up to people to figure out. McKinley was a man of enormous
character and integrity, which won him bipartisan respect. He demonstrated a
willingness to buck his party on the issue of immigration, particularly in
supporting the entrance of Catholics from Italy and Eastern Europe. The largest
pressure group at the time was an anti-Catholic group called the American
Protective Association. In 1896, they declared that McKinley was the only
Republican candidate for president who was unacceptable to them. It was because
when he ran for re-election as governor of Ohio, they had found out that there
were prison guards at a state prison who were Catholics. The APA demanded that
McKinley fire them, and he refused. So, they took him on in the 1896 election,
but he overcame their opposition and won the nomination. He retaliated in a way
by having the opening prayer at the Republican National Convention in St. Louis
issued by a rabbi. The second day, it was an African American preacher who gave
the prayer.
DER
SPIEGEL: Why did he do that?
Rove:
McKinley was a reformer, and he recognized that the country was changing. It
was becoming more urban. America was accepting more immigrants. It was almost
scandalous because the Republican Party in the North was the white Anglo-Saxon
Protestant party, and here's a guy who's the first Republican presidential
candidate to be endorsed by figures in the Catholic hierarchy.
About Karl
Rove
Karl Rove
(pictured here in 2007 with then-President George W. Bush) was long regarded
one of the most successful and controversial strategic advisers in American
politics. He helped George W. Bush rise first to become governor of Texas and
later the 43rd president of the United States. Under Bush, Rove served as
deputy chief of staff in the White House. Today, he writes books and serves as
a columnist for the conservative Wall Street Journal.
DER
SPIEGEL: In your book on McKinley, you write that politics is based on creating
the broadest voter base possible. You call it the "play of addition."
But in the the 2016 election, Donald Trump played, if you like, the game of
subtraction. He focused on white working-class voters. Nevertheless, he won.
Why?
Rove:
Because he added blue collar, non-college graduates to the Republican
coalition, winning Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He got people who
live in Kenosha and Allentown and the suburbs of Detroit who are nominal
Democrats but could not bring themselves in 2016 to vote for Hillary Clinton to
vote for him. Now, the other part of that equation is that, in those three
states, Clinton turned off parts of the Democratic coalition. Trump was given
his moment when people said, "If I'm a blue collar, working class person
who lives between the coasts, I don't think I'm being respected. Hillary thinks
I'm deplorable, and then the guy before her (Obama) talked about me clinging to
my religion and my guns."
DER
SPIEGEL: After Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney in 2012 presidential election,
the consensus among Republicans had been that party had to focus harder on
attracting non-white voters. Given the outcome of the 2016 election, was this
analysis wrong?
Rove: No,
not over the long haul.
DER
SPIEGEL: Then why is the Trump campaign once again focusing on white voters?
Rove: Look,
I'm not their spokesman. But they will make the argument that they can do
marginally better in the African American and Latino communities because of the
good state of the American economy. We have the lowest unemployment rates among
African Americans and Latinos since we began breaking those statistics out by
race in 1948.
DER
SPIEGEL: One parallel between the age of McKinley and today is that a deep
divide runs through the U.S. What, in your view, are the reasons for that?
Rove: It's
interesting. We were going through a moment of populism back then, and we're
going through a moment of populism now -- and both had their roots in the
divide between the have-nots and the wealthy. The crisis of the 1870s and '80s
was marked by the conflict between debtors and savers. People who had money and
saved it were better off than people who had mortgages and borrowed money. In
that era, it led to the creation of the Populist Party, but inside the
Democratic Party. This time, the 2008 financial crisis led to a populist
impulse inside the Republican Party, as well.
DER
SPIEGEL: What, exactly, is Donald Trump's talent?
Rove: Well,
he's very good at reading people, very good at reading crowds. Trump is a
showman, whether it's his TV audience or the crowd at his rally. He figures out
what do to motivate the crowd. Those people are doting on every word. The
author Salena Zito was right: The press takes Trump literally but not seriously,
and the crowds take him seriously but not literally.
DER
SPIEGEL: You have spent your whole life in the mainstream of the Republican
Party. Given all the scandals surrounding Donald Trump, how can someone who
truly believes in values like family and integrity support him?
Rove: Well,
I run into this a lot. People will come up to me in airports and say, "I
see you on Fox News. I read you in the Wall Street Journal. I really like what
Trump is doing. I like the (conservative) judges (he appoints). I like the tax
cuts, the strong defense." And I say: And what about the tweets? The
answer is: "Oh God, I wish he'd stop tweeting." We are at a tribal
moment. If you attacked Obama when he was in office, Democrats would leap to
his defense. Today, you'll notice there's a lot of disquietude being expressed
about his years in the White House. He wasn't liberal enough. He didn't press
far enough. But the Democrats weren't saying those things when he was in
office, because, by God, if you're attacking my leader, I'm going to stand with
him firmly. Same with Trump.
DER
SPIEGEL: Is Trump's crude language on Twitter a means for keeping his base
happy?
Rove: Yeah,
it is, but American elections are won by the voters who swing from side to
side. Now granted, there aren't a lot of them today. When you're talking about
the Nixon and Reagan elections, you're talking about a time when a third of the
electorate was up for grabs. This election, it will be 8 or 10 percent. But
therein lies the difference between winning and losing.
DER
SPIEGEL: What will the Republican Party look like after Donald Trump?
Rove: You
know, we had Reaganism -- an optimistic, sunny, conservative philosophy that a
lot of Republicans today still identify themselves with. What's going to be
interesting to see in the decades ahead, is whether Trump has made the
Republican Party into a populist party tinged with nationalism and occasional
alt-right sympathies, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim attitudes? Or whether
people turn not back to the old conservatism but design something new that
looks a little bit like today and a little bit like Reagan, but it's something
new.
DER
SPIEGEL: What's your answer?
Rove: I
think that happens, because populism is not sustainable over the long haul. We
saw the populism of President Andrew Jackson, but it receded quickly. And then
we have the populism of Trump today, but I don't see a ready heir. Is it Vice
President Mike Pence?
DER
SPIEGEL: Maybe Donald Trump Jr.? He obviously wants to run at some point.
Rove: Well,
we'll see.
DER
SPIEGEL: Your analysis of the situation among the Republicans has been the same
for years: The party will need to widen its voter base if it wants to assert
itself in a country where whites are increasingly in the minority. But doesn't
that also mean that the Republicans are doomed if they continue to follow
Donald Trump's path?
Rove: Well,
I don't know. We won't die. We'll lose and then we'll change. That's one of the
strengths of our two-party system. These two parties (the Democrats and the
Republicans) are broad coalitions, and if they start to lose, they wake up and
say, "We've got to do something different."
DER
SPIEGEL: Who is the Democrat with the best chances of defeating Donald Trump?
Rove: My
personal view is that Joe Biden is the most dangerous of the Democrats if he
could win the nomination. He's a little goofy, a little weird. He can't put two
sentences together, but he's sort of a normal Democrat. He could stand up and
take back that 8 to 12 percent of the vote that will decide the election. The
voters could look at him and say, "Look, our country will be OK with him
as president. Uncle Joe can do that."
DER
SPIEGEL: Can a moderate conservative like you seriously vote for Donald Trump
in 2020?
Rove: Oh yeah.
DER SPIEGEL: Why?
Rove: There
are conservatives in Britain who don't like what Boris Johnson is doing, but
when they look at a socialist like Jeremy Corbyn, they know it will be worse.
Same here. The Republican base will be strongly with Trump. And some voters who
are up for grabs in 2020 can bring themselves reluctantly to vote for him
because they think that Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders are worse. And
they are.
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