Republican strategist Karl Rove continued his streak of slamming the GOP Friday, stating his party has been “infiltrated” with “conspiracy nuts.”
Rove, who served as a senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush and was a key architect of his 2000 and 2004 presidential victories, announced earlier this week that he will vote Democrat in the Texas Railroad Commission race over “bigoted” Republican Bo French.
Rove’s revelation drew fiery criticism from President Donald Trump, who called him a “stone cold loser” on social media.
“I’m gonna go get hats made up that say on the front of ’em, ‘Stone Cold,’” Rove said Friday during the 2026 Atlantic Festival in New York City.
Rove, who has defended the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, denounced his party in a fiery Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday. In it, he wrote he decided to vote against French after the candidate posted a photo of non-white University of Texas football fans, writing, “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
Rove said Friday he discovered more issues with French the more he “looked into it.”
“He tweeted, ‘What’s worse for America? Jews or Muslims?’” Rove recalled. “And made a bunch of bigoted comments and racially tinged comments. He says, ‘The most angry people in the world are white, educated women.’”
“No wonder you’re divorced!” Rove joked to laughter and applause.
Justin Sullivan via Getty Images
Rove argued, “And the problem is, my party is infiltrated by these people. We have these ‘I’m just raising questions,’ you know, conspiracy nuts, we have these … ‘masculinity,’ which means women shouldn’t vote.”
“We’ve faced this problem before,” he said, adding that the GOP needs to “get rid of these people.”