Karl Rove: Historic Redemption, the Hard Work of Politics, and the Essential Nature of Americans

Karl Rove:

So if you're sitting there saying, "well, it's too dirty and it's too nasty and it's so unpleasant and you have to go through a primary and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah"—well, fine. If you think it's too much, stop bitching about it because you're not willing to take on the task of trying to bring about change.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt, and today I am joined by Karl Rove, one of the most consequential political strategists of the modern era. Karl served as Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to George W. Bush, helping shape presidential campaigns, governing coalitions, and the Republican Party at a pivotal moment in American history. Today he's a contributor at Fox News, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and the author of The Triumph of William McKinley and Courage and Consequence. But this conversation isn't a replay of old battles or a tour through partisan talking points. Instead, we step back and ask some more basic and harder questions. What kind of leadership does this moment demand? What happens to a democracy when trust erodes and political courage becomes rare? And does the American experiment still bend towards renewal or have we lost something essential along the way? I came into this conversation skeptical. I was worried that American politics may have drifted too far from the virtues that sustain self-government. Karl argues that we've seen this before and that history suggests we'll find our way back. I didn't agree with everything he said, but I left the conversation much more hopeful than I expected. I'm eager to hear what you think.

Karl Rove:

Well, look, parties constantly change. The Republican party of today is not the Republican party of 10 years ago or 20 years ago, and neither is the Democratic party. We're particularly in a place where the country's deeply polarized. The parties are deeply agitated. They spend more time disliking the other side than advocating for themselves, and the country is balanced on a knife edge, one election to another. You put on your shirt, you put on the Biden shirt or the Obama shirt, or you put on the Trump shirt, and that's who you are and that's who you're standing up for. Over time, there's some disconsonance there between their personal beliefs and the leader.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I hear your point about putting on the jersey of the elected president if you're in the party, but the space for dissent seems quite a bit smaller today than it did even under Biden.

Karl Rove:

Yeah. This is, to my mind, a mistake. Because to every action, there's an opposite reaction in politics, just like there is in the universe at large. And so if you say to people, fidelity is 100% of the time, it makes them easier for those future moments where they say, well, you know what? I'm not with you. You need to give them a chance to sort of be themselves, vote the way that they think the people back home want you to vote and recognize that threats don't help. I thought one of the worst things that could happen was, like in this Indiana redistricting case, the Indiana Senate Republicans said, we're not enthusiastic about this, and both the White House and their outside political group said, we're going to primary you next time you're on the ballot. Well, first of all, some of those people are not on the ballot until 2028, and really you're going to say, take some of your money—rather than trying to elect somebody, you're going to spend it in a primary to try and beat somebody over an issue that's going to be two and a half years in the rear view mirror?

I think that's shortsighted.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I heard you on a podcast with David Axelrod, I think it was in July this year. You leaned pretty heavily on the idea that this is cyclical.

That we've had these times before—the 1970s as an example, where things have been polarized. We were in a war that was highly controversial. I find myself concerned that that is a nice thought. It gives you a little bit of ease, but it does feel like there's at least the threat that this might be a secular decline, and this is not just Trump. This is reflective of the populace. Our trust in institutions has declined so much; norms have really faded. I'd love to understand why you have conviction that this is cyclical and maybe not part of a longer secular decline.

Karl Rove:

We have these episodes where the country is deeply polarized, deeply divided. The politics is angry, the politics is divisive. The parties look broken. I mean, think about it: the urban riots that course through our society—I mean, they started in '63, '64, '65 and '66—the long hot summer of 1967 in which there are over a hundred and some odd riots. April of 1968, Martin Luther King is gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee, and within hours 140 American cities are aflame, and I think it's 41 Americans die. We had Robert Kennedy six weeks later, gunned down the night that he won the Democratic primary in California. I think it was '67, there was 35,000 people who stormed the Pentagon in attempt to shut down the war. But it's not just then. I wrote about the Gilded Age in my book. You think it's bad today? Go back to the Gilded Age.

They hate each other. They're still fighting the Civil War. In 1838, a Democrat from Kentucky kills a Whig from Maine in a duel over banking regulation. I mean, my point is let's not kid ourselves. It's bad today, but let's not kid ourselves by thinking that this is the first time and that we're on the edge of the precipice. But I'm relatively optimistic because—go around the country, I do a lot, and when we discuss this issue, I say, how happy are you with the American politics? Raise your hand if you're happy with the state of American politics and virtually nobody ever raises their hand. And that's the moment at which people say, you know what? I want to vote for and support somebody who's going to set a different tone and once in office, they're going to act in a way that brings us together as a country. And it happens.

Ted Roosevelt V:

So I hear your point. There's no question that the country has been more frayed. Obviously we had a civil war—you don't really have to look a lot further than that to know that we've had more issues with each other. I just wonder if there's something different about this time that is more problematic and whether there is a fraying in the moral character of our politicians, and maybe even our citizenry, where we've become so transactional, so disillusioned by our institutions, so disillusioned that we don't even have a shared set of values and morals at this point—that we can't or that it'll be harder to come back from the precipice.

Karl Rove:

Well, again, I would make the argument that we've been here before. You think that there was a moral agreement upon the issue of race in the fifties, sixties and seventies? Do you think that in the aftermath of the Civil War that everybody in the South said, you know what? Black people should have a right to vote and to live in freedom as the Constitution and the Declaration declare? No. I mean, we've gone through ugly periods in which the country's been divided, and what ultimately happens is that either events intrude or more often somebody comes along and helps set a different tone. I had a bright young member of Congress at my house for a fundraiser. He comes from Midland, Texas—you talk about a conservative part of the country—and one of the local Republican activists who'd written him a check asked him a question, but made a speech in advance and—"the Democrats are our enemies and they're communists and they want to destroy the country."

August Pfluger said, no, no, no, let's stop there. They're not our enemies. They're political opponents, and our country is ill-served by thinking that they're our mortal enemies. And he said, we've got to find a way as a country to move ahead. He's a combat veteran, a fighter pilot, and he said: I and other Republican veterans have sat down with Democratic veterans and we've agreed to do two things. One is have dinner and lunch on a regular basis to get to know each other as human beings, and second of all, to pick out one thing that we will do with somebody from the opposite party each year. So my point is it's already starting to happen without presidential leadership.

Ted Roosevelt V:

So I was thinking... When I was graduating from college in my twenties, I had a number of friends who have gone on to be highly successful, but you could see in them the sort of embryonic interest in going into politics later in their career, and they're now kind of turning 50. It's that moment in life where maybe they might try to give back to their country, and to a person—and this is anecdotal, but—at least in my friend group, none of them are interested in going into politics today. And I think they look at the political, what they would consider the political swamp, and say, this is not, it's not for me. It's too much trouble. My family's going to get dragged through the mud, and the system is broadly not working. What would you say to those people? I mean, what do you say to the sort of person sitting on the sideline that says, I've got other career opportunities.

Karl Rove:

I see a lot of people who have enormous success in their career who then turn to politics and think that all of a sudden it's going to be easy. It's hard. I had lunch with a wonderful young guy a couple of days ago, last week, who wants to get involved in politics, and he said, what's your advice? I said, get a posse. I mean, think about it. One of the things that your forebearer did was find himself in a group of other like-minded reform Republicans, and they became people that throughout his entire career, he kept adding to that group. And Henry Cabot Lodge was perhaps the clearest example, but there were many in the orbit of Theodore Roosevelt who were part of his quote "posse." And that posse was broad and wide and included people like him from the upper crust of New York society, but they also included the people that he met when he was in the Rough Riders and the people that he met when he was out west and the people that he met at Harvard, and he kept those friendships up. That's how politics works, is by addition. So if you're sitting there saying, "well, it's too dirty and it's too nasty and it's so unpleasant and you have to go through a primary and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah"—well, fine. If you think it's too much, stop bitching about it because you're not willing to take on the task of trying to bring about change.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I love that advice. I'm curious about, because you've been relatively critical in some instances of the Trump administration, and he's had some not particularly kind words for you—calling you "a total loser," among other things.

Karl Rove:

"Total loser. Rove is a total loser." I once had a meeting in the Oval Office and I was asked to come up and disabuse him of an incredibly stupid notion in May of 2020, and I walk into the Oval and there are 15 people in the Oval Office. "Everybody know Karl—Karl, you know Jared, you know Ivanka, you know Hope Hicks, you know Dan Scavino, you know my new chief of staff Mark Meadows—everybody know Karl? Last six months, been good to me. Before that? Not so good."

Ted Roosevelt V:

Were you able to—I mean, was he available to hear counter arguments from you?

Karl Rove:

Yeah. I mean, look, my job at the Journal and on Fox, is to call balls and strikes. So when he does something good—you know, the 2017 tax package—my job as a commentator, a conservative commentator, is to say what I agree with and what I don't.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Do you feel like criticism is an effective way to affect change with him?

Karl Rove:

I think praise is the most effective way to get change with him. And I mean that.

Ted Roosevelt V:

One of the conversations among Democrats is they love a Messiah, they love the sort of, who the next person is that's going to come and save the Democratic party, which certainly feels like it's in disarray right now. Can you lay out the Republican field? What does the post-Trump world look like in your mind, or what would you like it to look like?

Karl Rove:

Obviously the Republican bench is going to be led by the sitting vice president, a young guy from Ohio, JD Vance—but that's a tough road. Let's not kid ourselves. There have been two vice presidents who have gone on to succeed their presidents: Martin Van Buren and George HW Bush. So Vance is by no— he may be the front runner for the Republican nomination, but he's no, by no means got a lock on being president. So I don't know. There's JD Vance, Tom Cotton, maybe Nikki Haley, Brian Kemp, Glenn Youngkin, Theodore Cruz. They're going to be a number of people that are going to think about it and may jump in. Similarly on the Democratic side, it's going to be—look, I see Gavin Newsom has already been declared the front runner, good looking, tall guy, but, you know—California in 1980 had a more positive reputation than California today has. Do you really want to Californicate the rest of the country? I don't know. But they also—the Democrats have talent: Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Moore of Maryland, Polis of Colorado, Andy Beshear of Kentucky.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I mean, I think the other big question is... the Democratic Party is trying to find which way it wants to break right now, right? Mamdani won the mayoral election in New York where I live, certainly generated a new set of voters in New York that I think surprised a lot of the political class, certainly surprised Andrew Cuomo. And I think there are a lot of people nationally looking at that as maybe that's a lesson for the Democratic Party nationally.

Karl Rove:

Yeah. What is that lesson?

Ted Roosevelt V:

In my mind? It's a good way to lose the next presidential election.

Karl Rove:

Yeah. Well, exactly. The 66% of the people registered to vote in the city of New York are registered Democrats, and here's a guy who gets just over, he gets like 50.4% of the vote. I mean, with all due respect, Andrew Cuomo? I mean—run out of Albany because of allegations of sexual harassment, enormously unpopular over his handling of COVID in which he basically sent a lot of old people to die and comes across as an arrogant know-it-all. And here's the bright, young, energetic, tech-savvy, web-savvy, social media-savvy, Democratic Socialist. I mean, he can't even get the base Democratic vote in the city. He can't get to 66% of the vote.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Yeah. And I can't emphasize enough how much it appeared that Andrew Cuomo did not want the job as he was campaigning. One of the themes I keep hearing is how often the person who is elected is as much a reflection of his opponent or her opponent as it is the actual candidate, which may be an obvious insight, but I feel like that gets lost often. It's not necessarily a mandate of the ideas that are being represented by the winner so much as a repudiation of the ideas of the opponent.

Karl Rove:

Well, and a repudiation of the persona of the opponent. I think part of it was, look, here's the bright young guy. Yeah, he says some things that I don't think he's going to be able to do, but I like him more than I like this other guy over here. Seems to be grumpy. And he ran out his welcome with me a long time ago.

Ted Roosevelt V:

You wrote a book about the election of 1896 called The Triumph of William McKinley. And his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, was known for being pretty bombastic along the campaign trail, and McKinley was much more measured. Do you see any advantages to that approach to politicking, the idea that maybe being more reserved or more restrained during the campaign?

Karl Rove:

No. Look, they want to see you. They want to see you.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Yeah.

Karl Rove:

And Bryan was simply the first one to understand that the state of American railroads made it possible for him to campaign widely and rapidly. The interesting thing to me is nobody travels with him until early October. In July, August and September, he literally is traveling by himself hoping that somebody—you know, he's wired ahead to the local Democrats, he's hoping somebody will get him a room and a place for the night and that all the arrangements will be made, but he is on his own. It's only in the last month of the campaign that they finally get him a railroad car so that he knows where he is going to be putting his head down to rest every night.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Are there any crowds for him?

Karl Rove:

Oh, huge. Huge. It was routine for him to have rallies with 10 or 20,000 people.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Wow.

Karl Rove:

And an estimated 750,000 people make the pilgrimage to Canton, Ohio to meet Mr. McKinley, have him step out on his front step of his house on North Market Street, and speak to them. So it's a very energized campaign. The turnout is above 90% in the north.

Ted Roosevelt V:

That's amazing. What is leaving you particularly hopeful about our country right now? I mean, I think there are a lot of people out there that are feeling overwhelmed by the politics and are turning away, not listening. What gives you hope that the American people will turn back in and as you say, sort of get into the arena, get back involved, and lift up our higher and better spirits?

Karl Rove:

We were at a moment where people don't like what's going on, and American people are the kind of people who say, well, I've tolerated this long enough, give me a better alternative. And going back to your forebear, and you mentioned—you were kind enough to mention my book on McKinley. One of the amazing events of the 1896 campaign is October 9th, when 2000 people in butternut gray uniforms get off of trains in Canton, Ohio. They're veterans of the Shenandoah Valley campaign where William McKinley, who had entered the war as an 18-year-old private, ends the war as a major, having received three battlefield promotions for unbelievable valor. He's a decorated Union war hero. In fact, he's proposed, recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor and refuses to have the application pushed, saying, I was only doing my duty.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I didn't know that.

Karl Rove:

And McKinley invites 2,000 Confederate veterans of the campaign who tried to kill him for three years to come to Canton, Ohio. And when they line up with Union troops, Union veterans in blue uniforms, every one of the Confederates is given a badge, half blue and half gray, that says there should be—a quote from Washington: "There should be no north, no south, no east, no west, but a common country." Tens of thousands of people mobbing this scene because it's never been seen before. People are openly weeping at the sight. And when McKinley—when they form up in front of his, on his front lawn, McKinley comes out and says, "if we're ever forced to fight again—and God forbid that we shall—we shall fight as brothers under a common flag." And the country... this is like a moment of unity that we'd never seen. And some successful leader is going to say, I want to be the President of not blue states or red states, but the United States. That's a great sentiment. Somebody's going to act on that.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I hope you're right. I mean, I would love to see the nation come back together and I see the success of division in politics right now that makes me worried—going back to the question of kind of cyclical versus secular—that the political class continues to lean heavily on division as opposed to uniting us.

Karl Rove:

Well, it does and it will. Until it doesn't. Until somebody figures out it doesn't.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I'm also struck by the idea of William—and I love it—that William McKinley did not push to get the Medal of Honor because as you know, TR very much did want to get the Medal of Honor. And Bill Clinton awarded it to him posthumously, which I always was bittersweet about because his son, who then became TR Jr, goes out and gets the one thing that his father always really wanted, which was the Medal of Honor, which is not an easy thing to come by.

Karl Rove:

Yeah, well, and particularly by 1944. Think about it—goes ashore in the first wave at Normandy? What a guy. Rallies the troops, charges up the beach to confront Nazi machine guns, and then dies of a heart attack later, shortly there or thereafter.

Ted Roosevelt V:

He's got an arthritic knee. He walks up and down the beach under heavy fire, tapping soldiers on their head with his cane, telling them to move forward. Descendants, particularly children of presidents, have a tough go at it historically. That's a very difficult person to be raised by and to sort of live up to any expectations, because he was the most famous man— TR, the president—was the most famous man in the world, was revered. And so to go out and be able to be successful and do that, I always took great pride in. I'm curious how you came to TR, because you didn't grow up in a political family that you didn't know how your father voted until much later in life, which was the opposite of me. I grew up and every dinner conversation was around national politics. I guess, how did you come to national politics or come to politics? And then I guess the secondary part of that question is, what led you to TR?

Karl Rove:

The first one, I have no idea. I grew up in, as you say, in a very apolitical household. My dad was a taciturn Midwestern Norwegian, so he didn't talk about those things. I had the very first book I can remember reading, Great Moments in History. And what is sort of semi-interesting was, I was teaching at UT an undergraduate course in my forties, and the chairman of the department, Jim Fishkin, said, look, we'll fast track you on the PhD, but you got to get your BA, which I'd never gotten. So I just looked around to find if there were any shortcuts, and I found History 351 in the catalog. "Seminar in Historical Source Writing." All you had to do was get a professor to take you on, come up with a thesis, do research in the original source material, and you could get three hours. So I showed up at the history department in the summertime and I said, I want to do this.

And the secretary said, well, we never do that. Nobody ever does it. You have to get a professor and nobody wants to do that. I said, well, is there a professor here that I can talk to? And she said, well, there's only one professor in today, Louis Gould. He agreed to see me, and he sort of vaguely knew who I was. And he said, what are you thinking about doing? And I said, I would be interested in trying to figure out how Theodore Roosevelt resurrects his political career. He's coming third in the race for mayor. He's on the police commission, but by 1896, he hates the job. He backs the wrong guy for president. So how did he do it? And Gould says, I'll take you on. And he took me on. But he said, there's one caveat—you have to read the McKinley papers because history gets McKinley wrong.

And the more I got into the McKinley papers, the more I'm blown away with what a thoughtful, considerate, kind, able politician he is. Smart as hell, no hard edges on him, but a lot of center in him. My view of Roosevelt is he's desperate. There's a great letter he writes to his sister after the Republican Convention—"we had a great convention, a marvelous gold platform, plank in the platform. And McKinley is a good man, but he is weak! And I worry about him in a moment of crisis for our country!" And then couple of days later writes the [??] close friends of McKinley and close friends of Roosevelt, and says, we must do everything we can to elect McKinley. And when he's elected my ambitions such as they are, can go by the wayside, which is his way of saying, I'm desperate, man, I need your help. And he weasels his way into the campaign with good advice at key moments. And McKinley and his people recognize they got a talent. He did good on the campaign trail. He doesn't want to be in the cabinet. He wants this new post, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and to which McKinley says, I'll consider it. And yet he gives him the appointment and the rest is history.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Do you worry that our country doesn't know these—I mean, they don't know the stories of our founding fathers. They don't know the stories of TR anymore. Do you feel like that's part of some fraying of the social fabric?

Karl Rove:

Yeah, I do. I mean, we have a glorious history. I mean, think about it. We've taken the wretched refuse. Our country's built on losers, lightweights and discards. And so—look, I have optimism because I don't care whether it's what your last name is, what your ethnicity is.

There's something that binds us together as Americans and the world recognizes that. I was in Abuja, Nigeria, and the cab driver says, where are you from? And I said, Texas. He said, ah, America, I want the American dream. I said, what's the American dream to you? He said, dream big, work hard and rise. And I'm thinking, were you an Abraham Lincoln speech writer? I mean, that's exactly what our country—so look, don't bet against us. Yeah, we screw it up. Our politics is it's not the center of our being. The center of our being is our life as Americans and creating a family and raising a family and just serving in our community and making things better and being a good neighbor and maybe dreaming big about starting a business or inventing something or making a life of value and worth by serving others like we'd like to be served ourselves. I mean, don't count us out. And this moment of politics, it's episodic, it happens. We get out of it, but we get out of it because of the essential nature of Americans, not the essential nature of our politics.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I do worry that we've kind of lost a little bit of an understanding of how great a nation this really is, and I hope whoever's next, whatever the next wave is in our political cycle, is a return to that understanding, that it is an imperfect nation. But it is a great nation too.

Karl Rove:

It is. It is. Absolutely. And the 250th anniversary is a way for us to recall some of that, and I hope we make the most of it.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Absolutely. Karl, the final question I have for you is... you've actually sort of circled at this entire conversation, but—what makes a good citizen?

Karl Rove:

Well, love of country, love of fellow American. We're not based on a religion, but we're based on the Judeo-Christian ethic. So we have a responsibility to love a neighbor, like we'd like to be loved ourselves. And we have to live up to the declaration that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have a moral obligation. That is how our country came into being. It's what has sustained us through 249 years going on 250, and we all have an obligation to do what we can as Americans to see that the vision of America that the founders laid out is brought to life and kept alive.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Karl, I love this conversation because I came in quite a bit more skeptical about American politics and where we are in the cycle than where I'm leaving this conversation, and I genuinely appreciate that.

Karl Rove:

Thank you, Ted. Great to see you.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Karl, thank you so much for this conversation. You brought so many rich stories and important reflections, as well as a wide range of presidential history and your own personal experiences. And even with all the great material in this podcast, there was plenty left on the cutting room floor. So thank you very much for your time.

Listeners, if you liked our conversations, please share it with a friend. We hope it sparks a good conversation of your own. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of Storytelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.