Republican strategist Karl Rove unloaded on his own party Friday, declaring that the GOP is “infiltrated” with “conspiracy nuts.”
Rove, a Fox News political contributor, spoke at the 2026 Atlantic Festival in New York City alongside staff writer Vivian Salama and former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card. The conversation marked the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Near the end of the discussion, Salama raised Rove’s recent announcement that he plans to vote for Jon Rosenthal, the Democrat running for the Texas Railroad Commission, over Republican Bo French. Rove made that decision after French posted racist remarks about South Asian students at the University of Texas at Austin.
“The president this week took issue with a decision that you made very publicly,” Salama said.
She was referring to President Donald Trump’s Monday Truth Social post, in which he wrote that Rove is “so bad for the Republican Party, and completely wrong so often.” Trump said Rove suffers from “a major case of Trump Derangement Syndrome” because he beat back so many of the people and things Rove wanted and espoused for almost 10 years. He asked why Fox News and the WSJ “keep his RINO Voice alive” and called Rove “a stone cold loser.”
Rove responded with an impression of the president saying those words. Salama suggested Trump’s outburst came in response to Rove backing a Democrat, but Rove disagreed. He said the criticism stemmed from a recent Fox News appearance in which he attacked Trump’s plan to give every American a $5,000 check if the GOP holds the House and Senate in the midterm elections.
“I’m gonna go get hats made up that say on the front of ’em, ‘Stone Cold,'” Rove said. He then stressed, “I am a Republican. I have voted, to date, for one Democrat in my life — Texas Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock in 1994.”
Rove said he will vote for Rosenthal because Republicans nominated, by a one-percent margin, “a guy who is a bigot.” He described the joy of UT undergraduates in burnt orange celebrating a fourth-quarter rally by the Longhorns against top-ranked Ohio, and said French posted a picture of a diverse group of students with a caption that said, “Oh God, look at all of the foreigners. We’ve got a problem at UT.”
Rove pushed back on that claim, noting that UT has no racial quotas and that students in the top three percent of their graduating class are admitted automatically. He said the more he looked into French, the more he found. According to Rove, French tweeted, “What’s worse for America? Jews or Muslims?” and said the most angry people in the world are white, educated women. “No wonder you’re divorced!” Rove quipped.
Rove then broadened his critique to the party as a whole.
“And the problem is, my party is infiltrated by these people,” he said. “We have these, you know, ‘I’m just raising questions,’ you know, conspiracy nuts. We have these ‘masculinity, which means women shouldn’t vote’ people. We need to get rid of these people. We have faced this problem before, and we need to get rid of these people.”
