In Stunner, Karl Rove Blasts Donald Trump’s January 6 Position

A stalwart of the Republican Party went scorched earth on Donald Trump’s promise to pardon January 6 rioters, suggesting to his fellow conservatives that Trump’s staunch defense of the “sons a bitches” should disqualify him from the presidency.

In an interview on MSNBC’s The Beat on Wednesday, Karl Rove, a senior adviser to President George W. Bush, tore into Trump’s decision to fight for people charged and convicted for committing acts of violence at the U.S. Capitol. Trump warmly refers to people who attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results as “hostages.”

“And what those people did when they violently attacked the Capitol, in order to stop a constitutionally mandated meeting of the Congress to accept the results of the Electoral College, is a stain on our history,” Rove said. “And every one of those sons a bitches who did that, we oughta find them, try them, and send them to jail.”

“And one of the critical mistakes made in this campaign is that Donald Trump has now said, ‘I’m going to pardon those people because they’re hostages.’ No, they’re not. They’re thugs. There were people—some of them had automatic weapons at a hotel in Virginia hoping to be able to be called up,” Rove continued, describing the ensuing chaos as the rioters ransacked Congress, hunted Nancy Pelosi, and chanted “kill them all.”

“And so, why Trump has done this is beyond me. If he had said, ‘You know what? I trust our jury system, I trust law enforcement, anybody who assaulted the Capitol oughta be’—I mean, he said it once or twice, but now he’s appearing in a video with people who assaulted police officers with an intent to take the Capitol by force.”

But Rove says there’s a lesson in all this for Democrats too. The Republican Party’s failure to hold their demagogue leader accountable for January 6 should not stop the liberal party from making it a centerpiece of their campaigns against him.

“If they were smart, they’d take the January 6 and go hard at it,” Rove told MSNBC’s Ari Melber. “And they would say, ‘He wants to pardon these people who attacked our Capitol.’ I worked in that building as a young man. To me, the Congress of the United States is one of the great examples of the strength of our democracy and a jewel of the Constitution.”