Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance is calling Karl Rove, the former senior advisor to President George W. Bush, a “slimeball” after he says Rove unsuccessfully tried to tank his primary run despite President Trump’s endorsement.
This week, Vance won the highly-contested Ohio GOP Senate primary race by nearly 88,000 votes on a populist-nationalist policy platform that has long been despised by the Republican establishment.
In an interview with Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson, Vance specifically called out Rove as the epitome of corruption in the Republican Party, accusing the long-time political consultant of trying to get donors to back away from his candidacy even as Trump endorsed him.
“You know, the slimeball Karl Rove, who shipped a lot of American jobs overseas and got rich in the process and also who sent a lot of Americans to die in stupid conflicts,” Vance said.
“Karl Rove spent a lot of money, he spent a lot of op-eds criticizing my candidacy, he was even calling my donors after Trump endorsed me and encouraging them to drop my campaign.”
Vance continued:
In a lot of ways, what this revealed, is that you do have some very corrupt political consultants in the Republican Party who despise their own voters … a couple of days before the primary — I think we had already kind of locked it up, we were way ahead in the polls — a Republican donor group put two million dollars on TV to attack me which really didn’t hurt my candidacy against the other Republicans, it actually just hurt me against the Democrats. [Emphasis added]
My candidacy revealed an incredible amount of corruption in our own party and I do think that’s one of the things I do have to fight against. Tim Ryan, who I’m running against, is a total fraud, but we also have to fight against the corruption in our own party. [Emphasis added]
.@JDVance1 Joins Tucker Carlson Tonight To Discuss His Victory In The Ohio GOP Senate Primary & His Battle With The Establishments In Both Parties
JD: "Tim Ryan, who I'm running against, is a total fraud, but we also have to fight against the corruption in our own party." pic.twitter.com/DnEfvBJHXY
— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) May 5, 2022
In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Rove sought to attack Vance for not having the backing of Ohio Republican Party insiders during his primary run. Instead, many of those insiders aligned themselves with Jane Timken, the former Ohio Republican Party Chairwoman, whose husband’s company became notorious during the primary for offshoring American jobs to China.
“It didn’t help that many Trumpers didn’t like Mr. Vance,” Rove wrote. “Ohio Republican county party officials and national convention delegates who were Trump loyalists publicly expressed their displeasure with the former president’s decision.”
Rove and the GOP establishment are fiercely opposed to Vance’s economic nationalist policy prescriptions, which include increasing United States tariffs across the board on foreign imports and punishing multinational corporations for outsourcing American jobs to foreign countries.
Vance has also vowed to not only oppose amnesty for illegal aliens, but also wants a reduction to overall legal immigration levels which have been steady at more than a million admissions every year, a boon for real estate investors, Wall Street, big business, and Silicon Valley.
In 2018, Rove openly lobbied against Trump’s tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. When Trump announced his presidential run in 2015, Rove attacked him for opposing former President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
TPP — before Trump killed that free trade deal — was expected to eliminate millions of working- and middle-class American jobs while driving down U.S. wages by forcing the nation’s dwindling manufacturing sector to compete against workers in Vietnam and Malaysia making less than 60 cents an hour, some of whom are forced into labor.
Likewise, most recently, Rove has lobbied Republicans in Congress to support President Joe Biden’s amnesty for the majority of the nation’s 11 to 22 million illegal aliens.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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