On this weekend’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” former adviser and Bush deputy chief of staff Karl Rove said if President Donald Trump continued to attack Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-KY), he would end up handing the U.S. Senate and the leadership role to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
Partial transcript as follows:
BARTIROMO: Let me switch over to what’s going on within his Republican party because this week we saw the president and Mitch McConnell get into it a bit. First you Mitch McConnell saying look, the president’s expectations are excessive. Donald Trump hits back. The president says I have been hearing about repealing and replacing for seven years, get the job done. And all of a sudden now, it is this ditch Mitch idea that the president says if Mitch McConnell can’t get health care done, then maybe it is time for him to step down. Your thoughts on what took place this week?
ROVE: Well, if the president continues along this line, he may get Mitch McConnell ousted as majority leader but replaced by Chuck Schumer. Creating a civil war within your own party —Mcconnell commented in front of a group saying the president has If expectations, this is tough work and takes a long time, but frankly, he’s right. The if he had ignored it, this would not have happened. Instead, he launches a barrage at the leader of his own party in the senate. Frankly, it was unfair. Mitch McConnell did everything humanly possible to try and get a vote done in the Senate, and it failed by three votes, by JohnMcCain flipping at the last minute. And, you know, you don’t — when that happens, the president cannot condemn his own people. And particularly when he went on and said now i want you to get tax cuts done, healthcare was done and an infrastructure and get it done quickly. The president has yet to lay out his own infrastructure package. This is the week that he is appointing his infrastructure committee, having an event this week to announce the appointment of some of these people. If he hasn’t even laid out his own package, why does he have any expectation that the congress should immediately pass it?
BARTIROMO: How should —
ROVE: Look, the president should step back –
BARTIROMO: How should he react?
ROVE: You know what he ought to say? First of all, you’ve got to be the president. Members of Congress say things about the president of their own party all the time, and most of the time the president ignores it. If he has something to say about it — I was in a White House for seven years in which lots of Republicans said things about the president that I served. What he would do was ignore most of it. If he had something to say about it, he would say it privately and end up having a better understanding and better relationship. A civil war inside the Republican party will hurt the Republicans in the senate in 2018. After 2018, all the damage will fall on the head of the president. If he loses control of the Senate how many committees led by partisan Democrats, do you think he’s going to enjoy? In 2020, people will say ‘I’ve heard you complain about the Republican Congress not get anything done, but you are the Republican President, and you haven’t gotten anything done.’ This is dangerous for the president, very dangerous.
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