Karl Rove warned President Donald Trump that his failure to deliver answers in the Jeffrey Epstein saga means there could be “hell to pay” politically.
The GOP operative cautioned in a Wall Street Journal column Wednesday that the president’s supporters may end up tuning out of politics because of unresolved questions about Trump’s ties to the late sex offender, in effect delivering Democratic wins in next year’s midterms.
“If that happens, Mr. Trump’s life will get a whole lot more complicated,” wrote Rove, a senior adviser to George W. Bush in his administration and a 2020 Trump campaign adviser.
“We’re seeing what happens when conspiracy collides with reality,” Rove wrote, adding that Trump was “obligated to deliver” on the Epstein issue given his past comments questioning the socialite’s ties to others in power.
Yet that has not yet happened.
“There’s hell to pay when those who hyped the conspiracy have closed the books on the case. Team Trump is now in damage control mode. They’ve also fought among themselves. That will leave scars,” Rove anticipated in the paper that Trump is suing for $10 billion over a report that he wrote a suggestive birthday letter to Epstein.
When reached for comment, the White House did not mention Rove specifically, but in a statement referred to recently unearthed photos of Epstein at Trump’s 1993 wedding to his second wife, Marla Maples.
“These are nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures of widely attended events to disgustingly infer something nefarious,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told the Daily Beast. “The fact is that The President kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media, just like the Obama Russiagate scandal, which President Trump was right about.”
Rove said the president, who in May called him “a total Loser who’s been wrong about almost everything,” finds himself in a tough position regarding conspiracies he has pushed.
Trump still has not offered proof of the 2020 election being stolen, despite all the resources at his disposal. Neither has he done so to support claims that the Jan. 6 insurrection was an “inside job” to make him look bad. This isn’t possible, Rove said, because the proof doesn’t exist.
Yet “if Team Trump admits the election wasn’t stolen and government agents didn’t organize the Capitol assault, MAGA conspiracy theorists would be furious and the president’s base further weakened and fractured,” Rove argued.
The president has also done himself no favors with his supporters if National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard “doesn’t send someone to jail for what she calls the ‘treasonous conspiracy in 2016’ by top Obama administration officials to destroy Mr. Trump in that year’s election,” Rove went on.
“Conspiracy theories undermine trust and cause chaos,” Rove continued. “When they are believed by large numbers of people, truth and reality become subjective. None of that bothers Mr. Trump.”
“What should trouble him,” he concluded, “is that recent events may well reduce the number of his supporters who vote in the midterms and beyond. Told their passionately held beliefs are wrong or forced to watch the White House fail to jail their common enemies, many might become discouraged, tune out and drop out of politics.”
