Republican strategist Karl Rove said President Trump’s claims that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has discovered “hundreds of billions” in government “fraud” will backfire when Democrats seek prosecutions of those involved.
During an appearance on Fox News’s “Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy,” Rove echoed Democratic strategist James Carville’s sentiment that Democrats should “allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight.”
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In his joint address to Congress last week, Trump criticized the “appalling waste” in government spending, while praising DOGE head and tech billionaire Elon Musk for discovering “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud” within federal agencies.
On its official website, DOGE claims to have saved an estimated $105 billion by detecting fraud, cancelling grants and contracts, terminating real estate leases and taking other austerity measures. However, these claims have not been independently verified.
Referring to Trump’s claims about uncovering “fraud,” Rove said the “unfortunate language coming out of the administration” is giving Democrats the chance to demand answers.
“If there is fraud, you wanna go out of fraudsters and you wanna indict them and prosecute them,” he said, adding that Democrats should wait for the time when they can begin asking those questions.
“The Democrats can conceivably wait a reasonable period of time and start to say where is the prosecution to the people that you said defrauded the government and when will you start putting them in jail,” he said in comments highlighted by Mediaite.
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“The Democrats, just by being angry, are not doing themselves any good and they are not doing the country any good,” he said.
Rove repeatedly expressed his agreement with Carville, who had urged Democrats last month to make a “strategic political retreat,” advising them “to play dead.”
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“Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight, and make the American people miss us. Only until the Trump administration has spiraled into the low 40s or high 30s in public approval polling percentages should we make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular. Until then, I’m calling for a strategic political retreat,” he wrote in a guest column for the New York Times.
