Respected GOP strategist says Trump set himself up for 'shellacking'

.S. President Donald Trump boards Air Force One as he departs for a state visit to Britain, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., September 16, 2025. REUTERS Kevin Lamarque

Veteran Republican strategist Karl Rove knows how to win elections. He says he also knows what losing them looks like, and he says Trump is on his way to losing big.

Strangely, the Republican Party’s master of partisan politics claims Trump is being too partisan, as indicated by the direction he took at his State of The Union speech.

“Almost everything the president said energized his MAGA hard core. But they aren’t enough to stave off a shellacking this fall,” Rove told the Wall Street Journal.

“Mr. Trump should have fixated more on those of his 2024 voters who have since become disenchanted: Those represented by his approval rating’s almost 8-point slide in the RealClearPolitics average since re-entering office,” said Rove. “That isn’t a large slice of the electorate, but those swing voters will decide which party controls Congress for Mr. Trump’s final two years in the White House.”

Trump’s speech, like Trump himself, was “angry, pugnacious, and hence less effective,” said Rove. And the information he delivered — and has been delivering for months — is simply not making a convincing case to the centrist voters Trump and his Republican Party need to nab a November victory.

“For them, the president’s speech almost certainly didn’t sound based in reality,” said Rove. “Many Americans, especially swing voters, are pessimistic about the economy. At the end of 2025, 12-month inflation was at 2.7 percent, near its 2.9 percent level the December before Mr. Trump took office.”

Comparatively, the economy that former president Joe Biden handed Trump “started off gangbusters in 2025” with 3.8 percent growth in the second quarter and 4.4 percent in the third.

“But [it] slowed to a crawl with 1.4 percent in the fourth,” Rove said. “The congressional Joint Economic Committee says the U.S. lost 108,000 manufacturing jobs last year. And all this took place amid growing public concern over the effect of artificial intelligence on jobs, utility bills, kids and the future.

“Yet the president claimed ‘prices are plummeting downwards,’ They generally aren’t,” assured Rove. “His tariffs, he opined, will ‘substantially replace the . . . income tax,’ and ending fraud in federal spending will produce ‘a balanced budget overnight.’ They won’t. Here, Mr. Trump sounded as out of touch as Joe Biden did when he kept proclaiming ‘Bidenomics is working.’”

Rove said Republicans must instead offer “more substance” and “display more empathy,” as well as properly focus on the economy” if they hope to pull through in November.

“They better get cracking,” warned Rove. “Time’s a-wasting.”

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