President Donald Trump was sharply criticized on Wednesday by well-known conservative strategist Karl Rove, who said Trump’s nonstop social media outbursts — which have now grown into open death threats toward members of Congress — are damaging the country.
Rove wrote that America is now seeing a new kind of politician rise to the top. These politicians aren’t focused on solving real problems or passing laws. Instead, they chase attention. They deliberately stir chaos, shock people, and say the wildest things they can think of, just to get more likes, more views, and more reactions online. According to Rove, they don’t care whether the reactions are positive or negative — as long as people are talking about them.
He explained that this behavior is spreading across parts of the political right. He pointed to extremist figures like Nick Fuentes, who openly praised Adolf Hitler and denied the Holocaust, as well as outgoing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who once pushed a bizarre claim that satellites controlled by the Rothschild family were responsible for California wildfires.
But Rove said that no one fuels this kind of online chaos more than Trump himself. Because Trump dominates social media so easily, even normally reasonable Democrats and Republicans have started copying his style, posting louder and more dramatic content to stay relevant.
Rove gave an example of six Democratic members of Congress — all of them military veterans or former CIA officers — who recently released a video telling active-duty soldiers to “refuse illegal orders” from Trump. They didn’t mention any specific illegal order, which Rove felt made the message risky and unnecessarily provocative. But Trump escalated things even further by accusing them of “sedition,” a crime he said could be “punishable by death.”
Rove said this kind of loud, angry back-and-forth is part of why so many Americans no longer trust the country’s institutions. Politics, he said, is becoming more like a shouting match filled with pointless drama, and it will probably get even worse before it gets better. Real improvement, according to him, will only come when a new group of leaders with better values rises up and chooses a different way of doing politics.
Until that happens, he warned, the noise will continue — and so will the frustration of ordinary voters.
