Rove: Trump should let George W. Bush matter ‘rest’

by Jonathan Swan - 11/08/16 7:23 PM ET

Republican strategist Karl Rove says he warned Donald Trump in a private conversation in May that he’d never get George W. Bush’s support and that he’d be smart to let the issue rest.

{mosads}”You’ll notice Donald Trump has not brought this up since May,” Rove said on Fox News Tuesday night.

Rove was responding to host Megyn Kelly, who brought up the fact that Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway is complaining that former presidents, like Bush, didn’t vote for Trump.

Rove, a former top strategist to Bush, said he met with Trump at the end of May and Trump raised the issue of the Bushes not supporting him.

“And I said to him, in essence, ‘Do you really want to pursue this issue?'” Rove said, recalling his conversation with Trump.

“You called for the impeachment of President George W. Bush; you voted for John Kerry in 2004; you said that George W. Bush deliberately lied about the presence of WMD in Iraq in order to provoke the war,” Rove added. “You said that he had advanced knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and allowed 3,000 Americans to die, deliberately. And do you really want to, do you really expect him to say nice things about you?'”

Rove said the “implicit thing” in his May conversation with Trump was that it wouldn’t be in Trump’s interests for these issues to be litigated publicly during a general election campaign.

“I mean, imagine what would happen,” Rove said. “Somebody would say ‘you know President Bush, what do you have to say about him believing that you should’ve been impeached?'”

Rove said that at one point during the campaign a Trump surrogate wrote an article arguing that the Bushes should endorse Trump. Rove said he phoned that surrogate and said ‘I had this conversation with your principal, and this was his response.'”

“And the surrogate said,” Rove recalled, “you know what, I didn’t know that he’d said those things. You’re right, we oughta drop this.”

Rove said Trump “did not want to have an argument with the American people about whether or not he was justified in saying Bush should’ve been impeached.”

“Most Republicans,” Rove recalls advising Trump, “are unaware that you’ve said these things. Let it lie.

“And he did,” Rove added. “He let it lie for the rest of the campaign.”

Tags Donald Trump John Kerry