There is nothing – and I mean nothing – more damaging to the Republican Party than a poser – otherwise known as a Republican In Name Only (RINO for those of you in the back).
I present to you the ultimate RINO loser, Karl Rove, who has spent a decade telling MAGA voters they’re doing it wrong. This week he took the last step and told them he’s voting for the other team. Did I mention he’s a loser?
At a members-only luncheon at Austin’s Headliners Club, Rove said he’ll vote for Democrat Jon Rosenthal over Republican nominee Bo French in the Texas Railroad Commission race. Per the Texas Tribune, he called French a bigot on the way out.
Trump answered Monday night on Truth Social the way everyone expected: Rove is a RINO, he’s been wrong too often to keep taking seriously, he’s carried Trump Derangement Syndrome for the better part of ten years, and — the line that will stick — he’s a “stone cold loser.” The president also asked why Fox News and the Wall Street Journal keep handing him a microphone.
The Bo French drama (seemingly) reaches the White House: After @TexasTribune reported that Rove wouldn’t vote for French, Trump rants that Rove “is so bad for the Republican Party” and “a stone cold loser” pic.twitter.com/GNiV0rQA7x
— Bayliss Wagner (@baylisswagner) September 14, 2026
The precipitating offense was a social media post. French commented on video of University of Texas students celebrating a win over Ohio State. The students appeared to be of South Asian descent. He called them foreigners. That was a dumb post, and conservatives should say so plainly — those kids were celebrating a Longhorns win in Austin, Texas, about the most American thing you can do on a Saturday in the fall.
But look at the size of the response. The remedy for a bad post is criticism, a primary challenge, a withheld endorsement, a check you don’t write. Rove skipped all of it and went straight to a Democrat, in a race for the body that regulates oil and gas in the nation’s biggest energy state. Rosenthal is not a placeholder. He’d bring a different regulatory posture to the industry underwriting the Texas economy and a real share of American energy security. Rove knows exactly what that seat does. He decided a tweet mattered more.
The timing tells on him. Eleven days before the luncheon, he published a Journal column titled “Trump Sticks With a Losing Midterm Plan.” Last Thursday he was back with “Who Will Be the Bigger Midterm Loser?” French’s post didn’t radicalize Karl Rove. It gave him a clean exit for something he’d been building toward in print. And the résumé behind the lecture is worth remembering: the architects of the permanent Republican majority presided over 2006 and 2008, spent record sums in 2012 to deliver Mitt Romney, and told the party to go quiet on immigration in 2013 before a coalition they never saw coming corrected them.
In other words, Trump is 100 percent right: The Rove-ites of the GOP were stone-cold losers on every major issue that mattered to Republican voters. Trump tapped into that frustration, promised to fix it, then did fix it – and that’s how he conquered the Grand Old Party. Trouble is, the Old School Losers never forgave him for that; they’d rather hate on him than admit they were the ones who were wrong all along.
Now that Trump Derangement Syndrome is leading otherwise rational people – semi-rational in Rove’s case – to make dumb, politically motivated choices. Good riddance.
