To readers of Breitbart News these days, Karl Rove is a familiar,
sinister presence. The Republican strategist who twice helped George W.
Bush win the Presidency is now, according to Breitbart, “the voice of the hapless Republican
establishment,” “out of touch,” and “wrong in nearly every
prognostication for the past ten years.” In one article this summer,
Breitbart’s Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle, called Rove
President Trump’s “arch-nemesis.” Invariably, the voluminous coverage of
Rove on the conservative Web site, which is run by Trump’s former chief strategist
Stephen Bannon, notes that the President himself has labelled Rove “such
a dishonorable guy,” “a total incompetent jerk,” and a “proven loser.”

So when Rove went to North Carolina this fall to headline a fund-raiser
for a Republican congressman, Breitbart quickly responded. The
congressman, a back-bencher from Charlotte named Robert Pittenger, was
dubbed a tool of the “Karl Rove-backed elites” who had “sold out his
district.” A story on the site announced that Bannon was making the race
a key front in what Breitbart calls Bannon’s “war against establishment
Republicans.” From here on, the article warned, Bannon would be
supporting Pittenger’s opponent in the Republican primary, a fiery minister
named Mark Harris.

I reached Pittenger by phone the other day, and he professed bewilderment at the furor. “When you look at the
rankings, I’ve voted with Trump ninety-six per cent of the time. I’m
endorsed by the American Conservative Union, the National Right to Life,
the N.R.A., and a host of other organizations,” he told me. “I’ve never
met Steve Bannon, but it seems to be a game. There’s all kinds of games
up there in Washington.” As for Rove, “I’ve known him a long time, and I
appreciated him coming,” Pittenger said. “I have all sorts of people
coming to help me.”

Rove was more forthcoming when we met for a couple of hours last Friday,
at his office in Austin, Texas. This wasn’t about Robert Pittenger, he
said, it was about Karl Rove—and Steve Bannon. This summer, Rove had
publicly celebrated Trump’s firing of Bannon, cheering “good riddance to
Steve Bannon” in his weekly column for the Wall Street Journal and
skewering Bannon’s “grandiose” and “destructive” plans to meddle in
Party primaries. Rove followed that up a few weeks ago with another
scathing attack on Bannon in the Journal, lambasting his “jihad”
against Republican incumbents who support the Party’s congressional
leadership and mocking his choice of candidates, including the convicted
felon Michael Grimm for a New York House seat. That was on October 18th.
The following day, Breitbart published its piece attacking Pittenger.

In our meeting, Rove pointed out that Pittenger’s is the only House race
that Bannon appears to be targeting currently, along with a long list of
Senate races. “Why?” Rove asked. “Because I appeared at a
fund-raiser for Pittenger. The congressman is a loyal Trumpista who just
happens to have been a Bush supporter in 2000, who became a personal
friend of mine. And now he’s the enemy.” At least, he’s the enemy
according to Bannon, “the chief Leninist,” as Rove called him, of his
own self-styled Trump Revolution.

For his part, Bannon was travelling in Japan and not available to
respond to Rove’s comments, though he has made clear in numerous
interviews the low regard in which he holds Rove and the President he
served, having called Bush “the single most destructive president in
U.S. history, and I include James Buchanan in that.”

“I don’t know Steve Bannon, don’t think I’ve ever met him,” Rove told
me. “But, for him, it’s all personal.”

Politics has always been Karl Rove’s personal obsession. In 1973, during the Nixon era, he
famously and divisively got himself elected the national chairman of the
College Republicans after a hard-fought campaign which
not incidentally pitted him against Terry Dolan, the friend of the
future Trump adviser Roger Stone, whose campaign was managed by the
future Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort. Decades later, in a memo to
Trump asking for a role in his 2016 race, Manafort would refer to Rove
as his “blood enemy in politics,” going all the way back to that College
Republicans contest.

Rove, of course, went on to become a successful Texas political
consultant, and, since he helped the then Texas Governor George W. Bush win
the Presidency, in 2000, he has been a force to be reckoned with in the
national Republican Party. Throughout most of Bush’s tenure in
Washington, Rove was by his side in the White House, feared and loathed
by Democrats and celebrated by Republicans. He was known as “Bush’s
brain,” as the title of a book about him put it; the President’s
cynical, sophisticated envoy to the hard right and the “architect” who
masterminded Bush’s two Presidential elections with hardball tactics and
shameless pandering to base prejudice where necessary. John Dickerson,
writing in Slate, called him the Bush White House’s irreplaceable man,
an adviser “in the middle of every important West Wing decision,” and a Party builder who dreamed of a “Republican revolution that
would keep the GOP in power for a generation.”

By the time the revolution sputtered and Barack Obama turned Republicans
out of the White House, in 2008, Rove seemed destined for the quieter
life of a party elder. He had returned to Austin, Texas, where he had
met Bush in the first place, and started writing the Wall Street
Journal column and appearing on Fox News as a paid pundit. Rove helped
found American Crossroads, a big-money PAC to support Republican
candidates, after the Supreme Court opened up the floodgates to
unlimited gifts from mega-donors, and he published both a memoir of his
Bush years and a historical account of the 1896 Presidential campaign, a
longtime labor of love he had talked about for years.

And then along came Trump, a Bush basher of long standing who had been a
Democrat for most of his life. Trump’s ascendance was definitely not the
Republican revolution that Rove had intended. Their loathing was
immediate—and very much mutual.

In May of 2016, once it was clear that Trump had locked up the
Republican nomination with a primal scream of a campaign against Party
gatekeepers like Rove, a mutual friend tried to make peace between them.
Steve Wynn, the casino magnate and a big donor to Rove’s political interests, brought Rove and Trump together for what Rove told me was a
three-and-a-half-hour meeting, just the three of them, at Wynn’s
Manhattan home. It didn’t go well, as far as Rove was concerned, and he
came away believing that Trump was unaware of even basic political
realities. Rove said he walked Trump through the battleground states
only to have the candidate interrupt him repeatedly to insist he could
win solidly Democratic bastions such as California, New York, and
Oregon. “Politically, he had no idea what he was doing,” Rove told me.

There may be no bigger sin in Rove’s book than such political ignorance.
Even today, a year and a half after his conversation with Trump, Rove
seemed amazed and infuriated at the bad politics being practiced by the
President and his team. “Trump is bereft of any of the knowledge that
people pick up from being involved in politics,” Rove told me at one
point in our conversation in his cluttered office, a stone’s throw away
from the Texas State Capitol building and next door to the Fox News
studio from which he does his regular TV hits. It was a Friday afternoon
in a dressed-down part of the world, but Rove wore a bright yellow tie
with elephants all over it.

A year after Trump won the White House, Rove clearly was not yet ready
to concede the Trump takeover of the Party that Rove has spent his
career building. Democrats had just clobbered the Republicans in two
off-year gubernatorial races, in Virginia and New Jersey, and Rove had
gone on TV to affix blame squarely on the President himself. The voters,
he said on the Fox show hosted by his former Bush White House colleague
Dana Perino, were motivated by one thing: “They didn’t approve of
President Trump.” When I mentioned that line to him, Rove said the
disaffection with Trump wasn’t just in those states voting last week.
“As I travel, people come up to me and say, ‘Oh, I’m so enthusiastic
about Trump,’ and then two seconds later it’s ‘but I wish he’d stop
tweeting’ or ‘I voted for him and I hoped he would do better but he’s
not.’ ”

In Washington these days, Republicans are robustly debating how to
categorize Trump: Is he a one-off, an outsider who just happened to
win a once-in-a-lifetime upset? Or does Trump’s victory say something
more about the Party itself? Is the renegade President a symptom, in
other words, of a Party that has moved on, with or without its
leadership, from the old orthodoxies of its Reagan-Bush past? I’ve
talked with several younger Republicans who believe that is the real
explanation for Trump (“Our failure led to this demagogue,” one
prominent conservative told me), but Rove believes that the Party as he knows
it will endure. “Trump is sui generis: nobody else soon will be able to
pull off his act,” Rove told me, and even the populist
fervor that Trump rode to office “has a very good chance of dissipating
if answered by constructive policies.”

When I pressed Rove on whether Trump was changing the G.O.P., pulling
its ideological moorings away from the free-trade internationalism that
he and Bush championed, he responded no, or, at least not yet. Trump, he
said, is neither “an ideological figure nor a great communicator of a
philosophical mind-set. He’s got slogans, not a philosophy; impulses,
not habits. To reinvent a party permanently, you need a consistent,
well-informed, well-organized philosophy.”

To the extent that Trump has a philosophy, it’s Steve Bannon who has
defined it for him, so much so that during last year’s campaign, and
through the early months of Trump’s Presidency, many were eager to label
Bannon Rove’s West Wing successor in power and influence. As Bannon’s
White House clout soared, an aide to the Democratic congressional leadership,
Drew Hammill, told Politico in February that Steve Bannon was now “Karl
Rove on steroids.”

But Bannon post-White House seems more focussed on destroying Rove than
succeeding him, and he talks much less about Trump’s ideology than about
the Party purge he is avidly pursuing. A key early test of Bannon’s
crusade against Party elders came in late September, when Roy Moore, a
Bible-thumping activist who had twice been ousted as Alabama’s chief
justice, beat the establishment’s choice, Luther Strange, in a hotly
contested Republican primary to fill the empty U.S. Senate seat vacated
by Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. Rove and Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell campaigned and raised money for Strange, and
Bannon’s enemies in the White House even got Trump to endorse
him. Moore’s win, it seemed, showed that Bannon was the one more in
touch with the Party’s new center of gravity.

In an appearance at the Values Voters Summit a couple of weeks later, a
jubilant Bannon blamed Rove and McConnell by name for starting a war
with Bannon that they couldn’t win. “It’s not my war. This is our war, and
y’all didn’t start it, the establishment started it,” Bannon told the
audience, according to a lengthy account of his speech published by
Breitbart.

To Rove, this was classic Bannon-as-Bolshevik stuff. “Well,” Rove said, “he’s a Leninist, and like all good Leninists he
always puts his attacks in vivid terms. So what do you do if you’re a
Leninist? Go back to Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ . . . Pick a
highly visible target and personalize it.” In 2016, Rove noted, the
target was the Republican Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, but the
Bannon-backed primary candidate who challenged Ryan got only sixteen per
cent of the vote. Now he’s fixating on Rove and McConnell instead.
“Bannon says, ‘Look, I’m taking your donors, Mitch McConnell. ’ Well,
we’ve had our best non-election fund-raising year for American
Crossroads/Senate Leadership Fund ever, closing in on forty per cent
either banked or pledged for our 2018 budget,” Rove said. “I don’t see
hordes of our donors defecting to Bannon or his candidates.” And,
indeed, just this week came news that Sheldon Adelson, another casino
magnate and Republican mega-donor, had decided to stick with Rove and
McConnell despite a recent meeting with Bannon.

Yet Bannon, clearly, has gotten under Rove’s skin. Rove ticked off a
list of candidates whom he said showed Bannon’s amazing “bad judgment”
and constituted what, to his mind, amounts to a parade of horribles:
Grimm, that “convicted felon” from New York; the “despicable” Tom
Tancredo for governor in Colorado; the “hapless” Danny Tarkanian, a
five-time failed candidate running against Senator Dean Heller in
Nevada. “These are the people he’s backing and thinks can both win and
then govern?”

Rove also cited Moore in Alabama, who is looking less and less like a
brilliant victory for Bannon and more like a pressing political
liability in the wake of reports by the Washington Post that Moore
sexually abused teen-age girls. While Breitbart defended Moore and other
Republicans equivocated, Rove, in our Friday interview, praised the
reporting as “stunning” and “compelling” with “validation and
corroboration.” Still, Rove allowed, Moore might yet win in a heavily
Republican state like Alabama. “There’ll be a lot of Alabamians saying,
‘lying Washington Post, people are out to get him.’ ”

Rove never mentioned Bannon in his answer, but neither did he have to. The Republican war is on, and Rove is quite clear on just who is the
enemy.

“Bannon is a side show,” Rove replied after one too many questions about
the strategist trying to claim his mantle. “Trump is the real issue.”

An earlier version of this post misidentified the Democratic aide who called Steve Bannon “Karl Rove on steroids.”