Both President Donald Trump and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich Wednesday blamed the public's perception of the tax bill on negative coverage coming from the mainstream media against it, but Republican strategist Karl Rove said more than half of the blame actually lies with Trump's White House and the "lousy" job it did laying out the case for the landmark legislation.
"The White House, with all due respect, has done a lousy job of laying the predicate for this," Rove, who served as deputy chief of staff under President George W. Bush, told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" program.
"We've only seen this president attack the issue episodically, and not in a very effective manner in most instances."
Trump did a good job for "one or two moments" explaining the bill, said Rove, but that was not consistent.
"If you want to bring public opinion with you, you have to bring it with you patiently, consistently, and persistently — and he has not," Rove continued. "Then, the final complicating factor is this president has thrown a bunch of controversies out there that distracted attention from the substantive things he is doing, and focused on his personal behavior."
In 2001, Bush's tax cuts were passed with a quarter of Democrats voting for them, Rove said, because he spent about five months — from the time of his inauguration — laying out, "methodically," the case for the tax cuts.
Earlier on the program, Gingrich told show anchor Bill Hemmer that news outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS and NBC and ABC, lied about the tax bill for six months.
"If the only thing you heard was left wing diatribes you aren't going to believe it, either. Let's see it next spring when people have money in their pocket. See how that gets explained on MSNBC."
Trump tweeted earlier that the "fake news" was to blame for the public's perception of the bill.
Moving forward, Rove said he thinks Trump needs to consider his approach as the 2018 midterm elections near, and how his actions can affect those races.
Rove said he does believe the tax bill to be a good one, but he does not think it's perfect.
"In most respects, it's a distinct improvement upon our current tax system, particularly for people who will find it much easier to file their taxes, and because of the doubling of the standard deduction and the nearly doubling of the child tax credit. They will find that their circumstances are much better off," he told show anchor Bill Hemmer.
Rove said he also thinks that high-tax states like New York, California and others will rethink their strategies on taxes when they are pressured by residents who no longer get tax deductions for the property and other state taxes they are paying.
"Look, for a long time people in these high-tax states, particularly wealthy people, were being subsidized," said Rove.
"Think about this: a person who is working on a road crew in Texas is paying tax money in order to subsidize somebody who lives on the Upper East Side in Manhattan and making more money than they do because one of them gets a tax advantage in writing off his high state income taxes and the person in Texas has no similar deduction."