Rove: Trump a 'Joke Candidate,' Part of the 'Nutty Right'

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS HOST: All right, one quick question on the Donald Trump controversy, since he has grabbed headlines across every network and every newspaper, this whole birther issue that he has raised. I don't agree with Donald Trump on this. I'll say it right from the get-go. But does this hurt the Republican Party?

KARL ROVE: Well, it hurts Donald Trump and it removes -- he was an interesting candidate who had a business background and could have contributed to the dialogue. But his full embrace of the birther issue means that he's off there in the nutty right and is now an inconsequential candidate.

I'm shocked. The guy's smarter than this. And you know, the idea that President Obama was not born in Hawaii, being -- you know, making that the centerpiece of his campaign, means that he's just -- you know, now, you know, a joke candidate. Let him go ahead and announce for election on "The Apprentice." The American people aren't going to be hiring him, and certainly, the Republicans are not going to be hiring him in the Republican primary.

VAN SUSTEREN: Can he bring himself back?

ROVE: I don't know. He's so far out there. The initial part was, he said, Well, I think the president was born in the United States. I acknowledge that. But I don't understand why he hasn't put out the birth certificate. Now it is weird conspiracy theories, saying things that people -- you know, none of his family knows what hospital he was born in in Hawaii. Wait a minute. Everybody -- you know, yes, his family knows know what hospital he was born at. You know, nobody knows him in college? One of my White House deputies was a classmate of Barack Obama's at Harvard and helped get him elected the Law Review editor.

So you know, this is just -- he's now embraced full-throated the nuttiness that somehow or another, Obama was born in Kenya and his parents and grandparents arranged to have birth -- birth notices printed the next day in the Honolulu newspapers so that 40-some-odd years later, he'd be eligible to run for president. It just -- you know, I'm sorry to see it happen. He had an opportunity to provide an interesting contribution to the dialogue.