It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

The fundamental question for Republicans, or at least those who claim to vote Republican, is what is the Republican party. This book written by a long-time Republican operative, Stuart Stevens, is eye-opening. The book traces the history of the Republican party over the last 50 or so years and paints a grim picture indeed. The greatest scorn that Stevens hands out, goes to what he calls "enablers"- and while he avoided name calling, he did identify just 3 or 4 who he ridiculed. Of course, he still gives no breaks to the dozens of Republican enablers of Donald Trump. The book is really well written, is short enough (202 pages) to read in one sitting which I did last night, giving up the option of doing any work! There are some startling statements. For example, he mentions George W. Bush and Mitt Romney in one section and says "neither of these men could win a primary for president in the current Republican Party. Decency, kindness, humility, compassion-all touchstones of a christian faith-have no value in the current Republican party. All his life Donald Trump has believed these to be weaknesses, and now that is the view of the party he leads"(p50).He does not go easy on current Republican leaders although he does not name many names. "One of the hallmarks of the Trump era is the alacrity with which intelligent people embrace stupidity. As it was in Mao's China with the Red Guard, it is a political crime in today's Republican Party to appear well educated"(p95). He does mention Bill Bennet who wrote the book of Virtues and the Death of Outrage. Steven's argues that Bennet was pleading for decency - his abject criticism of Bill Clinton for his moral failure "a president whose character manifests itself in patterns of reckless personal conduct...cannot be a good president"(p97) but Stevens goes on to say "how Bennett supports a man who brags about assaulting women and directs his own son to write checks to reimburse his lawyer Michael Cohen for hush payments to a porn star?"(p97). Stevens pulls a significant punch when he then says "So what sort of signal does it send when a man as intelligent and thoughtful as Bill Bennet decides to contradict his entire body of work to support a man like Donald Trump? What value is left in intelligent reasoning" (P98).The one politician that Steven's lays a great deal of blame on for what he claims as the demise of the Republican Party is Newt Gingrich. He talks about Gingrich in unflattering terms. Gingrich shut the country down, not once, but twice over an "unbalanced budget" the amount of which was probably spent in 2 or 3 months during the Covid-19 pandemic. Gingrich is presented by many Republicans as a great leader, who Stevens notes whose current wife is "a former intern he was having sex with while leading an impeachment against Bill Clinton for lying about having sex with an intern. That the former House intern Callista Gingrich, is now the American Ambassador to the Vatican is further evidence both that irony is dead and that God has a sense of humor"(p134). But Stevens is not finished with Gingrich. "As has been observed, Newt Gingrich is a dumb person's idea of a smart person, and Donald Trump is a not-rich person's idea of wealth. It says a lot about the Republican Party that both these disturbed and broken men have become dominant figures"(p134).Stevens does mention Republican figures who have not, so to speak, gone down the hole. He points for example to "three Republican governors in deeply Democratic states....Phil Scott of Vermont, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, and Larry Hogan of Maryland - are amount the most popular governors in America. They are the last outpost of a dying civilization, the socially moderate, fiscally conservative Republican Party"(p200).A significant portion of the book reflects on how the Republican party walked away from non-white voters intentionally. It's a theme that is recurring throughout the book. Stevens points to the negative connotation that the "Black Lives Matter" movement has within the current Republican party. He sees the total failure of the Republican Party to focus on those with less economic power, compared to those with more. But this realization, which took Stevens decades to see or at least admit, only reared its ugly head when he was faced with a politician capturing the Republican Party nomination. His greatest scorn is for Donald Trump but I won't list all the names he calls him. What did disturb me and remains a question I am struggling to answer, is why did it take a Donald Trump to open Stevens eyes as to what his own Republican Party was about? It must really be a truism that there can always be a last straw.In his final chapter, Stevens reviews his lifelong career in working within the Republican Party to elect Republicans but wonders "..I find myself in a very strange and uncomfortable position of looking out at a political landscape and seeing no reason for hope that the party I spent decades working for can be redeemed.....A political party without a higher purpose is nothing more than a cartel, a syndicate"(p200)If you are a Democrat, you will probably read this book and say "I knew all that". But here's the rub in this book. Stevens implies that if you were a Republican reading his book, you probably should be saying "I knew all that"!

A friend recommended the book entitled: “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump” by Stuart Stevens and while I had read many books about Trump prior to the November 2020 election, I decided to read one more but ended up finishing it on election day after I had already voted. It turns out the book offers insight into more than Trump and especially the future or possible futures of the Republican party. It is worth purchasing and reading regardless of your party affiliations or political leanings or the fact that election day has past. Author Stevens apparently made his living helping Republicans win elections and by creating ads that capture the good aspects of the Republican brand. He ultimately became disenchanted with the Republican party feeling that they walked away from their brand and does a passionate job of offering reasons for their failure and options to succeed. As Stevens states in the beginning of the book: “I was drawn to a party that espoused a core set of values: character counts, personal responsibility, strong on Russia, the national debt actually mattered, immigration made America great, a big-tent party invited all. … All of these immutable truths turned out to be mere marketing slogans. … What I missed was one simple reality: it was all a lie. … I come to this not out of bitterness but out of sadness. … There is nothing strange or unexpected about Donald Trump. He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.” When Stevens devolves into ad messaging to reach out to African American voters, he comes to the conclusion that: “It isn’t how Republicans are talking to black voters that results in 90 percent or more of those voters refusing to vote for Republicans. It’s what the Republicans are doing, once elected.” Stevens goes on to state: “Donald Trump, the most openly racist president since Andrew Johnson … Ronald Reagan wielded race as a magnet to attract disaffected white Democrats. … Reagan introduced his famous welfare fraud, a black woman in Chicago: … Reagan’s “welfare queen” was likely an exaggerated description of a woman exposed in 1974The majority of all welfare goes to white Americans and always has, but the specificity of a woman in Chicago makes the racial appeal clear…. The reality is that there is an ugly history of code words and dog whistles in the party, and it’s something Republicans must admit and address.” Stevens opines: “The most “forgotten Americans” are the nonwhite Americans. But by calling out to the white Americans who feel slighted or frustrated by their lot in life, Nixon was mining the same resentment vein that Trump—and George Wallace—exploited. … So many Republicans embraced Trump’s view that they were victims, as was he, because they had actually believed this all along. Theirs was a white birthright, and the rise of nonwhites was an unjust usurping of their rights. … The similarities of George Wallace and Donald Trump are striking, from attacking the news media to railing against elites, all played in the key of racism. This isn’t an aberration or a sudden wrong turn by the Republican Party.” Stevens states: “Reince Priebus, commissioned a so-called autopsy report to analyze why the party was struggling in presidential races:The “autopsy” accurately described the political cliff the party was running toward, acknowledging that a party with little appeal to nonwhite voters was a party in great danger: … In 1980, exit polls tell us that the electorate was 88 percent white. In 2012, it was 72 percent white. … According to the Pew Hispanic Center, in 2050, whites will be 47 percent of the country … But I think it is telling that the Republican focus on the need to broaden the party has been driven by an instinct for survival and no real sense of a larger purpose.” The author states: “The entire modern Republican definition of the conservative movement is about efforts to define itself as “normal” and everything else as “not normal.” … The Christian right would like the world to believe it was the political arm of Jesus Christ, come to life to save a sinful America. In practice it operates more like a Christian-related super PAC for a white America.” Reflecting on national debt Stevens writes: “Trump was running a scam on investors, and the Republican Party has been running a similar scam on voters. Trump claims to be a great businessman who was wildly successful, while in fact he was one of the greatest failures in modern American business history. … In truth the modern Republican Party is the equivalent of Donald Trump: addicted to debt and selling a false image of success.” And goes on to state: “Republicans had promised for decades to control spending, and when given a chance, they decided it was easier to just spend more”And less well known, “But a few basic facts are indisputable: in the post–World War II era, Republican presidents have contributed far more to the deficit than Democrats.” Stevens goes on to state: “Instead of killing the economy as Republicans predicted, the Clinton economic plan helped launch one of the longest periods of economic growth in U.S. history and helped create twenty-three million new jobs. Incomes rose; poverty fell. The only period of greater growth was the post–economic crash under the Obama years. 12 (Yeah, that sort of drives Republicans crazy too.)” Stevens explains with explicit examples how, conservative states actually get more tax money returned than they contribute and how farm subsidy programs benefit the wealthy. He also reviews well known numbers about US military spending, placing the US far above the next half dozen or so other nations combined. The author also reminds the reader that “In the Republican presidential primary of 1980, George H. W. Bush called the Reagan tax plan “voodoo economics,” which fit perfectly the writer Michael Kinsley’s definition that “a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”” As to tax cuts, Stevens reports: “Reagan crowd harnessed their inner John Galt to believe they had a moral duty to cut taxes, particularly for the wealthy, who were the most deserving because they were, well, wealthy and had proven themselves superior to those of lesser means. … A belief in the power of tax cuts is about as close as it can be to a definitional core belief that exists in the Republican Party.” Stevens offers a different perspective on conservatives and Buckley in particular, stating: “Many current anti-Trump Republicans wax nostalgic about the days of the intellectual firepower of the National Review, but the truth is that Trump’s racism is a direct descendant of William Buckley’s early racism. … The avowed hatred of government that is such a Republican bedrock principle is offensive and alienating to much of the country. … (It is also a practice of the white middle class to be completely blind to the vast help they get from the government in all aspects of their lives.)” In reflecting upon the media, Stevens offers that: “These days the branding of Fox News as “Fair and Balanced” often seems primarily to serve the purpose of proving that irony is not dead. But there is a long history within the far right of right-wing media positioning itself as the only true and honest media.” He goes on to state: “The charge that Barack Obama was not born in America is a quintessential conservative media moment, an attempt to provide some factual basis for bigotry. The birthers “felt” that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama could not truly be an American, so a cottage industry was born attempting to “prove” a lie. … The playing ground between “mainstream” media and the conservative alternatives is forever tilted against the side that has standards, because part of those standards is admitting mistakes and correcting them on the record.” Stevens offers his views on the NRA including: “Special interest groups are like terrorists: they test for weakness and exploit fear. The transition of the National Rifle Association is a perfect parable: over a couple of decades, it evolved from a gun-safety education organization to a thuggish gang that rewards those at the top with millions of dollars based on proven ability to muscle elected officials into doing what they mostly know is wrong. In 1995, the head of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, attacked a federal assault weapons ban for giving “jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.” … That was enough to make President George H. W. Bush resign his lifetime NRA membership in a blistering letter.” Stevens seeking to better understand Trump states: “No single political figure better illustrates the predicate for Donald Trump than Newt Gingrich. Both men are deeply damaged psychological cripples from dysfunctional families. … Donald Trump’s relationship to his family is so tortured he has the bizarre need to reinvent their origins, claiming in Trump: The Art of the Deal that his grandfather came to America “from Sweden as a child.” Then, in 2019, he claimed his father was born in Germany. Trump tried to temper his complaints about Germany’s not paying enough to NATO by saying, “I have great respect for Angela [Merkel] and I have great respect for the country. My father is German, was German, born in a very wonderful place in Germany so I have a very great feeling for Germany.” Trump’s father was actually born in New York and his grandfather in Germany. Both Trump and Gingrich have a transparent need to compensate for their deep insecurities with childlike boasting.” In comparing political parties, Stevens states: “Both parties have a vast array of special interests, from the NRA to labor unions, that have the ability to mobilize voters to support or oppose their choice of candidates. The difference between the impact of these groups on each party goes to the fundamental asymmetrical structures of the parties. The modern Democratic Party is a much more diverse, heterogeneous association of voters. Compare that with the overwhelming majority of Republican voters, who are white, Christian, and middle class or more affluent.” As to cutting taxes, the authors reminds us: “On economic issues, one man, Grover Norquist, has spent the last thirty years pressuring Republican candidates to commit to a pledge not to raise taxes.if there is one single unifying conviction among Republicans, it is the assumption that all good in government flows from cutting taxes…. The truth is that most Republican politicians I’ve known—and I’ve known a lot—greatly resent the power of Grover Norquist and resent the childlike indignity of signing a pledge, as if running for office were like joining some secret college society with rules.” Stevens sums up by stating: “Pushed by both the impending demographic collapse of the Republican Party, whose overwhelmingly white constituency is becoming an ever smaller share of the electorate, and the GOP’s extremist inability to craft policies that speak to an increasingly diverse nation, the Republicans opted to disfranchise rather than reform. … Republicans have thrown their power behind making sure more of “their” people vote instead of trying to make the party more appealing. It’s a losing strategy in a country that is changing as rapidly as America”

I already knew some time ago that "it was all a lie," but I found it useful to learn more details that "it was all a lie." It's a compelling and quick read if you are familiar with politics and already know the players being referenced. The premise of the entire book is not simply that the republican establishment sat idly by while Trump took over but rather that Trump is the apotheosis of what the Republican party has been since Eisenhower. Where he gets into a little trouble logically is when he refers to the betrayal of republican values when he has already shown that the party essentially had no values long before Trump came along. It's a contradiction at the center of his work which seems to stem from his desire to believe the candidates he has worked for actually stood for something. It reflects what seems to me to be a personal conflict for Stevens, but I honestly don't blame him. After all, this book represents a repudiation of his entire life's work, certainly no easy thing.I found his honest discussion of the party's history informative (I had no idea conservative media was born in the 40's). While I don't agree with him on everything (he insists W is a "decent" man, for example, without considering the many indecencies committed by his administration), I found the book well written and informative and worth reading despite what I consider its logical flaws.

A very engaging read.His style and unique perspective make this a great read

An excellent work of self confession. I’m wondering what the post-Trump presidency version would look like given that the nation has failed to right the wrongs even after 01.06.22!

Stuart Stevens was a Republican Party insider who had made TV advertisements for countless republican candidates. He came to the conclusion that everything those candidates had said was really a lie proven by their obsequiousness to Donald Trump.

It is difficult and agonizing and also morally courageous, for a successful professional to look back on the decades and admit that they were spent in a lifelong chase for hollow success. Stevens has done exactly that. Kudos for his brutal honesty.

Recommended reading for followers of US political turmoil. With upcoming elections, will the public wake up to the upcoming danger