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It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump Hardcover – August 4, 2020

by Stuart Stevens (Author)

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AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses to the reader that the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies... This reckoning inspired Stevens to publish this blistering, tell-all history... Although this book will be a hard read for any committed conservatives, they would do well to ponder it."
--Julian E. Zelizer, The New York Times

From the most successful Republican political operative of his generation, a searing, unflinching, and deeply personal exposé of how his party became what it is today

Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass.

This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else. Stevens shows how Trump is in fact the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Stevens shows how racism has always lurked in the modern GOP's DNA, from Goldwater's opposition to desegregation to Ronald Reagan's welfare queens and states' rights rhetoric. He gives an insider's account of the rank hypocrisy of the party's claims to embody "family values," and shows how the party's vaunted commitment to fiscal responsibility has been a charade since the 1980s. When a party stands for nothing, he argues, it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room.

It Was All a Lie is not just an indictment of the Republican Party, but a candid and often lacerating mea culpa. Stevens is not asking for pity or forgiveness; he is simply telling us what he has seen firsthand. He helped to create the modern party that kneels before a morally bankrupt con man and now he wants nothing more than to see what it has become burned to the ground.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Knopf
Publication date

August 4, 2020
Dimensions

5.8 x 1 x 8.6 inches
ISBN-10

0525658459
ISBN-13

978-0525658450
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Stevens stands out among Trump’s conservative critics because of his candor about the deeper rot at the core of the GOP... He offers a grand mea culpa for his own role in paving the way for Trumpism."
—Sean Illing, Vox

"It Was All a Lie is unlike anything published in the Trump era: a photo negative of the genre of self-justifying apparatchiks... He’s written a history of the modern GOP from an insider’s perspective, as well as something deeply personal."
—Benjamin Wofford, Washingtonian

"A stunning indictment."
—David Corn, Mother Jones

“A blistering tell-all history. In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses [that] the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies."
—The New York Times

"This book is going to become an important reference volume for future historians trying to explain what happened to the Republican Party in the second half of the 20th century and the Trump era. It takes someone with Stuart Stevens' insights as a writer to be able to see this story and deliver it to us the way he has."
—Lawrence O'Donnell

“A sustained attack… Refreshingly frank.”
—John S. Gardner, The Guardian

"Washington in 2020 often beggars belief: an American President answering a deadly pandemic with ignorance, inflaming racial unrest with racism, stoking violent confrontations while his fearful party stands mute... What if the accounting comes from one of the Republican Party's most accomplished political strategists, an insider provoked by Trump to reconsider his life's work? In fact, it has. Stevens dissects several categories of deception. Though he could not have anticipated it -- the book, completed last September, does not include the words "coronavirus" or "George Floyd" -- events of recent days keep offering improbably-vivid evidence for his assessments.
—CNN

"A blistering attack on the modern Republican Party and its wholesale surrender to Donald Trump... His willingness to tell the truth should serve as a model for the mea culpas that Republicans who enabled Trump’s corruption, norm-shattering, and immorality owe us."
—Michael A. Cohen, The Boston Globe

"An epitaph, of interest to all politics junkies, for a formerly venerable party by a champion-turned-gravedigger."
—Kirkus

About the Author

STUART STEVENS is the author of seven previous books, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, and Outside, among other publications. He has written extensively for television shows, including Northern Exposure, Commander in Chief, and K Street. For twenty-five years, he was the lead strategist and media consultant for some of the nation's toughest political campaigns. He attended Colorado College; Pembroke College, Oxford; Middlebury College; and UCLA film school. He is a former fellow of the American Film Institute.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

Race, The Original Republican Sin

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.
—Lee Atwater, 1981

I played the race card in my very first race.

It was 1978 and my first client was running for Congress in Mississippi. His name was Jon Hinson. He had been chief of staff to a Mississippi congressman named Thad Cochran, who was now running for the Senate. (Actually, back then they called the head staffers “administrative assistants,” or AAs, but as government became more about positioning for that next job and less about service, that sounded too much like “secretaries,” so the more elevated “chief of staff” became common. What lobbying shop wants to pay $500,000 for a former AA?) In high school I had been a page when Hinson ran the congressional office, and I’d kept in touch when visiting the office on trips to D.C.

Hinson was running against the son of Senator John Stennis, a Mississippi icon of the Democratic Party. The son, John Hampton Stennis, was a state representative, and it was assumed he would win easily. I was in film school then at UCLA, and Hinson called and asked if I could make television commercials for his campaign. I told him I didn’t know how to make commercials, that I just made silly little films and wrote scripts I couldn’t sell. “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “You have to do it. I can’t afford to pay anyone who does this for real.” In retrospect, this might not have been the most compelling pitch. But like anyone who has gone to film school, I was eager to get out and actually do something even vaguely related to film, so I said yes.

I’d been one of those kids who loved politics and campaigns and had walked precincts since the 1967 “William Winter for Governor” campaign in Mississippi. Winter ran against the last avowed segregationist to be elected governor, John Bell Williams, and it was a race full of death threats and drama. Winter lost, but I fell in love with politics and read Teddy White’s Making of the President, 1960 over and over. It seemed a strange and intoxicating world, and when I left film school and started working in the Hinson campaign, I instantly felt at home. There was this sense of doing something that might actually matter. If I came up with the right ad, I might make a little history—or at least that’s what I told myself. It was the tiniest bit of history—a Mississippi congressional seat—but it seemed infinitely more consequential than student films and debating what was the greatest opening camera move in cinema. The only problem was we were losing.

Stennis was a towering figure in Mississippi, and his name on the ballot was the obvious default choice for voters. Hinson was right when he said he couldn’t afford to hire anyone, because no one thought he would win and for good reason. We raised some money, put up a few positive ads, and moved comfortably into second place, which is where we seemed stuck. The problem was that the congressional district, which included a lot of Jackson, Mississippi, and Vicksburg, was around 30 percent African American and, true to form, Hinson was getting less than 10 percent of that vote.

Thad Cochran was facing the same problem in his Senate race. No Republican had been elected statewide in Mississippi since Reconstruction, mostly because there really wasn’t much of a functioning Republican Party in Mississippi. Cochran had won a congressional race against a very weak Democrat and then relied on incumbency to win easy races, but every other member of the Mississippi congressional delegation was Democratic. In his Senate race, Cochran had one great advantage: Charles Evers, the brother of the assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers, was running as an independent. Not surprisingly, he was drawing a significant portion of the African American vote. With the bulk of the black vote going to a third-party candidate, the race between the Republican and the Democrat largely came down to a fight for white voters. And that was a fight Cochran was winning. He was a young, likable attorney from Jackson and had a strong base in his former congressional district. Evers had no chance of winning, but he was enabling Cochran to move into first place.

What we needed in the Hinson campaign was a like dynamic of an independent African American drawing black votes from the Democrat. And we had one: Evan Doss Jr., a thirty-year-old African American, had qualified to run as an independent for the congressional seat. The problem was that he wasn’t famous like Charles Evers, so few, including those in the black community, knew he was running. So I did the obvious thing: I made ads that showed the Republican, the Democrat, and independent, Evan Doss. I did it like a public service announcement: “In the Fourth Congressional District, three candidates are running.” I put all three on the screen with their names. “Jon Hinson is the Republican nominee. John Hampton Stennis is the Democratic nominee. Evan Doss is running as an independent and would be the first African American candidate elected to Congress in Mississippi since Reconstruction.”

That was it. I thought it was terribly clever, and it didn’t bother me a bit on any “I’m playing the race card” kind of level. What could be wrong with informing voters of the choice they faced? And it worked beautifully. On Election Day, Hinson won with 51.6 percent of the vote followed by John Hampton Stennis with 26.4 percent and Evan Doss with 19 percent. Every vote for Doss was a vote that would have gone to Stennis. In the end, Hinson might have won without the black independent, but it would have been very, very close.

In my first race I had stumbled onto a truth as basic and immutable as the fact that water freezes below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit: race was the key in which much of American politics and certainly all of southern politics was played. It was really very simple: the Democratic candidate needed 90-plus percent of black votes to win. If a significant portion voted for a third party, the Republican would win.

It hadn’t always been this way. Before 1964, Republican presidential candidates could expect to get between 30 and 40 percent of the African American vote. Dwight Eisenhower got 39 percent in 1956. Four years later, Richard Nixon campaigned with Jackie Robinson and won 32 percent of black voters. In 1964, Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act, and his black support plummeted to 7 percent. Since 1964, no Republican presidential candidate has broken 17 percent with African American voters, and by 2016 only 3 percent considered themselves Republican.

Politics is in many ways a perfect marketplace. Candidates and parties learn very quickly what works and what doesn’t and focus time, energy, and money on the share of the marketplace that pollsters tell them is accessible to persuasion or motivation. Since 1964, Republicans have learned that they will have little success in appealing to black voters. It’s not that most campaigns didn’t make at least some effort, but it was always done with the knowledge that breaking 10 percent would be a significant achievement.

What happens if you spend decades focused on appealing to white voters and treating nonwhite voters with, at best, benign neglect? You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to white voters. That is the truth that led to what is famously called “the southern strategy.” That is the path that leads you to becoming what the Republican Party now proudly embraces: a white grievance party.

All my adult life in politics, I’ve heard Republicans blame our problems with black voters on “how” we communicated with the “minority community.” The Republican Party has hired an entire cottage industry of black consultants to help candidates, campaigns, and elected officials crack the code of how to talk to African Americans, as if there were some linguistic issue blocking the party from returning to the party of Abraham Lincoln. It’s all nonsense, and black voters get that it’s nonsense.

The reason African Americans overwhelmingly reject Republicans isn’t based on word choices or phrasing. It’s based on policy. 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. The fact that the Republican establishment is so invested in the myth that their problems are a matter of language is revealing and self-damning. At the root of it is a deep condescension that they—the de facto White Party of America—know what is best for black folks, and it’s unfortunate these black folks don’t seem to get it but, you know, they are different and we have to talk to them in a language they can understand.

The reality is just the opposite. Since 1964, black voters have heard the Republican Party with exquisite clarity; more important, they have seen what Republicans are doing once in office. It’s summed up nicely in a chapter called “The GOP’s Rise as ‘the White Man’s Party’” in Dog Whistle Politics by Ian Haney López: “Where in 1962 both parties were perceived as equally, if tepidly, supportive of civil rights, two years later 60 percent of the public identified Democrats as more likely to pursue fair treatment, versus only 7 percent who so identified the Republican Party.” Barry Goldwater ran on a carefully crafted platform of coded racism that contradicted his previous support of civil rights legislation. As Walter De Vries and Jack Bass wrote in the 1978 Emerging Coalitions in American Politics,

The Republican decision to exploit the race issue and abandon the option of becoming a party of reform manifested itself in the 1961 speech in Atlanta by Barry Goldwater to a gathering of Southern Republicans. “We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are,” he declared. Goldwater then spelled it out, saying that school integration was “the responsibility of the states. I would not like to see my party assume it is the role of the federal government to enforce integration in the schools.”

The “ducks” were white voters, and in 1964, of the six states Goldwater carried, five were in the old Confederacy (the other being his home state of Arizona). African American support for Republicans fell off a cliff in 1964 and has never returned. As Hispanic and other nonwhite support plummets for Republicans, I hear many in the party assure themselves it is temporary and will “bounce back” as soon as the “right” leader emerges for the party. That’s a hopeful fantasy, as the example of 1964 proves.

When Jon Hinson beat Senator Stennis’s son in my first congressional race, it received some attention in national political circles as an upset. Suddenly I found candidates interested in hiring me to make television commercials for their campaigns. It was how I stumbled into becoming a political consultant. I found I could work in campaigns for a short time and have the off-season to try to write books and articles. At the time no one would pay me much to write, so it was an easy way to make a living doing what was in effect seasonal work, sort of like migrant labor work but indoors and a lot easier.

A few years later I was working in the first congressional campaign for a young Florida banker named Connie Mack. He was running in a newly created district around Fort Myers, Florida, that was created to be a safe Republican seat. His toughest campaign was in the Republican primary, and after that it seemed fairly certain he would win the general election. (He went on to win with 65 percent of the vote.) It was a predominantly white district, but for some reason the Republican National Committee sent down an African American consultant to coach the campaign and candidate on how to maximize appeal to black voters. It was hyped as a “highly important” meeting with a great drumroll from Washington.

I was still naive enough to think there might be some secret language we could learn that would allow us to move the hearts of at least a substantial number of black voters. We had a simple storefront campaign headquarters. It reminded me of the scenes from Teddy White’s Making of the President, and every time I walked into it, I felt like a character of White’s, playing out in my head the drama of coming behind in the West Virginia primary when Kennedy beat Humphrey. It made the endeavor seem far grander than a routine election of a nice-guy banker who had run mostly because he was bored and had a name that still meant something to the older snowbirds in the district. (Connie Mack’s grandfather and namesake managed the Philadelphia Athletics for their first fifty seasons.) Our pollster, Arthur Finkelstein, an intense mad genius who had specialized in electing hard-right candidates like Jesse Helms, muttered to Connie in one poll briefing, “Every time an ambulance goes by, you lose a voter.”

For this critical meeting with the African American consultant, we were summoned to a small conference room at a local hotel. It was an all-day meeting and catered. I had never been to a catered meeting before. Our small staff gathered with Connie and his wife and the RNC consultant. He was dressed impeccably in an elegant suit with a blue shirt that had a white collar. He was wearing Gucci loafers, which I wouldn’t have known except later one of the young staffers, who was gay, noted with grudging admiration that they were nice shoes. (Just about every Republican campaign I’ve worked on had a sizable gay contingent of staffers. The more conservative the candidate, the greater seemed the percentage of gay staffers. The correlation between the conservatism of a Republican candidate and the number of gay staffers seems so reliable that in a later campaign when there was discussion among the staff of the candidate’s sexual orientation, I could declare with some certainty, “I don’t think our guy is conservative enough to be gay.” The point was accepted, and I later heard a young press operative trying to explain this to a baffled reporter who, thank God, did not quote him.)

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; First Edition (August 4, 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0525658459
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0525658450
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.8 x 1 x 8.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #43,241 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #27 in Political Parties (Books)
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- #200 in Political Leader Biographies

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Stuart Stevens

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Stuart Stevens grew up in Mississippi, a seventh generation Mississippian. For a very long time he's been driven by a fascination and love of politics, film, and, writing and has pursued those interests throughout his life.

He attended Colorado College; Pembroke College, Oxford; Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English; UCLA Graduate Film School, and the American Film Institute, where he received a diploma signed by Charlton Heston.

It Was All A Lie: How The Republican Party Became Donald Trump is his eighth book. His earlier books are: The Innocent Have Nothing To Fear, last Season: A Father, a Son and a Lifetime of College Football, Night Train to Turkistan, Malaria Dreams, Feeding Frenzy: Around the World In Search of The Perfect Meal and the novel, Scorched Earth: A Political Love Story. He's written extensively for dramatic television series, starting with Northern Exposure and including I'll Fly Away, K. Street, Commander in Chief and others. His articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Outside, The Washington Post, Food & Wine and many others.

He has a long time interests in endurance sports which he pursues badly. He's skied the last 100 kilometers to the North Pole and ridden the 1200 km Paris-Brest-Paris cycling event and was the first person to complete all of the World Loppet (Nordic Ski Marathons) in a single season. He wishes he were good at these endeavors, but concedes he is not, yet enjoys them nonetheless.

Stuart Stevens was a founding partner in Strategic Partners & Media and stepped down from the company in April 2019. He is currently an advisor to the Lincoln Project and is working on his next novel.

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Joseph R.

This is great read. It's an inside look at the Republican Party.

Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2020

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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"!

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G. C. Carter

Passionately offers reasons for Republican failures and options to succeed

Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2020

Verified Purchase

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 1974
The 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”

68 people found this helpful

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Venus

A worthwhile read

Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2022

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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.

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Daniel M Cousineau

Engaging

Reviewed in Canada on April 1, 2024

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

Phil

Amazing Insight

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 7, 2022

Verified Purchase

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!

M Clark

A Republican explains that all of what Republican politicians say is a lie

Reviewed in Germany on March 14, 2021

Verified Purchase

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.

Thanirdab

A Cry from the heart

Reviewed in India on March 4, 2021

Verified Purchase

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.

Kindle Customer

Excellent read about the downfall of the party of Lincoln

Reviewed in Australia on January 20, 2024

Verified Purchase

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

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It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump Hardcover – August 4, 2020

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