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It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump
Audible Audiobook
– Unabridged
New York Times Best Seller
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
“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)
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.
- Listening Length5 hours and 44 minutes
- Audible release dateAugust 4, 2020
- LanguageEnglish
- ASINB082TNP4V9
- VersionUnabridged
- Program TypeAudiobook
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Product details
| Listening Length | 5 hours and 44 minutes |
|---|---|
| Author | Stuart Stevens |
| Narrator | Dan John Miller |
| Audible.com Release Date | August 04, 2020 |
| Publisher | Random House Audio |
| Program Type | Audiobook |
| Version | Unabridged |
| Language | English |
| ASIN | B082TNP4V9 |
| Best Sellers Rank | #51,193 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #407 in Political Commentary & Opinion #882 in United States History (Audible Books & Originals) #1,641 in Politics & Government (Audible Books & Originals) |
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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"!
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”
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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His style and unique perspective make this a great read




















