Stevens now believes the Republican Party is, not to put too fine a point on it, a malign force jeopardizing the survival of American democracy. He’s written a searing apologia of a book called It Was All a Lie that compares his lifelong party to the Mafia, to Bernie Madoff’s fraud scheme, to the segregationist movement, even to the Nazis. He’s pretty disillusioned.
[pullquote]GRUNWALD: You’re brutal when you talk about the Republican Party right now. You compare it to Bernie Madoff, to the Mafia, you even have a bunch of Nazi Germany comparisons. What’s been the reaction of the people you used to work with?[/pullquote]While Stevens is one of the most prominent “Never Trump” Republicans, and It Was All a Lie is predictably scathing about the failures of President Donald Trump, the book does not blame Trump for the failures of the party he leads. It essentially takes for granted that Trump is as bad a president and a human being as his worst Democratic critics say—and that he constantly violates supposedly bedrock Republican commitments to free trade, family values, limited government and the Constitution. His point is that Trump is a fitting representative of the modern GOP.
It Was All a Lie is really about the party that spawned Trump and now marches in near-lockstep behind him—the party to which 67-year-old Stevens has devoted his career. The GOP’s abject surrender to its unorthodox and unconservative leader was a surprise to Stevens, but he has concluded that he shouldn’t have been surprised.
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[pullquote]Republicans always say that you can’t negotiate with terrorists; well, Donald Trump is a terrorist, and the Republican Party decided to negotiate with him.—Stuart Stevens[/pullquote]The book makes it abundantly clear that Stevens feels shame about his role in perpetuating Republican lies, but it’s not entirely clear whether he thinks he was lying, lied to, or just lying to himself. There are times when It Was All a Lie sounds less like an apology than an “if-only” book about how some good Republicans could have saved the country from Trumpism. Stevens writes glowingly about his clients who have never embraced Trump—like President George W. Bush, who he believes could have steered the party towards “compassionate conservatism” if the September 11 attacks hadn’t changed history, or Utah Senator Mitt Romney, who has emerged as a lonely voice of Republican resistance, or popular moderate governors like Larry Hogan of Maryland, Phil Scott of Vermont and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts. His book is notably silent about his clients who have bent their knees to Trump—like Senators John Cornyn of Texas, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Rob Portman of Ohio, Charles Grassley of Iowa, or Dan Coats of Indiana, who became Trump’s top intelligence official.
[pullquote]You know, it really struck me when I read the memoir by [the late German Chancellor] Franz von Papen, it’s exactly the same message you hear today. In 1953, he was still trying to justify Hitler: “You have to understand, the Bolsheviks were a threat, we had to counter them.” Of all the books I read to write my book, the Franz von Papen thing haunts me the most. It’s not to say that what happened in Germany is going to happen here. But the idea that you can’t talk about that—well, I think you have to talk about that. The parallel is so striking.–Stuart Stevens[/pullquote]Politico Magazine senior writer Michael Grunwald first met Stevens 25 years ago when he was working for William Weld, a moderate Republican governor who was running a futile campaign to unseat Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, and who would later run a futile primary campaign to unseat Trump. Grunwald talked with Stevens last week about the evolution of the Republican Party, its “conspiracy of cowardice” under Trump, its prioritization of politics over policy, his secret effort to undermine Trump in the 2016 election, his disdain for Republican thought leaders like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, and his fears for the 2020 election, which he expects Trump to try to steal.
[pullquote]Mitch McConnell thinks Trump will be remembered as his fool, and I think the odds are pretty good it’s going to be the other way around.—Stuart Stevens[/pullquote]They also talked about some of the tensions within It Was All a Lie, and Stevens opened up about his disappointment with former clients he genuinely admired. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
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STEVENS: Listen, dude. So much time. I really don’t understand it, but I’ll never wonder again how 1938 happened in Germany. The cowardice is contagious. I think there’s a sort of conspiracy of cowardice—when everyone’s a coward, you don’t feel like a coward. That’s why these Republicans resent Mitt Romney. He reminds them that they don’t have to be cowards, and it makes them feel bad.
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STEVENS: I don’t think so. History says that when a major political party endorses hate, and that’s what Trumpism is, that’s very hard to undo. It takes a lot of time and sometimes a lot of blood to undo; I hope it doesn’t take a lot of blood.
It’s odd, because the successful and wildly popular Republicans right now are the governors—Baker, Hogan, Scott. If Republicans could win their states in a presidential race, it’s over. Shouldn’t the party say: What can we learn from them? They’re selling our product in the hardest markets, and they’re selling the hell out of it. But they’re treated with benign neglect. That just says it all about where the party is. You don’t undo this stuff. Look at Nikki Haley, a once-serious person, trying to negotiate with this, like she’s going to be the good segregationist. You can’t do it. You just can’t do it.
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STEVENS: I think you’re absolutely right. Who are the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party? People like Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity. Laura and Tucker are smart people who are saying stupid things because it’s good for their careers, and because they have some sort of strange emotional issues they’re working through publicly. They’re both angry people. Hannity is just a guy who never graduated from college having the time of his life. But they’re the intellectual leaders of the party.
STEVENS: . . . I thought you would have to come to grips with the reality that racism was a flawed conceit. I thought that was inevitable. I wouldn’t have thought it possible that a president in 2020 would be defending Confederate monuments and the Confederate flag, or that his chief of staff John Kelly would be arguing that slavery wasn’t the cause of Civil War. I would’ve thought it was no more likely than that we’d be having a debate about gravity. I was wrong.
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STEVENS: My response to that is: I was wrong and you were right [about climate change]. And now, the same tendencies that led to denying climate change [have] resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans from a virus. There’s no other way to look at it.
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STEVENS: No. I think Trump and the Republican Party have officially validated hate as an acceptable response to politics. Just as if we elected a bank robber president, bank robbery will become more socially acceptable, the same thing has happened here. That won’t change. What’s going to change is they’re going to lose. We don’t know how long it will take before they lose. Maybe they’ll hang on longer than we expect. But the majority of Americans under 15 are nonwhite. The odds are damn good that when they turn 18 they’ll still be nonwhite. That’s a death sentence for the Republican Party. We know what’s going to happen: Look at California. It was the beating heart of the Republican Party, and now not much happens there that the Republican Party is involved in.
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