Republican strategist and author Stuart Stevens joins the show to discuss his book "It Was All A Lie," as he lays bare how the GOP's craven need for power led the party down an evil path that inexorably brought us Donald Trump. Hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman probe Stevens's insider information about Republican strategy and the dangerous decline of the GOP.
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I'm Jared Yates-Sexton, here with Nick Halsman, as always.
But we have a special episode, and we've been looking forward to this for the past few days.
We have with us Stuart Stevens, and for those who don't know, Stuart is the author of eight books and has written for television shows including Northern Exposure and Commander-in-Chief.
For 25 years, he served as a strategist and media consultant for several campaigns and politicians, including George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.
What we're going to talk about today is, I think, a really important book that Stuart has written, and we're going to dive deep into this.
He's the author of the book, It Was All a Lie, How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.
Stuart, I want to say, first of all, that I thought writing this book was really courageous and needed.
And we're going to talk, we're going to get deep in this podcast about the Republican Party, the history, the experience that you have had.
Can you talk a little bit about what it was within you that felt it necessary to write this book?
What was the moment where that light bulb went off?
Well, thanks for asking me to go party.
You know, there are a lot of people who are wrong about Donald Trump in 2016.
But it's really hard to find anybody who is more wrong than me.
I mean, you can look around the country.
I didn't think he'd win the primary and I didn't think he'd win the general.
And when he did, I started asking myself, like, how come I didn't see this?
How come this party I'd worked in could do this, could produce this?
And, you know, in that way, you're like high school English teacher said, if you can't write it, you don't understand it.
I really just began this as sort of a personal Exploration of like, how did I miss this?
So I started reading a lot about the history of the party, which I thought I knew, but like a lot of things I only knew superficially.
And you know, the Republican Party is not an unstudied thing.
There's a lot of fascinating, interesting work about it.
So that's really what led me to write this book.
And I mean, I think that There were a lot of us who worked in the party who were drawn to George W. Bush and the idea of compassionate conservatism.
And I think, and I went down there in April 1999, Austin, to our landslide.
You know, in books, we used to joke that anybody can get elected president when you get more votes.
It's when you lose by half a million, it takes professionals.
It seemed funnier at the time.
You know, I think we saw the dark side of the party, but we always thought that we were the dominant gene, if only because the country was changing, therefore the party would change out of necessity, if nothing else.
And I don't know any other conclusion, but that we were wrong.
And we were the recessive gene, as it were.
And I think The whole premise of our book is that Donald Trump didn't hijack the Republican Party.
The Republican Party became Donald Trump and is very comfortable with it.
And, you know, I finished this book, well, almost two years ago.
And it's a pretty bleak book about the party, but it turns out I was way over optimistic.
And it's even worse than I thought at the time.
I'm curious, if we look at the trajectory of the Republican Party, it's a kind of a two part question.
Would you say that Trump was inevitable?
And is there a touchstone or a specific moment in that past that sort of began this march toward where we are now?
That's a great question.
And I've thought about this a lot because I work for Romney.
And if Romney had won, I think it's safe to say the party would be in a very different direction, but it'd be the same party.
So what I come back to is that thing that like we studied when we still studied civics, like leadership matters.
So I think Trump, we all have a lot of different sides of ourselves.
Trump tapped into our worst angels.
Trump tapped into our worst selves.
So, like, if you look in the 30s in America, there was a huge fascist movement in America.
You know, America first.
Trump seems to think it's a positive.
But why didn't we become fascist like a lot of countries in Europe?
Probably because Roosevelt was president, not like Lindbergh or Henry Ford.
And we would have been the same country.
We just would have been led in a different direction, which, you know, the parallels to Germany are obvious.
So.
I think.
In a lot of ways, you can make the case that the last chance the party really had was pre-9-11.
So if you look at Bush, you know, there's a sort of parlor game among some of us who worked with him, and I never worked in the administration, I was just a campaign guy, but what would he have been kind of president would he have been if 9-11 had never happened?
So I think the best indicator is how he governed in Texas, where he was very bipartisan.
And what was his first big piece of legislation as president was No Child Left Behind.
So, you know, it's this famous picture of him signing that would take Kennedy over his right shoulder.
I mean, today that would be presented like in a war crimes tribunal.
So then he became a wartime president on 9-11.
So had Romney won, I think, He could have.
He would have led the party.
I mean, I think people have a much better sense of who Mitt Romney is today than they did in the campaign, which is typical.
Campaigns are very difficult places to really show yourself as a full person, weirdly enough.
But.
I think that.
If you look at, you know, after Romney lost, the party went through that so-called autopsy, analyzing what was wrong with the party.
Which, I mean, it's pretty obvious, but I think Reince Priebus, who was chair of the party, gets a lot of credit for that, because it's always hard to be self-critical.
But the conclusions were the party needed to be more diverse, needed to appeal to more women, particularly, you know, women who worked outside the home, single women.
Had to appeal to more non-white voters, all of that.
And it was presented not just as a political necessity, but as a moral mandate.
That if you're going to earn the right to govern this big, confusing, loud, diverse country, you needed to represent it.
So then Trump comes along and it's like, it's like almost an audible sigh of relief.
Like, thank God we don't have to pretend we care about this stuff.
And I think it, It just shows the hollowness of it, which led me to say it was all a lie.
I mean, I think a lot of these, if not most of these, values, what I would have called values, I thought were values, were nothing but marketing slogans and didn't really believe in anything.
And it's not a, you know, it's just not a fun book to write at all.
I mean, I think to work in politics and be able to look back on your career and feel good about it would be a great feeling.
I just can't do that.
Well, I want to talk about that because we were talking about this before we started recording.
I feel like one of the best parts of the book is, I think, actually watching you sort of Dive into the history of the Republican Party and conservative conservativism and the strategies that were playing in the background during your career as you were working on these major, major campaigns.
And, you know, we're pretty familiar with the higher points, of course, Southern strategy.
There's no way to understand the modern Republican Party without understanding Nixon and Buchanan coming along and saying the direction that we have to go with is in order to appeal to disgruntled whites who are uncomfortable with civil rights.
Right.
We've seen those reports.
We've read those things.
And, you know, that, of course, was lashing together This economic and social philosophy of people like Buckley, right?
And a lot of these Ivy League sort of educated economic conservatives with this disgruntled class, of course, handing over the former Confederacy to the Republican Party.
So we understand that that's how it worked.
We understand that that was the strategy to create these coalitions, particularly at the federal level.
What I've always wondered, and what I sort of walked away from this book, is I always wondered what it's like to be in the room and trying to square that circle.
So as you are trying to get politicians elected, you understand the electorate, you understand the direction that the party has gone, the way that it has brought together these certain different, actually Clashing coalitions.
So what is it like to be in the room and to craft that message?
How do you square the circle when you were trying to appeal to that strategy?
Yeah, well, you know, the honest truth is I didn't think about it much.
I was just about the business of winning.
And I'm sort of wired to be very competitive.
You know, I was one of these guys that was always about the taking of bad debt, not the running of it.
The government itself, I knew I would be terrible at it.
It bored me.
So in a lot of ways, I think, you know, you could make the case pretty convincingly that I represented the worst of American politics, which was just about winning.
You know, to the extent I had to justify it, which frankly wasn't very much, I didn't think about it much.
You know, I come from this long family of lawyers and judges, and it was that kind of legal thing that everybody deserves a lawyer.
It doesn't matter if you're guilty.
It's kind of a bullshit excuse, I think, but it's one that I would fall back on if need be.
You know, we talk about Buckley.
I mean, people forget that, you know, Buckley was a Stone Cold racist when he started out.
Just an avowed white supremacist.
Yeah.
I mean, and the second, you know, first book he wrote was God and Man at Yale, which was, you know, one of the ironies is, you know, his dad paid $16,000, a lot of money at the time to promote the book.
And then the second book he wrote, he wrote with his brother-in-law, Brett Bozell, who's still with us.
There was a, you know, spirit of defense of Joe McCarthy.
So there always was that sound.
To the party.
Now, later, Buckley, to his great credit, recanted.
But, you know, the people I tended to work for, I mean, that's the thing.
I mean, I liked everybody I worked for.
And, you know, I had a reputation for working for kind of more moderate side of the party, though I did some real conservative.
I mean, people like Bill Weld in Massachusetts.
It is the first race in 1990 when he got elected governor, the first Republican in Massachusetts.
I mean, we beat a guy in the primary by attacking him for not being pro-choice.
It's one of the few times it's happened.
You know, Tom Ridge in Pennsylvania.
The last Republican governor to be re-elected in Pennsylvania.
So, you know, I never worked for the Jesse Helms types.
I think that race is a A touchstone of all politics in America, maybe all politics everywhere, but certainly in America, certainly more in the South.
Well, maybe not certainly more in the South, but more obviously in the South.
You can probably make a good case that this New York City mayor's race its own now is all about race.
But I never, I mean, I talk in the book about how the first race I did, I have to admit to myself, I played the race card, but in a way that was not Derogatory, if that's the right word.
It was just manipulation of race, I think, is a better way.
I never ran ads.
I just never did that stuff, not consciously.
So I never really thought about it.
it was all about winning.
So, yeah.
One, if you won, you felt good.
And if you lost, you felt bad.
I have to imagine that like, you know, when you're involved in on that side, when you're having these meetings to discuss how you want to run the race, it's you're not going to say we need to scare more white people into voting for us.
Right.
That's never said even in the most racist of areas of the country where they're obviously trying to do that.
Right.
That just sort of must be what you're kind of like applying to what you're talking about as far as it's never been out loud when they're doing these things.
Right.
And, you know, the people I work for were always I think it's, so to say, incredibly frustrated at the inability of the party to attract more particular African Americans.
And it was seen as a great failure.
I mean, you know, 2005, Ken Melman, who was chairman of the party, went before the NAACP and gave a speech apologizing for the Southern strategy.
So, now does that matter?
Because, you know, Trump gets about the same number of African Americans as Bush did.
I think it matters.
I mean, I think what you aspire to matters.
And I think you have to recognize something as a failure to begin to want to change.
Now there's just an acceptance of white grievance as the touchstone of the party.
So we were always deeply frustrated by it.
And we're always trying to appeal to more African Americans.
You know, I write in the book about how there was a while there in the kind of 80s and 90s when there was this opinion that the reason that Republicans couldn't do better with African Americans is that it was a communications issue, a linguistic issue, that these white candidates and white candidates didn't know how to talk to African Americans.
So it spawned this sort of Um, cottage industry of African-American consultants being hired by the Republican Party to come down and talk to campaigns, almost invariably white, and explain to us, like, how to talk to black people, basically.
And it's sort of embarrassing to think about.
A lot of this is embarrassing, but, you know, how we hung on every word.
And it would be like, instead of talking about good jobs, you need to talk about meaningful jobs.
We would all nod and go out and do it.
And of course, it didn't, it didn't make any difference at all.
It was all bullshit.
And it wasn't that African-Americans didn't understand what Republicans were saying.
It was that they did understand what Republicans were saying.
And I think the greatest failure is still a failure, which was how do you reconcile, like, this sort of joke that Reagan would tell, but it was also a reflection of policy.
And we all thought this was somewhere between profound and funny or some mix that the most dangerous words in the English language are, I'm here for the federal government to help.
How do you reconcile that with a group of people, many of them on the lower economic, who see the federal government as one of their great, if not best, hopes to advance in life?
How do you reconcile that in a policy sense?
And the party never accomplished that.
And I think compassionate conservatism was an admission that the party had failed.
And if you remember, when Bush started talking about compassionate conservatism, It upset a lot of people on the right, because they say, OK, you're trying to say that conservatism isn't compassionate.
And Bush's answer to that was basically, yes, that's what I'm saying.
And we have to change.
And if you go back and you read a lot of Bush's speeches, most of which are written by Michael Gerson, who now writes a column for the Washington Post, it is attempting to get at this contradiction.
If you go back and you read Bush's 2000 acceptance speech at the convention, it reads like a document from a lost civilization.
It's like something about the Aztecs, you know, when you cannot believe this is the same party.
It's all about compassion, humility, caring, giving, helping others.
It's like we went from that to Trump.
And if you read Michael Gerson now, he's kept faith.
You know, there is this interesting little group of evangelicals who have totally kept faith, and they are beautiful writers.
Michael Gerson, and Pete Wehner, who writes for the Times in the Atlantic, who was a Bush speechwriter as well.
David French, who writes, you know.
I admire these people so much because they have called out not only conservatism, but the evangelical white community.
So we always thought that there was a way that we could change, that there was a path here, that there was a that there was a path here, that there was a path to make conservatism appealing.
to nonwhite voters.
And, you know, a lot of the focus that Bush had, for a lot of reasons, was on Hispanics.
The whole Tex-Mex thing, he deeply believed in it.
He got up to, I think in the re-elect in 2004, we got up to 42, 43% of Hispanics.
But, you know, he really believed this.
And there is that whole different Hispanic culture in Texas.
I mean, even Cruz does better with Hispanics.
It's more, you know, more people have father-in-laws who are Hispanics or, you know, there's Tex-Mex culture.
It's just more interwoven.
But if you look, as an example, in 1994, Pete Wilson was governor of California, and he decided to run this campaign demonizing immigrants.
And he made this famous ad of illegal immigrants coming over the border, calling over the fence.
And it was, the first sentence in it was, they keep coming.
You know, like it was some invasion.
At the same time, in 94, Bush was running for governor of Texas.
And welcomed the Spaniards.
And tried to teach himself Spanish.
And his first appointment as governor was Tony Garza, Secretary of State.
And it's not entirely apples to apples, but since 94 basically a Republican can't get elected statewide in California.
And a Republican can't lose in Texas.
That's not the only reason, but it has a lot to do with it.
And had Republicans taken the attitude in 94 in California that Bush had, I think that the Republican Party would be thriving in California today.
I know it would be, it's just numeric.
Now the Republican Party is in, bounces between third and second place, and there's really no large public policy decisions that the Republican Party is even remotely relevant to.
Which is how I see, I think, California State Republican Party as the future of the, of It's just a question of how long it's going to take us to get there.
So when people say, what's going to happen to the Republican Party, I go, well, look at California.
You know, the history of trends in California spreading across the country.
It's usually a good microcosm.
It's one of every nine voters.
So, I mean, of Americans 15 years old and younger, the majority are non-white.
So odds are really good they're going to be 18 and non-white.
And that's going to change the Republican Party forever, which is, I think, going to kill the Republican Party, as it is now.
But what I really didn't understand when I wrote this book is the degree to which the Republican Party would become an anti-democratic party.
And that, to me, makes everything else trivial.
I look back at all these ads I made about, like, capital gains tax or health care.
It's like a joke!
I mean, really, we're gonna argue about, like, well, you know, like, 28% capital gains tax is better than 36%.
When you have a party that wants to disenfranchise African-American voters, which is what January 6th was about, that are for democracy when they win and not for democracy when they lose, which means they're not for democracy.
I mean, it's naive.
It's childish.
I didn't understand.
And that's where we are.
Republican parties become an anti-democratic force in America.
And the sooner we get about the business of recognizing this and fighting it, because, I mean, I know these people.
They're not stupid.
They're patient.
They're well-resourced.
And they think they're going to win.
And if we don't join that fight, they are going to win.
And we've never had a moment like this.
You know, we always have this tendency to want to go, this is a 64-year-old Republican.
It's not at all.
Not since 1860 you have a major party in the United States of America that doesn't believe in democracy.
And a simple test for that is, do they believe that Donald Trump legally lost the election?
Which means, do they believe Joe Biden is legally president?
And if you say no to that, and McCarthy's now kind of flirting with saying yes, there's a difference between accepting an election And saying that an election was legitimate.
You can accept a coup.
I accept Putin as president.
But it doesn't mean I accept that it was a democratic process that got him there.
And that's where we are.
And you know, everything you say about this, it's like a pandemic, sounds alarmist at the beginning and inadequate at the end.
And the way I look at this, and we do in the Lincoln Project, is January 6th wasn't the end of an election.
It was the beginning of a long fight to win.
And I'm glad you put it in those terms.
I mean, this is something, in the history of this podcast and the writing that I've been doing, it was really hard to watch the writing on the wall come into fuller and fuller focus as it happened.
And of course, I think that there is an inherent sort of a belief Particularly with America, that there is no possibility that one of the two major parties could ever sink into the abyss, become not just anti-democratic, but violently anti-democratic.
And so I want to talk a little bit about that.
And I want to talk a little bit about the fact that the word conservative doesn't mean anything anymore.
It's gone.
And I actually think it's a misnomer to even begin a conversation talking about liberal versus conservative.
I think that spectrum is Have you held a gun to my head and said, what is the conservative philosophy in America today?
that's just so shootin'. - Yeah, and you know, I actually, I was really glad, and again, this is one of the reasons why, I think your book is a beautiful piece of work, particularly when you get into the sort of, the larger scope of this thing.
And one of the names you brought up was Edmund Burke, who of course was at one point in England, in the 18th century, was a radical reformer, and then became one of the fathers of what we would call modern conservatism.
Right.
This is one of the people that you look back and you're like, this might be where conservatism was, uh, pure, I guess you would say.
Right.
And this was a reaction of course, to the French revolution and, and sort of the, uh, the overwhelming natures of that.
And, you know, I've been reading a lot of Edmund Burke lately.
And while Burke is talking about principles and talking about how principles should align society and morality, and that at times we need to slow down and think about who we are and go through those motions, In the midst of Burke's reflections on the revolution in France, I actually I'm writing this chapter right now in my book, so I have like one of my little yellow legal pads here.
Burke says that the revolution in France is part of a larger conspiracy of enlightened individuals who are looking to quote-unquote the utter abolition under any of its forms of the Christian religion.
So one of the things with conservatism, one of its natural parts is the idea of what you brought up in your book, which is like the United 93 election.
The idea that if conservative forces, when we're putting quotes around that, if they don't win, if they don't do anything necessary in order to hold on to power, we're looking at apocalyptic scenarios.
We're looking at being wiped out.
Now, with a little bit of distance and watching what's happened over the past couple of years and even the last couple of months, you've been in this thing.
What do you see is a possible, not just solution, but what could possibly be a better working definition of this thing?
What could it be and where could it go in order to get away from this?
Where could conservatism go?
Yeah, where could conservatism or another party or something along those lines, something that is not this Republican disease?
I think we don't know is the answer because, you know, there was a time when Republicans like to call themselves a party of ideas.
I mean, say what you will about Elizabeth Warren, she can articulate a very coherent theory of government.
You can argue with it, you can agree with it, you can disagree with it, but she can defend it well.
I don't know anybody can do that for conservatism.
What I know is that you can't negotiate with these people.
You can't compromise with them.
You just have to crush them.
That is the only way.
You have to have more nights like you had on January 5th in Georgia.
You have to beat them.
Now, eventually, I think, There is a market for a center-right party in America.
I think eventually it will emerge.
One that is based more on some principles and not on white grievance.
And not on fantasies like we can cut taxes, decrease the deficit, increase the budget.
But I don't see that happening for a decade at least.
At least a decade.
So, in 2024, no Republican will be nominated for president who will assert that Biden is a legal president.
Probably that's true in 2028.
So, if we win, which you make a good point, we should not assume we're going to win.
This is where American exceptionalism really works against us.
But we're the world's oldest democracy, and it would be naive to think that that's going to continue.
And, you know, one of my sort of touchstones is Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum.
And she talks about this, as the book by the two Harvard professors, How Democracies Die.
And you know, one of the points they make is democracies in the modern world usually don't die by coups, not like in Chile.
It's at the ballot box and in the courtroom.
And that clearly is what Republicans are attempting to pull off.
You can't say they're not going to win.
And all they have to do is win once, probably.
And democracies, we know, will be forever changed.
I know that sounds alarmist, but it's true.
I mean, I'm at a point in my life, I never thought I'd make another ad.
I mean, I, you know, I started working with the Lincoln Project because I really felt a responsibility because I had helped create this.
And, you know, one of the things that drew me to the Republican Party is this idea of personal responsibility.
I don't know where to begin with personal responsibility, except to take personal responsibility.
And, you know, there's a whole trope of books that people write about Washington, like if only they had listened to me.
I couldn't write that because they didn't listen to me.
I mean, I helped elect more Republican governors and senators than anybody at my end of the business over half the country.
So.
I don't know how you walk away from that and just hope it works out.
Well, just as a follow-up, because I would be remiss if we had this conversation and I didn't ask it.
You have done so much in terms of the messaging and so much in terms of the studying of the messaging that we've seen evolve.
I mean, you know, we go from those eras into now this bizarre orgy of violence.
Everybody who runs for a Republican office has to hold a semi-automatic and, you know, pretend as if they're getting ready to mow down their opponents or, you know, storm the Capitol.
How can that messaging be interrupted?
If the person who's been at the machine understands it, how could we possibly overcome that messaging?
Or how do you short-circuit it?
Or how do we take someone like you and make their job a whole hell of a lot harder?
Well, look, I mean, in the Lincoln Project, I think one of the valuable contributions it made was, if you go back to, say, January 1, 2020, there was a real debate A lot of Democrats thought that the way to beat Trump is not to talk about Trump.
And it was not crazy.
I mean, I can argue that round or flat.
The idea being everybody in America has an opinion on Trump.
You're not going to change anybody's opinion on Trump.
You need to talk about issues, as they did in 2018 when they made the race about health care.
In the Lincoln Project, we came out and said, no, Trump, this issue, this race is about nothing but Trump.
And face that, deal with that.
So we went out and hit Trump in the face.
And I think at that time, you know, there was no reason to believe Joe Biden was going to win the primary.
In fact, he was busy losing the primary.
But as it turns out, he won, of course, and his message was not disparate from ours, that this is the soul of the nation.
So I think Defining this for what it is is really critical.
I mean, we say the choice is America or Trump.
The same for Trumpism.
And you have to be unafraid to call it for what it is.
And, you know, that's one of the unique roles we have in the Lincoln presidency.
We don't have any clients.
And everybody says, how come in the Lincoln Project you made all these great ads and videos?
How come Democrats can't do that?
It's really not fair.
Because if you're working for a candidate, you always have to be worried that something you're going to do is going to backfire on that candidate.
In the Lincoln Project, I realized very early, it was great not to have a client.
It was very liberating.
I mean, we would get up and you'd say, what was your process making all these ads?
We didn't have a process.
I mean, me and Rick and Reed and Steve would talk in the morning and Rick would generate, you know, a couple of scripts.
I'd write one or two.
And we would just make the damn things and put them up.
We never did one poll in the Lincoln Project.
Not one focus group.
We knew what we believed.
We didn't need numbers to reaffirm our deeply held convictions.
And I think that there's something that is unique about that role.
We know how to beat these people.
We know these people.
Jason Miller was my intern for Gutsy.
And we know what they're afraid of, and we know how to mock them, and we know how to beat them.
So that's, you just have to fight.
I mean, you don't get in these fights because you think you're going to win.
I think you have to be about the business of laying out the stakes that we're in.
And I think the greatest danger is not to realize the greatest danger.
And I think that people like myself have a certain standing to do this because we helped create this.
So when someone says, when you say Republican Party has become anti-democratic, that's just partisan, that's just you being a Democrat.
It's like, no, I don't think so, man.
I've spent 30 years pointing out faults in the Democratic Party.
It's not about that.
It's because it's true.
And it's not a lot of fun, pointing it out.
But I don't know what else to do.
I'd like to go back a little bit to the notion of where the party could go or where the reasonable people could go and what that looks like.
And the funny thing that we might forget is that in another version of this matrix, we would hate you.
We would not want to talk to you because everything that you stood for and all the policies Republicans had versus Democrats were, you know, we were always fighting, you know, for decades and decades.
So I think that I wonder how it's interesting because we can galvanize around our hatred for Trump, which is nice.
We can kind of figure out a way to communicate and figure that out.
But I wonder if like when you were talking about MAGA, which a lot of times you have references like the 80s, for instance, and Reagan, you know, I'm deeply uneasy having studied the history now from this perspective of like the Reagan and Tip O'Neill way of governing.
So do you feel like that would be what people on the Republican side would be looking to kind of get back towards?
Well, look, I don't think there is a civil war in the Republican Party.
I think Donald Trump is what the Republican Party wants.
I think the only divisions in the Republican Party are over power and money.
The difference between Mitch McConnell and, say, Josh Holmes, his Roger Stone, and Trump and Jared or Stephen Miller or somebody, it's not ideology.
It's power and money.
So, you know, they just signed this group of Republicans, signed whatever, forget what they call it, last week, you know, calling if the Republican Party doesn't change, we'll leave the party or something.
Listen, I think that's great if they want to take that attitude.
To me, it's a rhetorical question.
You're not going to reform this party.
You have to burn it to the ground.
And the only thing they understand is fear and defeat.
You just have to get about the business of beating them.
But, you know, I have a lot of people in the Democratic Party, you know, that say to me, like, why should we trust you?
You helped create it.
And I always say, like, yeah, you probably shouldn't.
I understand that.
And, you know, they say, why should we like you?
And I go, you probably shouldn't.
But the one thing we are is useful.
And I'm OK with just being useful.
I don't need to be liked.
I just want the ability to fight and to be part of this.
And I think that that, that's the responsibility we have, at least the responsibility I feel.
I mean, there's some stuff that, you know, I'm good at, but we're good at.
Now, probably in, you know, A just universe, those tools wouldn't be needed.
But you know, we're really good at this.
And we have a choice.
We have three choices, basically.
Be for Trumpism, we're not going to do that.
Do nothing, which I have a lot of friends of that.
Or fight.
So I'll happily join with Bernie Sanders in this fight.
And, you know, I'll fight with anybody who, with anybody, and all I ask is a chance to fight.
And this idea that, like in the Lincoln Project, we're going to change the Democratic Party or something, it's so ridiculous.
I mean, the Democratic Party's like 80, Biden just got, what, 81 million votes?
And, you know, control three, you know, Congress, Senate, and the White House, you're worried about like four or five No, I don't think so.
So it's the nature of war, alliances.
And I think one of the greatest dangers for the Democratic Party is if they start applying all these purity tests.
Because the other side isn't going to do that.
I mean, people like Cruz, Holly, they'd be Trotskyites if they thought they'd get in power.
They don't have any ideology.
So, I mean, you know, I'm not a guy to come to for a lot of optimism, because I look at it pretty realistically.
Can I follow up on that for one second?
Because, you know, I kind of started to think about a term I was using is we're not a democracy.
I think it's more of like a capitalistic republic.
And if you look at a Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, the crazier things that she says, the more money she raises.
And I think you'd be a fool.
Let's say your position, you're advising her.
You couldn't tell her, well, stop saying the crazy stuff because, you know, we won't make any more money that way.
So it's almost like, is that what our democracy is?
Well, especially when there are consequences now.
There used to be consequences.
You would be drummed out of polite society and political circles, but now there is no downside to making your marketing niche showing up at a colleague's door and harassing them.
Yeah.
Well, there's always been a market for hate in America.
I mean, look at Father Coughlin in the 30s, and that was a monetized hate.
There's a lot of, you know, Rush Limbaugh that was monetized hate.
You know, you go back to basically the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and ADA made it possible for a lot of this.
So I don't think that it's that what Marjorie Taylor Greene does is that unique.
I mean, well, it's the John Birch Society, but monetized tape.
It was quite an industry.
The difference is it's been embraced by a major party.
So you go back to the John Birch Society, you can say it was expedient.
Wasn't done for the best reasons, or you can argue it was done for the best reasons, but the Republican Party made the decision in the 60s to drive the John Birch Society out of the party.
They haven't made that decision.
They're trying to drive Liz Cheney out of the party.
That's the difference.
It's that in our system, parties have to form a sort of circuit breaker.
And the Republican Party never pulled the circuit breaker.
And the most chilling book that I read when I was writing It Was All a Lie are the memoirs of Franz von Papen, who was the German aristocrat, the Prussian aristocrat, who did really more than anybody else to usher Hitler into power.
So he wrote his memoirs in 53, right?
You can actually get it on Kindle, amazingly enough.
I have no idea why.
So, 53, right?
So, like, things have kind of gone sideways a little, right?
Since, like, 36.
I mean, 100 million people dead.
He's still justifying it.
And he justifies it because you have to understand, those of us who were in power, the Prussian aristocrats, we had nothing in common with the working person in Germany.
And the great appeal to them was communism, Bolshevism.
And we needed someone like Hitler who could speak to these people or Germany would have become Bolshevist.
So yeah, it didn't exactly work out that great, but our instincts were good, therefore we can.
And this is what a lot of these Republicans think about Trump.
And it never works.
Never, never, never, never works.
But they'll still justify it.
I mean, I look at the failure of Republicans to convict Trump is going to go down as the Munich Accord of our time.
Exact parallel.
The difference is Neville Chamberlain was an honorable man who really was trying to prevent war, naively, but McConnell's not a decent man.
He doesn't believe in anything except power.
So I think in the McConnell-Chamberlain comparison, Chamberlain comes out ahead.
But that's what this is.
That's what this moment is.
And you can never appease this.
It's what the Republican Party used to say about terrorism.
You can't negotiate it with blah, blah, blah.
Oh, it's Trump, but he's a democratic terrorist.
And they took the attitude they were trying to appease him.
You know, it's one of the ironies here.
All the stuff that the party said that it believed turned out it didn't.
But what it said was right.
Character is destiny.
Personal responsibility is important.
Russia is, totalitarian governments are a threat, or an attack on personal liberty.
They just don't believe any of it.
So now we're the anti-personal responsibility, the pro-Putin party, the character doesn't matter.
I mean, it's extraordinary.
Talking about it in the book, I think you really have to look to the Communist Party, the Soviet Union as a party, to find such a disconnect between what a party said and what it believed in and what it really believed in.
I mean, it just collapsed in communism.
If you look at Chernobyl, that's kind of where the Republican Party is.
We're just going to say this stuff.
We know it's not true.
We know what the radiation meters really say, but we're just going to say it's not that.
And it's all about a battle of truth.
I think that's a really apt comparison to when I'm looking at this history, I'm seeing that clash between communism and American capitalism during the Cold War.
And it feels like both sides, it was a win at all costs, like you were talking about earlier.
It's pull out all stops.
It doesn't matter whether or not we're actually adhering to even the economic principles.
I'd have to think about it.
It doesn't matter if the radiation's up.
It doesn't matter if a nuclear missile explodes in a silo, whether we're overthrowing another country's democracy.
Yeah, I think what we're living in right now is very much a consequence of the Cold War in which there is no winner.
Well, I don't know.
I'd have to think about it.
I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that I'm always struck by is it used to be conservatives talked about the power of words.
and And we'd say, like with Reagan, you know, that words can change the world.
You can stand in front of the Berlin Wall and say, Mr. Gorbachev threw down this wall and it has impact.
Now they say, well, words, like Trump, it's just words.
What does it matter?
So I think one of the depressing realities about the Trump era is the lack, the collapse of moral authority in the United States.
And I mean, we've seen this before, but never to this extent.
During the Trump years, America certainly wasn't the leader of the free world.
Germany was.
And thank God Germany was there.
But, you know, America is the only country that's founded on an idea.
When that idea dies, the country dies.
And that's what is under assault now.
The very concept of what it means to be an American.
And, you know, are we a nation of elements?
These fundamental things that we always sort of took as truths, that there was truth.
Now there's just alternative facts.
Are we a country where we believe higher education is a positive, or is higher education a conversion therapy to socialism?
This is a conservative position, espoused by some of the best-educated people in the world.
Ivy League-educated elites?
Kennedy and Louisiana.
I mean, Kennedy went not only to Oxford, but to Magdalen College at Oxford, which has its private deer park, and you have a private servant called a scout, where C.S.
Lewis taught.
where the Rolling Stones played at parties.
That's Marvin.
But, you know, we've seen this before.
I mean, there's a lot of parallels to the Red Guard, I think.
Khmer Rouge.
Eventually, it burns itself out.
When you base a principle that education is bad, there's usually a limited time to it because ultimately bet on people who are educated.
They win.
So.
But how long is that time?
I don't know.
Well, speaking of the Red Scare and how the Republicans spent decades and decades scaring everybody in the country about that, were you as surprised as I was that the notion of the Russians attacking our elections had no resonance with the right at all?
Nothing in the cockles were, you know, there's no alarm bells even distantly in the deep recesses of someone's remembrance of the Soviet Union.
Was it surprising to you that it just seemed to not have any effect on them at all?
Well, look, you know, I worked for Mitt Romney, who was attacked by the right, well, by the left, by Obama, when he said that Russia was the greatest threat to America.
He was right.
You know, it was ridiculed by President Obama.
And I get it, it's followed, you know, it's this Cold War.
Romney was, I mean, go back and look at that.
Romney was absolutely right.
And he saw the world as it was, not as we wanted it to be.
I you have to work in campaigns, democratically.
The idea that there are over 100 contacts between Russians and the Trump campaign in 2016.
How extraordinary.
I mean, it literally is like unimaginable to me that they didn't go to the FBI.
I mean, it's just unimaginable.
And the depth of it has never come out.
I mean, I did a lot of things in politics, but I never woke up in the morning and worked on the same side knowingly as Russian agents.
And that's what they did in the Trump campaign.
There wasn't a Russian hoax.
There was complete cooperation.
Between the Trump campaign and Russians.
And fascinatingly, a lot of what the Russians did, you know, is try to execute the same strategy that basically was the Southern strategy.
try to divide Democratic Party, try to divide African Americans against African Americans.
You're going to tell me that they weren't cheering in the Kremlin when domestic terrorists attacked the Capitol on January 6th?
Of course.
Of course.
These are dangerous people, right?
And part of the danger is our reluctance to admit how dangerous they are.
You know, normal people, most of us are normal, have this difficulty imagining abnormal people.
We even have a language about it, you know, like they'll revert to normalcy, they'll come to their senses.
But they're not.
They're very happy.
This is how they see the world.
They don't want democracy.
They don't want to live in a pluralistic country where they can lose.
And that's the fundamental difference.
And you can't You can't negotiate with that.
Yeah, you can't negotiate with people who think they're fending off the apocalypse.
It just doesn't work.
If you read, like, the Flight 93 manifesto, you know, it's always a bad sign when someone writes something anonymously.
And I feel that way about the stuff that Miles Taylor wrote.
He should have stepped out himself, you know.
It's all about race.
I mean, if you read that, it's an extraordinarily racist piece of writing.
Extraordinarily.
And he talks about, you know, these Muslim hordes.
So.
At the root of this, mostly it is race.
And religion.
But religion is part of race here.
Well, Stuart, we just want to say thank you again for joining us.
For those who are listening, we've been talking with Stuart Stevens, a longtime media strategist for the Grand Ole Party and the author of a really incredible book, It Was All A Lie, which, as I keep saying, I think is one of the Thanks, man.
most important dives into the actual history of the Republican Party and modern American politics.
And I just want to say thank you so much for writing that and taking responsibility for all this and fighting the good fight.
I mean, I think what you said about having to call this what it is, is the most important thing.
And I'm glad that you're doing that.
Thanks, man.
Here's to better days ahead.
All right.
You've just listened to our exclusive interview with Stuart Stevens, the longtime Republican media strategist, ad maker on multiple GOP presidential runs, and the author, most importantly, of the book.
It was all a lie, which, Nick, I think is a really incredible document, to be honest.
Yeah, it was I mean, I got it a few months ago and I had started to devour it because it was like, finally, some validation to all the things that we it was clear what what the analysis we were giving and it was clear what was going on.
But to hear it verbatim, practically, was very validating.
And I don't want to say reassuring because he pointed painted a very sad picture to where we are.
But certainly, just to kind of know and own it is something worth valuable.
Well, and it's really important to point out that so much of politics is spent in what I guess some people go ahead and term game theory, right?
Like, what's going on on the other side?
You can collect the evidence, put it together, combine it into a collage that looks something like reality.
I mean, and I want to point out, like, not to pat ourselves on the back, but the conversation that we just had.
Which I think was really cool and illuminating.
Basically showed that all of the theories that we have had in terms of what has happened with the American right over the past few decades has been accurate, has been pointing out the win-at-all-cost mentality, this lashing together of the alliances.
And on top of that, that the situation is as dire as many of us have been yelling about over the past couple of years.
I think that the book and the interview are important artifacts.
I mean, to really put together that collage and that idea.
And I really want to be friends with the Lincoln Project, Jared.
I really do.
I don't know if you want to help me with that or not, but I don't know.
You know what I really appreciated about what Stuart said there?
Obviously, there are problems with the Lincoln Project, and there are reasons to be concerned.
What I really appreciated in what he said is, I'm not looking to have friends.
Like, maybe you shouldn't trust me, but we have a responsibility to do damage to the monster that we helped to create.
That, to me, is honest.
That, to me, is a mature, nuanced way to actually talk about what they're doing.
That gives me a modicum of hope in terms of the messaging.
I think he's exactly right.
They understand what makes these people tick and that these people have glass jaws.
And if they're able to land some punches, they're able to do some damage, they're able to make amends for some of the things that they've done, I am all for that.
And I really enjoy, again, that he says, you probably shouldn't trust me, which, to me, makes me feel... Right.
I mean, listen, we joined with the Russians to defeat the Nazis, right?
So... And then we got the Nazis on our side to go after the Russians.
Right.
And then we had the Russians turn and went after us, too.
And now we have the Russians who are working with white supremacist groups in America to overthrow American democracy.
It's a wild, wild world out there.
And we just want to say thank you again for the support and the patronage for people who want to support the podcast and want access to our additional show every week, The Weekender.
Just last week, we did a live show where we got to hang out with our listeners and take their questions.
Again, The Weekender is coming out on Fridays.
All you have to do is go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
We depend on your support.
That way we can have actual conversations and not be limited by ads and editorial oversight.
So we thank you so much for the help.
We will be back later this week with that Patreon-exclusive Weekender edition.
A lot to chew on, Nick.
Until next time, you can find Nick, you can hear me on this image, you can find me at J.Y.
