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

by Stuart Stevens

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. This no doubt explains in part the alacrity with which the party abandoned every principle laid out in the autopsy once Donald Trump emerged as a dominant figure in the primary. How do you go from dedicating a political party to expansion and inclusiveness and two years later rally around a man who calls Mexicans “rapists” and called for a religious test to enter the United States? It’s easy if you view an avowed commitment to inclusion as merely a political necessity and nothing more. For decades, conservatives attacked liberals for living by “situational ethics,” but the ease with which Republican leaders abandoned any pretense of being more than a whites-only party is the ultimate situational ethic. It wasn’t the morality of inclusion driving the call to expand the party; it was the political necessity. With Trump’s victory in 2016, the party seemed to breathe a sigh of relief that no longer did it need to pretend that it must reach out more to nonwhite voters. In the American political system, the major political parties should serve a “circuit breaker” function to deny the exploitation of the darkest side of our politics. The Republican