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

by Stuart Stevens

There is a direct line between the rising of the national debt and the increased influence of Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform.

Today more than forty-four million Americans were born in another country, the highest percentage since 1910.

few of those are coming from Scandinavia, and even fewer are models from eastern Europe,

The largest group is Mexicans, and the second large...

Non-Mexican South Americans are the third...

The power a small group of right-wing zealots has over the Republican Party will continue until one of two events occurs: either a critical mass of Republican

politicians stands together and stands up to their power, or the party changes such that it is not a white party but a party that looks more like America.

For most of the 2016 general election, Trump was losing college-educated voters (which is very close to saying “college-educated white Republican voters”). No Republican nominee had lost this group in modern history.

it does seem clear that the media coverage of Trump was more as a phenomenon or, in the beginning, a joke than as a potential presidential candidate.

That a national party once largely defined by its seriousness of intent in international affairs would be led by a man who not only was ignorant of the basics of national security but was willfully and unflinchingly proud of his ignorance is just one more milepost marking the journey of Republicans on their way to the junkyard of history.

It seemed obvious that Trump as president would continue to be the same badly damaged, semiliterate, incurious, and maladjusted oddball he had always been.

the race to extremes makes it difficult to discuss calmly and rationally the threat Donald Trump and the collapse of any moral center in the Republican Party present

to our democratic process.

How Democracies Die,

During the Cold War, coups d’état accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic breakdowns.

In all these cases, democracy dissolved in spectacular fashion, through military power and coercion.

But there is another way

Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very ...

More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.

If I could make every Republican elected official read one book, it would be the memoirs of Papen, the aristocratic chancellor of Germany who dissolved the German parliament and enabled Adolf Hitler to rise to power.

Memoirs of Franz von Papen

a study in self-deception by an intelligent man who knows he made terrible mistakes w...

This is

a cautionary warning on the collapse of norms in a society.

Legitimizing hate is like a war: it is easier to begin than to stop.

“The Flight 93 Election”

a plea for conservatives who were reluctant to back Donald Trump to put their concerns aside because the alternative was so dangerous it posed an existential threat to the nation:

“The Flight 93 Election” makes the same case that the choice is so bleak there is no choice:

“The final test.”

This is the language used to recruit suicide bombers, not a rational discussion of political choices in a civil society.

that so many Republicans feel the need to justify their support of Trump with these apocalyptic constructs is a telling indication of their desperate contortions to prove that doing what th...

The writer of “The Flight 9...

a former speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani named...

history will rest

with those like Anton and the leaders of the Republican Party who failed a fundamental test of civic decency.

Collectively, they are the indolent children of inherited wealth, removed by generations from those who last made the fortune—the Greatest Generation—and

the Trump presidency

a white nationalist who ran on a Muslim ban and calls Mexicans rapists, a man who has no sense of truth and little of right and wrong, a man who wrote hush-money checks for a porn star in the Oval Office is president, but, hey, we cut marginal tax rates for corporations.

In How Democracies Die,

the authors described

a set of four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one.

We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game,

2) denies the legitimacy of...

3) tolerates or encourage...

4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, ...

Republicans in the Donald Trump era are guilty of all four. A review:

the first president in modern history to refuse to release his tax returns (after promising repeatedly to do so);

praised a congressman for assaulting a reporter;

attacked the foundations of the American criminal justice system at its highest levels with attacks on the Ju...

encourages staffers to break laws both large and small, from refusing to respond to congressional subpoe...