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

by Stuart Stevens

Because you have to look at what you’re doing first. You have to care about what you’re doing. If you have a society where all we care about is that the other side is bad, and therefore we don’t have to do the right thing, that society will break down, and you will have no liberty.

The Republican Party is held aloft by a large, powerful, and ever-growing industry of deceit. The purpose of much of conservative media is to lie to their audience. It is fitting that at the heart of the Trump presidency itself is a lie: Almost every Republican elected official in Washington knows Donald Trump is unfit to be president.

My dad was in the FBI when Hoover ordered the roundup of Asian Americans. He hated it and quit, joined the navy, and spent the next three years fighting in the South Pacific. Like so many, he didn’t talk a lot about the war. But when it came to leaving the FBI, he told me once, “You can always say no.” And that’s my question to all those Republicans who are more worried about defending Donald Trump than defending America: Is this why you went into politics? Is this why you put up with all the bullshit and stupidity that is integral to our political system, so you can be on the same side as the Russians? You can always say no. I so wish Republican leaders would try it.

The most distinguishing characteristic of the current national Republican Party is cowardice. The base price of admission is a willingness to accept that an unstable, pathological liar leads it and pretend otherwise. This means the party demands dishonesty as a trait of membership—unless you are a rare sociopath who defends pathological lying.

Parties and elected officials don’t suddenly wake up one day and decide to betray avowed principles. It’s a gradual process of surrendering little bits of your soul and values while convincing yourself it is for a greater good. Rationalization is like a lot of things in life: the more you do it, the easier it becomes. The story of Faust is not just that Mephistopheles takes your soul; he also doesn’t deliver on what he promised. Cowardice, like courage, is contagious, and to be surrounded by cowards is to feel comforted in the knowledge that not only are there others like you but there is probably someone worse.

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 of these disturbed and broken men have become dominant figures. Their unifying thread is anger at a world that has treated them far more generously than they deserved.

The evidence points to a major partisan asymmetry in polarization. Despite the widespread belief that both parties have moved to the extremes, the movement of the Republican Party to the right accounts for most of the divergence between the two parties. Since the 1970s, each new cohort of Republican legislators has taken more conservative positions on legislation than the cohorts before them. That is not true of Democratic legislators.11

high-profile conservatives who believed that Trump was a disaster for the party and it would be better to lose one election than lose the moral mandate of a conservative movement.

Like the inability to imagine Donald Trump winning, there is a great failure of imagination to contemplate the damage done to American civil society by Trump’s presidency and the degradation of any moral authority of a center-right party.

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 opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.19

Trump has launched an assault on the First Amendment unlike any president in history, threatening to use the power of the government to attack media he dislikes, from The Washington Post to CNN, as “the enemy of the people.”

The assumption that the post-Trump American political system will revert to standards of normalcy that existed before Trump is yet another excuse Republicans use to justify their support of him. It’s why Republicans are so desperate to assert that Trump has supported policy that any Republican president would have supported.

They tell themselves that the alternative is unacceptable: that if they don’t support and encourage a man who assaults women and lies instinctively, they will soon find themselves facing the red armies of socialism and the country will start to look like…Sweden. There is nothing new or particularly interesting about this deceit. Republicans are linked to a vast life-support system of lies, terrified that the truth will unplug the machine.

One-in-ten eligible voters in the 2020 election will have been born outside the U.S., the highest share since at least 1970.1

Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which made Jim Crow voter-suppression laws illegal, was the defining moment for the modern Republican Party. That year 93 percent of blacks voted for Lyndon Johnson, and the die was cast that has led the Republican Party to evolve into the predominantly white party it is today.

But voter suppression doesn’t need to rely on race-based formulas to work. The modern political calculation of suppressing non-Republican voters is not complicated. Those at the lower end of the economic spectrum are less likely to vote Republican. And those same people are less likely to have access to the basic tools of the middle class that most of us take for granted—like easy access to a polling place or government-issued ID. Implementing stringent voter-ID laws and reducing the number of polling places and/or reducing early-voter and vote-by-mail options disproportionately target voters who are less likely to be Republicans.

But the looming threat of some socialist takeover of America or Sharia law becoming the new Supreme Court standard is all nonsense. And most Republican elected officials know it’s nonsense, just as they know Donald Trump is an unqualified idiot. But what many Republican politicians actually do believe is that they represent the “real” America, and they are somewhere from uncomfortable to frightened by America’s changing landscape.

The common thread is fear. Fear of change, fear of the unknown, fear of losing power while forgetting the purpose of power. Fear is at the heart of most conspiracy theories, and the current Republican Party is driven by conspiracy theories, a result of years of nutty radio mixed with nutty internet supercharged by a nutty president.

Labeling any media you don’t like as “fake news” is an all-encompassing conspiracy theory that makes truth an enemy. Same goes with denouncing anyone in government who might stand in the way of an authoritarian president as a member of the shadowy “Deep State.” The Trump/right-wing conspiracies have a common thread of labeling truth a conspiracy.

Republicans are increasingly uneasy in a world of change. That uniquely American sense of optimism that was once claimed by both Democrats and Republicans has been replaced with a dark foreboding of what lies ahead for a threatened America. No longer is to be born in America to win life’s lottery and know you are among the luckiest on earth; in the Trump Republican view, Americans are suckers, victims, the mark for a hostile world. Everyone is out to get America, from the Canadians to the Chinese. Anger has replaced gratitude.

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. The GOP, therefore, enacted a range of undemocratic and desperate measures to block the access of African American, Latino, and other minority voters to the ballot box. Using a series of voter suppression tactics, the GOP harassed, obstructed, frustrated, and purged American citizens from having a say in their own democracy.19

The Republican Party will signal that it is a healthy, growing political party when it embraces efforts to make it easier to register and vote for all segments of the electorate, not just Republicans and likely Republicans. What does it say about a party that it opposes automatically registering every voter at age eighteen or opposes efforts to register voters automatically when they receive or renew a driver’s license?

Demographic groups that preferred Trump were three times as likely to be a bigger part of the voter pool than nonvoters. Among groups that preferred Clinton, they were about 50 percent more likely to be a bigger part of the nonvoting community.20

Democrats believe the government should register people to vote. Republicans believe people have an individual responsibility to vote.21

The same people who have no problem mandating reproductive choices for women cite personal freedom as an opposition to registering voters. Nonsense. Republicans in Oregon don’t want to make it easier for those who are less likely to vote for Republicans to participate in the system.

But 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.

Even if Donald Trump loses in 2020, the Republican Party has legitimized bigotry and hate as an organizing principle for a major political party in a country with a unique role in the world.

Donald Trump did not change the Republican Party as much as he gave the party permission to reveal its true self. The Lindsey Grahams of the world have not changed. We are only now seeing who they always were, freed from any need to pretend.

The Republican Party has many weapons it will use to fight to remain in power. But it seems clear that embracing change will not be among them. Even though the party has all but abandoned any pretense of a moral justification for its existence except to defeat Democrats, it remains the official party of a white governing class in America, and with that comes tremendous money and power that will be employed to defend the party.

A political party without a higher purpose is nothing more than a cartel, a syndicate. No one asks what is the greater good OPEC is trying to achieve. Its purpose is to sell oil at the highest prices possible. So it is with today’s Republican Party. It is a cartel that exists to elect Republicans. There is no organized, coherent purpose other than the acquisition and maintenance of power.