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

by Stuart Stevens

working in Republican politics, I have heard variations on this theme countless times, referring to black voters, Hispanic voters, Asian voters—any nonwhite voters: they care about the same issues as white voters. This is one of those insidious half-truths that conceal a deeper, more important truth. Yes, pretty much all voters do care about jobs. But to say a white college-educated male or female cared about jobs in the same way as an African American is delusional. It was akin to saying that everyone would like not to get shot and that this truth means the same to a white suburban high school student in Des Moines as it does to a black teenager in Chicago’s K-Town. It was a truth asserted with such disregard for specifics that it became a building block of a larger falsehood. Feed generations of Republicans these easily digestible bromides, and it isn’t hard to understand the failure of Republicans to grasp the meaning of Black Lives Matter. The cry “Don’t all lives matter?” is just another variation on the assumption that jobs mean the same to all voters.