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

by Stuart Stevens

The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, “When I came to Washington in the early 1980s, the GOP was the ‘party of ideas’ and seemed on the verge of becoming the dominant political factor on the American scene.”13 He summed up the change embodied in the insanity of the government shutdown in 2011 over the passage of a simple bill to extend the national debt ceiling and stop the government from default: To those millions of Americans who watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of summer 2011’s debt-ceiling extension crisis, it might have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, like any political party on Earth, the GOP has always had its share of crackpots, such as Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer in past Congresses. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital core today: Eric Cantor, Steve King, Michele Bachmann, Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, and Allen West. The Congressional Directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.14