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

Lofgren explained perfectly the conditions that made a Donald Trump not a freak by-product of a flawed Electoral College but an inevitable next step on the path chosen by Republicans: The GOP has been gradually shedding its status as a broad coalition party and has started demanding litmus tests on fiscal, social, and foreign policy issues. There were signposts on the road ahead—the Gingrich revolution of 1995, the Clinton impeachment circus—but things got much worse after September 11, with the massive infringements of civil liberties that followed and the bluster and bravado that preceded the invasion of Iraq. By the 2010 midterm election the party had collectively lost its mind. The evidence is all around us: the debt ceiling debacle, the kamikaze politics over the payroll tax cut extension, the freak show of the Republican presidential debates.

Mike Lofgren had a close view of the corruption of our campaign finance system: The police and petty bureaucrats in many Third World countries are openly corrupt and will take bribes in order to augment their miserable salaries. In the United States it is relatively difficult to bribe a cop to get out of a traffic ticket or to slip money to a DMV functionary to get preferential treatment. You need to go higher up the governmental food chain in order to practice corruption successfully. But you can find bribery and corruption just about anytime, year-round, in Washington. It is called a fund-raiser, when a congress member’s campaign committee rents a room in a restaurant and invites a hundred or so of his or her closest friends from the lobbying shops on K Street, from industry, and from the trade associations. I’ve been to a few of these over the years and often wondered whether any of the Gucci-shod participants in their two-thousand-dollar suits and monogrammed shirts imagined that they were righteously engaged in the constitutional practice of petitioning for the redress of grievances as they handed over their checks before tucking into the hors d’oeuvres.16

The ending of the federal funding system is, in my view, one of the most negative long-term legacies of the Obama administration.

I found myself darkly joking that it was crazy to compare 2018 to 1932 when it was so obviously 1934. But Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write in How Democracies Die, During the Cold War, coups d’état accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic breakdowns.

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. Published in 1952, the Memoirs of Franz von Papen is a study in self-deception by an intelligent man who knows he made terrible mistakes with horrific consequences but is still trying to explain that his choices were the best of bad ones available.

“The final test.” This is the language used to recruit suicide bombers, not a rational discussion of political choices in a civil society. The reality 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 they know is wrong is in pursuit of some higher good. The writer of “The Flight 93 Election” turned out to be not a heroic warrior like his pen name but a former speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani named Michael Anton, proving that both boss and staffer can compete side by side in the humiliation derby of the Trump era. In classic Donald Trump style, Anton was rewarded with a White House job.

When Trump has left, it is safe to say the ranks of the “Good Republicans” who maintain they really didn’t know the extent of what Trump did will make Washington feel a lot like 1946 Berlin.

The Constitution means as much to Donald Trump as the rules of golf, a game at which he routinely cheats.

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.

Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, came to power on the same path: from the inside, via elections or alliances with powerful political figures. In each instance, elites believed the invitation to power would contain the outsider, leading to a restoration of control by mainstream politicians. But their plans backfired. A lethal mix of ambition, fear, and miscalculation conspired to lead them to the same fateful mistake: willingly handing over the keys of power to an autocrat-in-the-making.25

These people don’t hate America, but they are weak men and women who decided long ago their self-worth was determined by winning elections.

No one knows, of course, but I suspect they are knowingly or unknowingly destroying the value of center-right government for generations to come. And that would be under the best-case circumstances. This was their moment to stand for something, and they chose to stand for reelection. Let us remember.

These trends have been evident for over two decades, and as someone who has sat in the room for five presidential campaigns and tried to figure out how to get a Republican candidate over the 270 mark, the math has been increasingly oppressive.

Republicans were taking steps to change the electoral math by making it harder for nonwhites to vote. In this, they were continuing a long tradition of efforts by powerful white politicians to remain in power by suppressing votes.

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.

The Pat Buchanan–Kevin Phillips memo to President Nixon referenced in chapter 1 is the original document of what became the very successful efforts by Republicans to convert white Democratic voters in the South into Republicans.

I’ve worked in campaigns since 1978, and I don’t know of a single race in which illegal voters were remotely a factor. Does some illegal voting happen? Sure, just as elephantiasis does occur in America. But should elephantiasis be the focus of the National Institutes of Health instead of cancer? Probably not.

Carol Anderson describes it accurately in One Person, No Vote: The devices the Republicans used are variations on a theme going back more than 150 years. They target the socioeconomic characteristics of a people (poverty, lack of mobility, illiteracy, etc.) and then soak the new laws in “racially neutral justifications—such as administrative efficiency” or “fiscal responsibility”—to cover the discriminatory intent. Republican lawmakers then act aggrieved, shocked, and wounded that anyone would question their stated purpose for excluding millions of American citizens from the ballot box.12

The Politics of Voter Suppression, Tova Wang draws a similar conclusion: Until the second half of the twentieth century, the Democrats were the main culprits. Over the past fifty years, however, Republicans have most frequently and deftly employed election law and procedures to help their party win elections. As the country remains ideologically divided, and outcomes of local, some statewide, and presidential elections have the potential to be close, contemporary Republicans have made it a central part of their election strategy to enact laws and call for practices that will reduce turnout among those who tend to vote Democratic, at least at the margins—where elections can often be won or lost.13

Watching the Republican Party is like watching a friend drink himself to death. There’s a mix of sadness and anger tinged by a bit of sympathy for the misery he tries to hide. But alcoholism is a disease, and political cowardice is just what it looks like: weakness and opportunism mixed with fear and self-loathing.

A few held firm, but in a nation that claims to value heroism under battle, the Armies of the Right fled in terror from…a tweet.

This was my tribe. I did not think them perfect; no man may be a hero to his valet or political consultant. I never pretended to see even glimmers of greatness in most of them, but I did hold out for an assumption of decency. They have proven me wrong, and the sadness I feel is difficult to express.

While they worked through the tedious process of government, trying to make a difference on the edges, I left that hard work to others and spent my non-campaign time roaming the globe chasing snow, in pursuit of athletic challenges with no meaning. They would argue they did the hard work and I was over-rewarded for playing a bit part in our political drama. That’s all true.

In today’s Republican Party, a George W. Bush would be crushed by a Sean Hannity, whose growing body and seemingly enlarging head respond to lies like Pinocchio’s nose.

As the Democratic Party drifts more leftward, there is an urgent need for a center-right party to argue for a different vision and governing philosophy. But how can the party that gave us Donald Trump be a legitimate voice for conservatism as a positive force? Without moral legitimacy, a center-right party becomes a soufflé of grievances and anger that exists to settle scores, not solve problems.

What the Republican Party must realize is that it needs America more than America needs the party. And the America it needs is the one that is 320 million Americans and growing, a country of immigrants and less white every day: the real America, not the gauzy Shangri-La of suburban bliss that never existed. I’d like to say I believe the party I spent so many years fighting for could rise to that challenge. But that would be a lie, and there have been too many lies for too long.