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

by Stuart Stevens

I believed. That’s where it all started to go wrong.

All of these immutable truths turned out to be mere marketing slogans.

What I missed was one simple reality: it was all a lie.

Blame me when you look around and see a dysfunctional political system and a Republican Party that has gone insane.

It is a strange, melancholy feeling to turn sixty-five and realize that what you have spent a good portion of your life working for and toward was not only meritless but also destructive.

One is to say that Trump isn’t a real Republican. The other is to say he is just an “unconventional president” and focus on his policies. Both are wrong.

There is nothing strange or unexpected about Donald Trump. He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party became over the last fifty or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.

the party wasn’t just a white grievance party; there was still a big tent; the other guys were worse. Mostly, though, I just didn’t think about it.

I spent 2016 predicting that Donald Trump would not win because I refused to believe what Donald Trump proved about Republicans, about myself, could be true.

Hold Donald Trump up to the mirror and that bulging, grotesque orange face is today’s Republican Party.

The truth is that Trump brought it all into clarity and made the pretending impossible.

Yes, it was all a lie. But this is the truth.

race was the key in which much of American politics and certainly all of southern politics was played.

the Democratic candidate needed 90-plus percent of black votes to win. If a significant portion voted for a third party, the Republican would win.

Since 1964, Republicans have learned that they will have little success in appealing to black voters.

At the root of it is a deep condescension that they—the de facto White Party of America—know what is best for black folks, and it’s unfortunate these black folks don’t seem to get it but, you know, they are different and we have to talk to them in a language they can understand.

Since 1964, black voters have heard the Republican Party with exquisite clarity; more important, they have seen what Republicans are doing once in office.

“The GOP’s Rise as ‘the White Man’s Party’ ” in Dog...

“But unless you change the way you talk about jobs, black folk just won’t hear your message.”

The majority of all welfare goes to white Americans and always has, but the specificity of a woman in Chicago makes the racial appeal clear.

but the totality of the place and what he said—and didn’t say—was a direct racist appeal to white Mississippi voters.

Even given the choice of supporting an alleged child molester with a troubled, to say the least, history on race or a moderate Democrat, 68 percent of white Alabama voters stuck with the alleged child molester.

In my tribe there is a general sense of dismay but an understandable reluctance among most to blame the modern evolution of the party as a white party.

The Clinton slogan “A different kind of Democrat” was a direct message to the white voters who had abandoned the party.

The modern Democratic Party has fought for civil rights and believes government has a moral role in helping to create racial equality in America. The modern Republican Party has fought civil rights and is very hesitant to assert government has a role in equality of any sort, including racial.

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This group was heralded as saving the Republican Party after the disaster of Goldwater in 1964. With the exception of Reagan, all defined themselves as moderate problem solvers eager to work with Democrats. None, absent Reagan, considered themselves conservative ideologues.

That Republican Party as a national institution is dead.

The RNC endorsed Roy Moore but ignores moderate governors. What else do you need to know?

The rejection of Wallace was as much a statement for the Democratic Party as the acceptance by Trump of the Republican Party.

People have to understand that although the civil rights bill was good and something for which I worked arduously, there was nothing in it that had any effect whatsoever on the three major problems Negroes face in the North: housing, jobs, and integrated schools….[T]he civil-rights bill, because of this failure, has caused an even deeper frustration in the North.14

But the inadequacy of legislation supported by Democrats is far different from a calculated effort to appeal to white voters by manipulating the race issue. One is a failure of policy. The other is a moral failure.

“Dividing the Democrats,” the authors went through various elaborate ways the Nixon White House and campaign could manipulate racism to help Nixon’s reelection campaign.

it was based on the assumption there was little Nixon could do to attract black voters, so the focus should be on utilizing black voters’ support of Democrats to alienate white voters.

There is nothing that can so advance the President’s chances for re-election—not a trip to China, not four-and-a-half percent unemployment—as a realistic black Presidential candidate.

It was so obvious that even the Russians adopted it, attempting to instigate tensions among black voters to help Trump win.

we should continue to champion the cause of the Blacks within the Democratic Party; elevate their complaint of “being taken for granted.”15

is the discussion of “the working class” as if it were the white working class. It reduces African Americans and other nonwhites to invisible and nonexistent and is a perfect example of the casual racism of so much of conservative politics.

But by calling out to the white Americans who feel slighted or frustrated by their lot in life, Nixon was mining the same resentment vein that Trump—and George Wallace—exploited.

a common Republican ploy to paint Democrats as the victim shoppers, the easily offended, the “snowflakes” of society,

Republicans have been masters of proclaiming the virtues of personal responsibility, at least until Trump, whose eternal ...

“personal responsibility.”

So many Republicans embraced Trump’s view that they were victims, as was he, because they had actually believed this all along. Theirs was a white birthright, and the rise of nonwhites was an unjust usurping of their rights.

So the Nixon White House laid out the path to electoral success by maximizing white grievance and suppressing the African American vote through a combination of manipulation, lies, and legal challenges. It was this road that the Republican Party took to the Trump White House.

There is nothing new about Donald Trump.

Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and even Ronald Reagan played the same race-based politics of resentment. It is precisely Trump’s predictability an...

Race has defined the modern Republican Party. After Goldwater carried only southern states and received a record low of 7 percent of the black vote, the party faced a basic choice: do what was necessary to appeal to more nonwhite voters, or build a party to win with white voters.

And fittingly, absent serious change, race will define the demise of the Republican Party to a regional, Sunbelt-based party.

but for the first time in twenty years African American turnout actually decreased; third-party voting also increased over 2012. So Trump wins the White House with 46.1 percent of the popular vote, and Romney loses with 47.2 percent.

Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. States in which our presidential candidates used to win, such as New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Florida, are increasingly voting Democratic. We are losing in too many places.

Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country. When someone rolls their eyes at us, they are not likely to open their ears to us. At the federal level, much of what Republicans are doing is not working beyond the core constituencies that make up the Party.