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

by Stuart Stevens

But nowhere in the autopsy was there an acknowledgment or even consideration that the reason Republicans were failing with nonwhite voters was policy based,

Nor is there any indication of the moral imperative of a political party that aspires to lead a country to be more inclusive and better reflect the country it seeks to represent.

How do you go from dedicating a political party to expansion and inclusiveness and two years later rally around a man who calls Mexicans “rapists” and called for a religious test to enter the United States? It’s easy if you view an avowed commitment to inclusion as merely a political necessity and nothing more.

but the ease with which Republican leaders abandoned any pretense of being more than a whites-only party is the ultimate situational ethic.

With Trump’s victory in 2016, the party seemed to breathe a sigh of relief that no longer did it need to pretend that it must reach out more to nonwhite voters.

But four years later, Donald Trump called for a ban on Muslims’ entering the United States, a clearly unconstitutional edict violating the Constitution’s Article VI clause against a religious test, and the Republican Party leadership did nothing.

Why? The Republican Party was—and still is—afraid of Donald Trump.

Then, as the primaries unfolded and the Republican version of George Wallace gained support, the leaders in the party quietly abandoned their principles and fell in line behind Donald Trump.

How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power. The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie.

these are the worst seven words a client ever utters. Whatever follows will be somewhere between the merely disastrous and the fatal.

Then he said what I have learned are the worst three words: “But there’s more.”

So I launched my career in the party that prided itself on being the “family values” party. When pundits marvel that the Republican Party could accept a man like Donald Trump, who has five kids from three wives and talks in public about having sex with his daughter, they’re missing the point.

Instead,

he gives them a chance to prove how little they have always cared about those issues. Trump just remove...

“family values” was useful in attacking and defining Democrats. It was just another weapon to help portray those on the other side as being out of the mythical American mainstream.

It was an “otherness” tool, as in those who didn’t loudly proclaim their strict adherence to its code were “other” than normal.

The entire modern Republican definition of the conservative movement is about efforts to define itself as “normal” and everything else as “not normal.”

The Republican use of “family values” was the weaponization of two key elements of its power structure: racial prejudice and a politically conservative Christianity, from Catholics to evangelicals.

In particular, conservatives sensed that liberals had undermined traditional values. This climate was ripe for a politics that celebrated a nostalgic ideal of the home.3

America somewhere in the 1950s that never existed. Those roles continue to drive the structure of Republican politics and remain the key building blocks of the party’s DNA.

The family values that the Republican Party not only embraced as a personal ethos but wielded as a club against political opponents was built on the fantasy that sex did not exist.

describes the long list of disgraced preachers as “figures who were cartoonish, dramatic, deceitful, wealthy, white, smarmy, judgmental, callous, and, above all, hypocritical. Charlatans.”6 This is about as perfect a description of Donald Trump as one can find.

Their followers proudly claim they favor “authenticity” as a virtue but are drawn to the most elaborately artificial of men who cosmetically, chemically, and surgically alter their physical presence as if to affirm they were of a different, more godlike persona.

Whoever got one-on-one with Trump would win because he was an open sewer of immorality and Republicans were the “Character Counts” party.

(NCPAC, pronounced nic-pac). It was started in the mid-1970s with a mission to take advantage of a 1976 Supreme Court ruling that opened the door to independent groups’ spending large sums of money on federal races.

The major focus of the legislation was a broad attack on women, from limiting contraception to banning abortion and reaffirming the rightful place of women to be in the home.

All of this should have bothered me, but I honestly didn’t think about it much.

It is a strange phenomenon of Republican politics that candidates are quick to announce that God would like them to win.

The “ministry” he was called to was the Texas House of Representatives, which has seldom been confused with a church.

it was 168 days after the Days of Prayer before it rained in Texas.

Now whenever I hear the loonies on the right asserting that God wanted Trump to win, I always wonder why it didn’t occur to them that if God really was involved, he probably could have won the popular vote for Trump. And done it without the Russians’ helping.

Decency, kindness, humility, compassion—all touchstones of a Christian faith—have no value in today’s Republican Party.

All his life, Donald Trump has believed these to be weaknesses, and now that is the view of the party he leads.

Rather than Republicans and people of faith checking his most unappealing sides, the president is dragging down virtually everyone within his orbit.15

It is remarkable to hear religious leaders defend profanity, ridicule, and cruelty as hallmarks of authenticity and dismiss decency as a dead language.

Falwell, Graham, and others are providing religious cover for moral squalor—winking at trashy behavior and encouraging the unraveling of social restraints.

Instead of defending their convictions, they are providing preemptive absolution for their political favorites. And this, even by purely political standards, undermines the causes they embrace.17

But anger and racism and fear of the future have always lurked beneath the surface of the Christian right, like a menacing shark disturbing a calm ocean. Now they are in the open, and we need no longer pretend that those who support bad men like Roy Moore and Donald Trump are remotely motivated by love of neighbor or charity or compassion.

They are free now to be openly what they felt obligated to mask. They can now admit it was all a lie.

The Republican Congress now represents a party with very few significant defining principles other than the promotion of the president’s impulses at that moment. —Republican former senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire1

And so, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual taxpayer, according to the I.R.S. information on high earners—a publicly available database with taxpayers’ identifying details removed. Indeed, in 1990 and 1991, his core businesses lost more than $250 million each year—more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the sampling for those years.2

Trump was running a scam on investors, and the Republican Party has been running a similar scam on voters.

Republicans had promised for decades to control spending, and when given a chance, they decided it was easier to just spend more.

What happened under Ryan isn’t so much about him as about exposing the fundamental falsehood that Republicans ever cared about the deficit. The history of the national debt is like all history: it varies greatly by authorship.

in the post–World War II era, Republican presidents have contributed far more to the deficit than Democrats.

What is most remarkable—and telling—about the Clinton success on the deficit is the furious degree that he was opposed by Republicans. Not one Republican voted for his 1993 budget package that combined tax increases and spending cuts. In 1994, I and just about every other Republican political consultant made ads attacking the Clinton tax increases and predicting economic disaster unless repealed.

a political party that was fundamentally hypocritical on the deficit and economy and one that would proceed to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about sex under the leadership of Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was having an affair with a former House intern himself.

Instead of killing the economy as Republicans predicted, the Clinton economic plan helped launch one of the longest periods of economic growth in U.S. history and helped create twenty-three million new jobs. Incomes rose; poverty fell. The only period of greater growth was the post–economic crash under the Obama years.12 (Yeah, that sort of drives Republicans crazy too.)

In retrospect, the Clinton presidency adhered to the values espoused for decades by Republicans far more than the Trump years. Clinton had the first budget surpluses since 1969.

But supporting free trade was just another quaint marketing slogan that was useful until it was more convenient to fall in love with the Trump tariffs.