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

by Stuart Stevens

For all their bluster about the federal government and states’ rights, the most conservative states in the country are far and away the most dependent on federal aid.

For every dollar Mississippians pay in federal income tax, the state receives just over $3 back from the federal government. More than 40 percent of Mississippi’s entire budget comes from Washington.

Every time a New Yorker or Californian goes to work, he or she is helping build roads, hospitals, and schools in Mississippi.

in contemporary America those poor states are overwhelmingly Republican.

Before Citizens United cleared the way for outside groups to spend unlimited money supporting a candidate, a small-time state senator would not have had a chance against a well-funded, powerful U.S. senator who was well liked in the state. But a few powerful conservative groups in Washington targeted Cochran, long a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, as a perfect example of pork barrel spending, a senator who had used his influence and seniority to increase spending and steer as much as possible to Mississippi.

“a bunch of out-of-state political gunslingers who have crowned themselves as the leaders of Tea Party Republicanism.”15

we focused on the specific benefits he had delivered for Mississippi through federal funding. Instead of running against “earmarked” spending, we bragged about all the bacon Cochran had brought home to the poorest state in the nation.

we made ads with specific examples of why Mississippians were better off with a powerful senator who would fight for every dollar. About 40 percent of Mississippi’s state budget is funded by the federal government, as high as any state in the country.

so what McDaniel was really saying was that Cochran had won with black votes.

But the race did illustrate the deeply contradictory attitude of conservatives toward spending. At the end of the day, Mississippi Republicans, as conservative a bunch of voters as you will find in America, came down on the side of supporting a man who could help deliver more dollars to their state. And had no problem still insisting that federal spending was out of control.

I can’t think of a single instance where the message of cutting spending really moved numbers toward a Republican. Attacking a Democrat for wasteful spending—the “bridge to nowhere” was the classic case—can work, but like in the Cochran-McDaniel race there seems little upside to promising to cut specific spending that benefits a constituency.

that includes real spending cuts combined with “revenue enhancements,” which is what tax increases are called when no one wants to admit they are tax increases.

In a Washington increasingly divided by ideology, one of the few places where right meets left is the concurrence that the vast majority of farm subsidies are a wasteful scam. The left-leaning Environmental Working Group and the Union of Concerned Scientists praised the conservative Heritage Foundation, which opposes gun control and considers the Democratic Green New Deal a vast left-wing conspiracy, for its call to end farm subsidies.

“Today’s report confirms how our so-called farm safety net has strayed from its original purpose—to help farmers weather the ups and [downs in] agriculture, not to guarantee a level income that is well above the income of the average American household.”

but that support shouldn’t come at the cost of incentivizing certain crops and practices over others, exacerbating land access issues, or disproportionately supporting the largest and wealthiest farm businesses.

The average American household has a net worth of $82,600, versus $827,000 for farm households.19

About half of the billions in farm subsidies go to farmers with household income over $150,000.

cut out what amounts to farming welfare for rich farmers?

The linking of farm subsidies and food stamps makes sense if anyone thinks the government has equal obligation to help wealthy farmers and poor Americans. In a sane world, aid would be need-driven with any subsidies going to farmers in need just as food stamps are need-based.

Meanwhile, Republicans continue to push to make it increasingly difficult to qualify for food stamps. The hypocrisy is not lost on some in the agricultural community. In a Washington Post interview, the former USDA chief economist Joe Glauber acknowledged the hypocrisy of the farm lobby taking a stand against income testing for eligibility for farm subsidies, while “you have a knockdown drag-out over whether you’ll give SNAP payments to someone earning $26,000 instead of $25,000. Give me a break.”21

“Agricultural subsidies are one of the most important examples of corporate welfare—money handed out to businesses based on political connections.”22

“Welfare” is what the poor get because they are, well, poor, and being poor is a choice because in America anyone can succeed.

But “grants,” “tax breaks,” and “incentives” are the language businesses use to describe the corporate welfare they demand in exchange for doing what they usually have to do or want to do anyway, like build a new data ...

Big business has mastered the art of pitting one state against another state in a sort of eBay bidding war in which politicians desperate to claim they have “created” some mythical number of ne...

Then there’s the whole world of sports madness where billionaire owners somehow manage to get regular taxpayers to underwrite the cost of new stadiums that are basically a license to print money for the monopoly-protected owners.

Is it fair to lay the insanity of middle-class taxpayers’ subsidizing billionaires at the feet of the Republican Party?

they would combine any efforts to cut entitlements with a real push to end corporate welfare of all kinds, on the state or federal level.

Yes, some of it was ill-disguised racist tripe that blamed the poor for being poor. But the welfare system did need reform, as Bill Clinton famously declared in his 1992 campaign pitch to “end welfare as we know it.” Where is the equivalent when it comes to corporate welfare? Republicans have largely been silent and let the left like Bernie Sanders define the outrage.

When’s the last time you heard a Republican talking about cutting the military? Republicans ridiculed President Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders for claiming that the United States spends more on the military than the next twelve countries combined.

but Republicans have decided there is a direct correlation between the size of a patriotic heart and the size of the defense budget. This patriotism-equals-defense-spending is now so common with Republicans that it’s difficult to remember when it was otherwise. I made ads attacking John Kerry for supporting defense cuts.

I made ads attacking Bill Clinton for reducing defense spending.

Donald Trump is the most isolationist president since Herbert Hoover, attacking NATO and ridiculing America’s need to support allies. But he still supports increased military spending and, in a typically boastful lie, claims that when he became president, the military was running out of ammunition.

In the sandbox of Donald Trump’s mind, spending more on defense proves he’s a tough guy, while working with allies proves he’s weak.

the process by which it came about is emblematic of Republican ineptitude on fiscal policy.27

The subprime mortgage meltdown was predicated upon the government’s deception that housing prices could only continue to rise.

conservatives accelerated the crisis by pushing the concept of an “ownership society” that would help alleviate poverty as well as the idea that government should lower barriers to home ownership whenever possible.

had weapons of mass destruction. (I’ve never bought the idea that this was a deliberate lie, if only because the one thing you can say about politicians like Tony Blair and George W. Bush is that they do not like to be proven wrong, and if they believed no weapons of mass destruction would b...

The 9/11 attacks were rooted in the false sense of security the government fostered and a failure to imagine worst-case scenarios of terrorism. The massive breakdown of disaster relief with Hurricane Katrina was rooted in state and local governmenta...

So it is with the Republican Party’s modern love affair with tax cuts. In the Republican presidential primary of 1980, George H. W. Bush called the Reagan tax plan “voodoo economics,”

that “a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”29

“The biggest mistake so far,” said Rudolph G. Penner, who was the chief economist in the Ford Administration’s budget office, “was to urge this tremendous cut in taxes without reducing spending sufficiently. That is a major mistake that will have profound long run costs.”

For many in the Reagan administration, this “spiritual” attachment to tax cuts was connected to a cultlike devotion to the libertarian author Ayn Rand, which is odd in that Ayn Rand hated Ronald Reagan.

but the Reagan crowd harnessed their inner John Galt to believe they had a moral duty to cut taxes, particularly for the wealthy, who were the most deserving because they were, well, wealthy and had proven themselves superior to those of lesser means.

A belief in the power of tax cuts is about as close as it can be to a definitional core belief that exists in the Republican Party.

But the negative political impact of Clinton’s tax increases, which hurt Democrats badly in the 1994 midterms, was nullified by the colossal stupidity of Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House.

But still the Republican Party continues to push tax cuts the same way the Roman Catholic Church uses incense for High Mass, as a comforting symbolism for believers that reminds them of their identity.

Being against “out-of-control federal spending,” a phrase I must have used in a hundred ads, is a catechism of the Republican faith. But no one really believes in it any more

communicants believe they are actually eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ.

Republicans are forced by their political DNA to be in favor of lower taxes, even though the fantasy of decreasing the deficit with tax cuts becomes ever more difficult to sustain.

if only given complete control of all three chambers of power, would focus on the deficit was just one of the myths shattered in the first two years of the Trump presidency.