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

by Stuart Stevens

The reason African Americans overwhelmingly reject Republicans isn’t based on word choices or phrasing. It’s based on policy. It isn’t how Republicans are talking to black voters that results in 90 percent or more of those voters refusing to vote for Republicans. It’s what the Republicans are doing, once elected. The fact that the Republican establishment is so invested in the myth that their problems are a matter of language is revealing and self-damning. 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.

referring to black voters, Hispanic voters, Asian voters—any nonwhite voters: they care about the same issues as white voters. This is one of those insidious half-truths that conceal a deeper, more important truth. Yes, pretty much all voters do care about jobs. But to say a white college-educated male or female cared about jobs in the same way as an African American is delusional. It was akin to saying that everyone would like not to get shot and that this truth means the same to a white suburban high school student in Des Moines as it does to a black teenager in Chicago’s K-Town. It was a truth asserted with such disregard for specifics that it became a building block of a larger falsehood. Feed generations of Republicans these easily digestible bromides, and it isn’t hard to understand the failure of Republicans to grasp the meaning of Black Lives Matter. The cry “Don’t all lives matter?” is just another variation on the assumption that jobs mean the same to all voters.

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.

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.

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. He hasn’t invented a new politics or executed a brilliant and novel strategy. Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and even Ronald Reagan played the same race-based politics of resentment. It is precisely Trump’s predictability and, alas, inevitability that is so depressing.

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. It chose the latter, and when most successfully executed, a race-based strategy was the foundation of many of the Republican Party’s biggest victories, from Nixon to Trump. And fittingly, absent serious change, race will define the demise of the Republican Party to a regional, Sunbelt-based party.

Their assessment of the problem was not profound, but the problem was not profound; it was obvious: Public perception of the Party is at record lows. 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.

it is telling that the Republican focus on the need to broaden the party has been driven by an instinct for survival and no real sense of a larger purpose.

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.

Trump doesn’t signal a lowering of standards of morality by Republican voters. Instead, he gives them a chance to prove how little they have always cared about those issues. Trump just removes the necessity of pretending. “Family values” was never a set of morals or values that the Republican Party really desired to live by; instead, “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. Like not being white is “other.” Like not being Christian is “other.” Like not being heterosexual is “other.” The entire modern Republican definition of the conservative movement is about efforts to define itself as “normal” and everything else as “not normal.”

The Christian right would like the world to believe it was the political arm of Jesus Christ, come to life to save a sinful America. In practice it operates more like a Christian-related super PAC for a white America. The professional politicization of Christianity as a right-wing force was always more about the acquisition of power than a commitment to Christianity.

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.

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. The fear of a changing world is now validated and given legitimacy at the highest levels. They are free now to be openly what they felt obligated to mask.

The Republican Party claims to be a party that understands the need to run government efficiently, managing debt and balancing a budget. In truth the modern Republican Party is the equivalent of Donald Trump: addicted to debt and selling a false image of success.

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

The New York Times analyzed the successes and failures of “Reaganomics,” and it was clear then that deficits were a critical problem: Even prominent Republican economists see ominous portents in the deficits. “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.”

Reaganomics, however, is something more than a theory of managing a national economy. To the President in particular, it is something spiritual. The changes in the tax laws that he sponsored, such as the reductions of rates in all income brackets and the resulting reduction of capital gains taxes, do indeed benefit the rich far more than the poor. But when asked at his news conference this week whether the often-repeated charge that his policies boiled down to economics for the rich, the President said: “The Rich Don’t Need My Help.” “No, the rich don’t need my help, and I’m not doing things to help the rich. I think I’m doing things to help all the people. But what I want to see above all is that this country remains a country where someone can always get rich. That’s the thing that we have, and that’s the thing that must be preserved.”30

The most likely scenario is that the deficit will continue to pile up until there is a financial crisis that forces the country to feel debt pain. Then the odds are that it will give renewed energy to a tax plan that greatly increases taxes on the wealthy. This would be a fittingly ironic fate facing the so-called fiscal conservatives of the Republican Party. By pretending to care about an issue without the courage or will to act, they will have set in motion a scenario that is among their worst nightmares: an activated left with the moral authority to soak the rich with taxes. It will be the economic equivalent of Winston Churchill’s famous assessment of Neville Chamberlain: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”43

The losing Buckley argument was one that would continue to be a touchstone of the Republican credo on race until today: that in America, race doesn’t matter; anyone can succeed. It is the essence of the “color blind” assertion that is perversely racist but reassuring to white people. It has the benefits of sounding antiracist—we are all people, or, as it were, “all lives matter”—but is in practice deeply racist because it ignores the reality of the impact of race in every element of American society.

Merely the absence of bad action is not going to be sufficient.”

Asking the Republican Party today to agree on a definition of conservatism is like asking New York Giants fans to have a consensus opinion on the Law of the Sea Treaty. It’s not just that no one knows anything about the subject; they don’t remotely care. All Republicans want to do is beat the team playing the Giants. They aren’t voters using active intelligence or participants in a civil democracy; they are fans. Their role is to cheer and fund their team and trash-talk whatever team is on the other side.

Republicans are allowing Trump to equate conservatism with conspiracy, and the long-term success is predicated on stupidity becoming an airborne viral plague that will sweep the country like the walking dead. That seems like a bad bet for a political party, but one on which the truth-shredding, anti-fact Republicans are betting the future of a sane, respected center-right political party in America.

Republicans have built a political ecosphere that thrives on deceit and lies. It is an industrialized sort of deceit that is unique to the Republican Party. Over the last decades, Republicans have been conducting an experiment to determine how many control rods of truth could be taken out of a civil society’s core reactor of truth without creating a meltdown. It didn’t start with Trump, but Trump may prove to be the meltdown.

When Donald Trump tweets, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” Orwell’s 1984 is the perfect framework in which to understand his mentality: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”27

The most distinguishing characteristic of the current national Republican Party is cowardice. The base price of admission is a willingness to accept that an unstable, pathological liar leads it and pretend otherwise. This means the party demands dishonesty as a trait of membership—unless you are a rare sociopath who defends pathological lying. They do exist. The vast majority of Republican elected officials know Donald Trump is unfit to be president and pretend otherwise.

If the Republican Party had been in charge in 1776, we’d all still be celebrating the queen’s birthday. They would have timidly said, “What are we going to do, fight England? Fight the king? The most powerful army in the world?” and then set about to negotiate how much of their dignity they could pretend to keep in a pathetic effort to please.

To willingly follow a coward against your own values and to put your own power above the good of the nation is to become a coward.

!!!

Cowardice, like courage, is contagious, and to be surrounded by cowards is to feel comforted in the knowledge that not only are there others like you but there is probably someone worse.

Legitimizing hate is like a war: it is easier to begin than to stop.

a set of four behavioral warning signs that can help us know an authoritarian when we see one. We should worry when a politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2) denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, or 4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.19

It’s unfair to blame Trump for how Republican elected officials have responded to his candidacy and election. Each had a choice, and in overwhelming numbers these officials made a personal choice to support a man each knew was wildly unqualified to be president.

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.

those of us who work in elections know what the court concluded: there is almost no voter fraud in American elections.

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

Even if Donald Trump loses in 2020, the Republican Party has legitimized bigotry and hate as an organizing principle for a major political party in a country with a unique role in the world. While it is true that many of the institutions, particularly the judiciary, have survived this stress test of Trump anti-Americanism, it is despite the Republican Party, not with its encouragement and blessing.