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

by Stuart Stevens

It was my bleak assessment that the Republican Party wasn’t hijacked by Donald Trump, but rather he was the logical conclusion of what the party had become.

Had you asked me on January 5, 2021, if it was possible that the United States Capitol would be attacked and breached by a group of domestic terrorists attempting to overthrow the government of the United States, I’d have called it paranoid and impossible. I was wrong. I could not conceive of the Republican Party becoming the greatest internal threat to democracy since the Civil War. But that is the reality of this moment. That is the challenge we face if the American experiment is to survive this decade.

Which means that it is the official position of the Republican Party that America is not a democracy. The dividing line in American politics is no longer ideology or policy. The line is between those who believe in democracy and those who believe in democracy only when their side wins.

While I was focused on defeating Democrats, an evil was building in the Republican Party, an antidemocratic, pro-autocracy movement based in white grievance.

Most modern democracies do not end because of violent coups but at the ballot box and in the courtroom.

We should not grant them the privilege of considering they will change. They believe in a different America.

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.

Trump didn’t hijack the Republican Party and force it to bend to his will, abandoning so many avowed “bedrock” principles. How do I know this? I was there and, yes, I contributed.

Many will argue that my view of the Republican Party is distorted by my loathing of Trump. The truth is that Trump brought it all into clarity and made the pretending impossible.

RACE, THE ORIGINAL REPUBLICAN SIN

It was really very simple: 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.

What happens if you spend decades focused on appealing to white voters and treating nonwhite voters with, at best, benign neglect? You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to white voters. That is the truth that led to what is famously called “the southern strategy.” That is the path that leads you to becoming what the Republican Party now proudly embraces: a white grievance party.

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.

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.

This is true in areas like foreign policy, where the Republican Party has gone from “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” to a Republican president who responds to Vladimir Putin like a stray dog, eager to follow him home.

There is a small kernel of truth in it—the woman used four, not eighty names, and the total fraud was $8,000—but when four becomes eighty and $8,000 total becomes $150,000 a year, Reagan is just lying. 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 reality is that there is an ugly history of code words and dog whistles in the party, and it’s something Republicans must admit and address.

In a state where more than three hundred African Americans were lynched, many for the simple crime of trying to vote or helping others vote, referencing “our heritage” and calling black protesters sons of bitches in front of an overwhelmingly white audience was the perfect kind of racial pitch. It was heard clearly and undeniably as racist.

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.

One of the common traits of the Republican Party, which the media seems to often accept and imitate, 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. It has been a common Republican ploy to paint Democrats as the victim shoppers, the easily offended, the “snowflakes” of society, while the Republicans have been masters of proclaiming the virtues of personal responsibility, at least until Trump, whose eternal state is claiming he is victimized.

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.

The similarities of George Wallace and Donald Trump are striking, from attacking the news media to railing against elites, all played in the key of racism. This isn’t an aberration or a sudden wrong turn by the Republican Party.

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.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, in 2050, whites will be 47 percent of the country while Hispanics will grow to 29 percent and Asians to 9 percent.

But I think 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 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?

For decades, conservatives attacked liberals for living by “situational ethics,” 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.

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.

Evangelicals still believe in the commandment, “Thou shalt not have sex with a porn star.”…However, whether the president violated that commandment or not is totally irrelevant for our support of him. —Robert Jeffress2

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.

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.

The professional politicization of Christianity as a right-wing force was always more about the acquisition of power than a commitment to Christianity.

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.

As far as I could tell, NCPAC was a gay organization dedicated to electing the most conservative and antigay politicians in America.

In case you’re thinking you didn’t know that Rick Perry was a minister, he isn’t. The “ministry” he was called to was the Texas House of Representatives, which has seldom been confused with a church.

Neither of these men could win a primary for president in the current Republican Party. 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.

Rick understood that Trump will always put himself before anyone and any value and that a lifetime of scams, frauds, scandals, and lies has proven that whoever associates with Trump is discredited. So it is with evangelicals.

Whatever Trump’s policy legacy ends up being, his presidency has been a disaster in the realm of norms. It has coarsened our culture, given permission for bullying, complicated the moral formation of children, undermined standards of public integrity, and encouraged cynicism about the political enterprise.

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.

The New York Times broke the story that Donald Trump for over a decade had managed to lose more money than any other American and, in some years, twice as much as any other American. This is the man Republicans chose because of his business smarts and success:

Trump was running a scam on investors, and the Republican Party has been running a similar scam on voters. Trump claims to be a great businessman who was wildly successful, while in fact he was one of the greatest failures in modern American business history.

In truth the modern Republican Party is the equivalent of Donald Trump: addicted to debt and selling a false image of success.

So what happened when the Republican Party, in a shocking upset, won control of all three chambers of government for the first time since 2007? The federal debt skyrocketed. In less than two and a half years, the debt increased at record levels, from $20 trillion to $22 trillion.5 All but six months of that period was under the Republican-controlled White House, House of Representatives, and Senate.