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

by Stuart Stevens

Instead of decreasing national debt the $2 trillion a year promised, he increased it $2 trillion in a little over two years. Now, not surprisingly, the national debt has disappeared from Trump’s standard speeches and was not mentioned in his 2018 or 2019 State of the Union speeches.

But a few basic facts are indisputable: in the post–World War II era, Republican presidents have contributed far more to the deficit than Democrats.

I was never burdened by the notion that I was working for 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.

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.

More than 40 percent of Mississippi’s entire budget comes from Washington. Who pays for that? Those evil states like California and New York, where the good citizens pay a dollar in taxes and get less back from the government.

There’s a language war here that Republicans have been winning for decades. “Welfare” is what the poor get because they are, well, poor, and being poor is a choice because in America anyone can succeed. Or something close to that. 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 center or factory or, in the case of sports, a new stadium.

Any serious attempt to balance the budget by necessity would include defense cuts, but Republicans have decided there is a direct correlation between the size of a patriotic heart and the size of the defense budget.

It was during this shutdown, when the White House staff was pared down to basics and interns took over much of the routine of answering phones and staffing the West Wing, that Bill Clinton encountered Monica Lewinsky. So there’s that unintended consequence.

The political consequences of all this Gingrich-induced Wagnerian drama were that the ads we made attacking Bill Clinton for raising taxes were like trying to accuse someone of a mild traffic violation when your own client was up for war crimes in The Hague.

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 than communicants believe they are actually eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ. It just makes the members of the Republican Church feel closer to their political God.

Any pretense that the Republican Party, 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.

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.”

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.

Instead of obsessing over language to communicate with African American voters and those of lower income, Republicans should face the reality that many in these demographics view government as a positive and necessary tool in bettering their lives. The avowed hatred of government that is such a Republican bedrock principle is offensive and alienating to much of the country.

A constant crowd-pleasing refrain of Ronald Reagan’s sums it up: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ”8 For most white Americans of the middle class, that strikes them as both funny and poignant. (It is also a practice of the white middle class to be completely blind to the vast help they get from the government in all aspects of their lives.) But how does a black person hear these same words, knowing that it took thirty thousand federal troops to force the University of Mississippi to accept one African American?9

Today it’s impossible to imagine a candidate running on George W. Bush’s definition of conservatism having any chance of success in a Republican primary. Jeb Bush lost for many reasons, but the basic one is that he was running to win a race in a party that no longer existed.

Two centuries of slavery and another of discrimination and segregation did indeed produce victims on a world-historical scale. Today’s black poverty is the most visible reminder of a history filled with equal measures of pain and shame on the subject of race.

Once you convince yourself that racism has been defeated and that the real problems in America are the crisis of the family structure, it’s a short walk to the impeached Alabama judge and defeated Senate candidate Roy Moore’s passionate claim that blacks were better off during slavery.

When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team.

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. This removes any of the seeming contradiction of having spent years supporting principles like free trade and personal responsibility to suddenly stop and support the opposite. Think of those principles like players on a team. You cheered for them when they were on your team, but then management fired them or traded them to another team, so of course you aren’t for them anymore. If your team suddenly decides to focus on running instead of passing, no fan cares—as long as the team wins.

It isn’t the quiet fans in the stands who get on television but the lunatics who paint their bodies with the team colors and go shirtless on frigid days. It’s the crazy person who lunges at the ref and jumps over seats to fight the other team’s fans who is cheered by his fellow fans as he is led away on the jumbotron.

if he believed what he wrote about Bill Clinton that “a president whose character manifests itself in patterns of reckless personal conduct…cannot be a good president,” how can Bennett support a man who brags about assaulting women and directs his own son to write checks to reimburse his lawyer Michael Cohen for hush payments to a porn star?

So what sort of signal does it send when a man as intelligent and thoughtful as Bill Bennett decides to contradict his entire body of work to support a man like Donald Trump?

John F. Kennedy once held a dinner for all the living Nobel Prize laureates at the White House. Donald Trump invited the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, to the White House so that he could complain about his Twitter account.

There is a “Deep State” cabal out to get him. The Deep State seems to be driven by Trump’s annoyance that there was a government that existed before he came to power and there is a government that will exist afterward. (The latter may be overly optimistic.)

These conspiracist claims persist in the United States even when Republicans themselves control government.

But partisan politics is far from the whole story. For what unites conspiracists is not ideological attachment to conservative causes or to the Republican Party but something deeper: disdain for political opposition, regulated party rivalry, and the democratic norm of “agreeing to disagree.”

Few Republicans challenge Trump on his conspiracy obsessions, treating him like an addled senior citizen who calls his congressman’s office demanding to know why the CIA is talking to him through his dentures.

The shrug and smile that so many Republican leaders have adopted has allowed Trump to dismiss those who challenge his lunacy as “angry Democrats,” because it is Democrats who seem capable of explaining that Ted Cruz’s dad didn’t kill JFK.

But what few knew was that a video of the monument was made and sold by a company that helped Moore pay for his legal expenses over the fight that led to his removal from the supreme court.3 That little detail perfectly encapsulates the monetization of phony morality that is so common with the professional Christian conservatives.

Despite multiple allegations of molesting an underage girl, sexual harassment of barely legal teenage girls, and being such a general creep that he was allegedly banned from his local mall in Gadsden, Alabama, Moore defeated the appointed incumbent Luther Strange and became the Republican nominee.

Only black voters, particularly black women who turned out at record levels, saved the state of Alabama from being represented by an accused child molester who said that he first noticed his wife when he saw her in a high school dance performance. Moore was thirty at the time.

Does this mean Alabama is pro–child molesting of underage girls? Does Trump’s winning mean that America is pro–sexual harassment? There’s certainly an element of lack of concern about women and the sense that women are fair game for men, even fifteen-year-old girls.

That it was demonstrably a lie backed by hospital records was quickly brushed aside in pursuit of the “larger” truth that Barack Obama wasn’t “really” an American because an America that could elect a man with the middle name Hussein is not really America.

was a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who issued the ringing challenge to the Soviet Union “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” That party has now been transformed into Russian apologists, more concerned with defending Donald Trump than defending the country.

Because you have to look at what you’re doing first. You have to care about what you’re doing. If you have a society where all we care about is that the other side is bad, and therefore we don’t have to do the right thing, that society will break down, and you will have no liberty. I refuse to be a part of that.30

Degree matters, and it is much easier to see a flawed Democratic Party at least attempting to hold to some semblance of its long-espoused values than the Republican Party tying itself in knots trying to justify a man they know is unqualified.

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.

Parties and elected officials don’t suddenly wake up one day and decide to betray avowed principles. It’s a gradual process of surrendering little bits of your soul and values while convincing yourself it is for a greater good.

The transition of the National Rifle Association is a perfect parable: over a couple of decades, it evolved from a gun-safety education organization to a thuggish gang that rewards those at the top with millions of dollars based on proven ability to muscle elected officials into doing what they mostly know is wrong.

Today the leaders of the Republican Party follow Donald Trump’s lead and routinely attack the foundations of law enforcement, from the FBI to the Justice Department to the judiciary. At first glance it seems stunning to witness a party that once defined itself as a “law-and-order party” take the same position as every drug dealer, child pornographer, Mafia don, and human trafficker who claims innocence and attacks government officials for unfair tactics.

Under President Bill Clinton, LaPierre charged, “if you have a badge, you have the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.” This is the sort of language used by any homegrown terrorist group, from neo-Nazis to the 1960s radical-left bombers of the Students for a Democratic Society.

That was enough to make President George H. W. Bush resign his lifetime NRA membership in a blistering letter.

James Carville once described Pennsylvania as Philadelphia to the east, Pittsburgh to the west, and Alabama in the middle.

Like Trump, Gingrich spent decades in the pursuit of what he considered “trading up” in wives, starting with his high school geometry teacher and ending up, as of this writing, with a former intern he was having sex with while leading the impeachment against Bill Clinton for lying about having sex with an intern.

and broken men have become dominant figures. Their unifying thread is anger at a world that has treated them far more generously than they deserved.

The combination of high ideological stakes and intense competition for party control of the national government has all but eliminated the incentives for significant bipartisan cooperation on important national problems. Consequently, polarization has reduced congressional capacity to govern.

Since the 1970s, each new cohort of Republican legislators has taken more conservative positions on legislation than the cohorts before them. That is not true of Democratic legislators.

Money and the necessity of its craven pursuit have polluted and twisted our elections in destructive ways that all reduce the power of the individual, distorting the essence of democracy in ways unimaginable even fifty years ago.