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

by Stuart Stevens

It is as if nineteenth-century doctors were aware that leeches will not save their patients but would rather let them die than break the code of orthodoxy.

It seemed obvious that Trump as president would continue to be the same badly damaged, semiliterate, incurious, and maladjusted oddball he had always been. If you know a woman who is marrying a man who is over seventy and she says there are a lot of things she doesn’t like about him but she thinks he will change, what would you tell that woman?

“The final test.” This is the language used to recruit suicide bombers, not a rational discussion of political choices in a civil society.

Yes, a white nationalist who ran on a Muslim ban and calls Mexicans rapists, a man who has no sense of truth and little of right and wrong, a man who wrote hush-money checks for a porn star in the Oval Office is president, but, hey, we cut marginal tax rates for corporations.

In the Trump years, Republicans have sent a message that lying is useful and productive, racism is acceptable, the press is the enemy, and a strong-man authoritarian head of government is the ideal.

These people don’t hate America, but they are weak men and women who decided long ago their self-worth was determined by winning elections.

This was their moment to stand for something, and they chose to stand for reelection. Let us remember.

But to focus on their party label is to miss the point. Whether they had a D or an R by their name meant less than having a big W by their name, W for “white.”

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.

The common thread is fear. Fear of change, fear of the unknown, fear of losing power while forgetting the purpose of power.

Of course it makes sense to spend billions to build a wall on our southern border when America is being invaded with illegals who come here to rape, murder,…and vote.

Our problem in America is getting people to vote, not stopping illegals.

When you insist that the sky is green, the best argument is not to deny the sky is blue but to build a world in which the sky is in fact green. Then everyone who says it is blue is clearly a liar.

No longer is to be born in America to win life’s lottery and know you are among the luckiest on earth;

More than half of those who didn’t vote earned less than $30,000 a year; more than half of those who did vote were over age 50.

The same people who have no problem mandating reproductive choices for women cite personal freedom as an opposition to registering voters.

Of course another reaction might be to analyze why it is the Republican Party is less appealing to those who are poorer, younger, and nonwhite and try to change the party so that it has more appeal, rather than trying to block these groups from voting.

It has become a fundamental tenet of the modern Republican Party to hate California, which is extraordinarily revealing. Something is deeply disturbed about a political party if it considers the most populous state part of the long list of “otherness” that Republicans see as separating the true America from something dangerous and anti-American.

How did this happen? How did the state that gave us Ronald Reagan, the state that defined for the world what it was to be an American, the state with the largest number of military bases and the greatest farms of America, the state that built the world’s first great post-automobile city, the state with the industries that changed the world, from Apple to Hollywood—how did that become for Republicans an alien place to be scorned and ridiculed?

Watching the Republican Party is like watching a friend drink himself to death. There’s a mix of sadness and anger tinged by a bit of sympathy for the misery he tries to hide. But alcoholism is a disease, and political cowardice is just what it looks like: weakness and opportunism mixed with fear and self-loathing.

Perhaps what passes for the establishment in the Republican Party will be able to conjure a cover story to explain why they embraced a man who mocked the disabled, attacked a former POW hero, paid off a porn star from the Oval Office, defended Vladimir Putin’s murder of journalists, bragged about assaulting women, and implored foreign governments to investigate his political opponents.

Let’s say our Republican overlords can convince us that these were just personal quirks of a “black swan” leader who kept us from the horror of…a former secretary of state, U.S. senator, and First Lady becoming president.

These are not evil people. Live next door to most of them, and they will be good neighbors who help out when they can, laugh at your jokes, cheer for sports teams you both love. This was my tribe. I did not think them perfect; no man may be a hero to his valet or political consultant. I never pretended to see even glimmers of greatness in most of them, but I did hold out for an assumption of decency. They have proven me wrong, and the sadness I feel is difficult to express. No one wanted this moral test, but most of my tribe have failed it.

Donald Trump did not change the Republican Party as much as he gave the party permission to reveal its true self. The Lindsey Grahams of the world have not changed. We are only now seeing who they always were, freed from any need to pretend.

I’d like to say I believe the party I spent so many years fighting for could rise to that challenge. But that would be a lie, and there have been too many lies for too long.