It Was All a Lie Quotes

“Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing. 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. 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. 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. Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy. 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. What is the forum in which the key issues of the day are discussed? Talk radio and the television shows sponsored by the team, like Fox & Friends, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“Trump’s Deep State is just a variation of Joe McCarthy’s mythical Communists infesting the State Department, the “enemies within.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“If the Republican Party had been in charge in 1776, we’d all still be celebrating the queen’s birthday.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“But when Trump emerged from the primary, Bennett characterized those Republicans not supporting Trump as not team players who “suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country.”22 What has changed? If he believed what he wrote in The Book of Virtues that “it is our character that supports the promise of our future—far more than particular government programs or policies,” 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?”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“One of the hallmarks of the Trump era is the alacrity with which intelligent people embrace stupidity.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“My dad was in the FBI when Hoover ordered the roundup of Asian Americans. He hated it and quit, joined the navy, and spent the next three years fighting in the South Pacific. Like so many, he didn’t talk a lot about the war. But when it came to leaving the FBI, he told me once, “You can always say no.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“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.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“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. To avoid the nightmare of having a president who had actually spent decades preparing for the job, it was necessary to nominate a reality-TV figure who talked openly of his desire to have sex with his own daughter and lectured Republican members of Congress on Article XII of the Constitution, which exists only in his mind. This positions Donald Trump as the Necessary Monster history demanded to save the Republican Party.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“They tell themselves that the alternative is unacceptable: that if they don’t support and encourage a man who assaults women and lies instinctively, they will soon find themselves facing the red armies of socialism and the country will start to look like…Sweden. There is nothing new or particularly interesting about this deceit. Republicans are linked to a vast life-support system of lies, terrified that the truth will unplug the machine.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“Conservatives have managed to turn the phrase “mainstream media,” or “lame stream media,” as that noted arbiter of intellectual rigor, Sarah Palin, called it, into a pejorative. But what is mainstream media? It’s the journalism that believes in standards, strives to report facts, and has a professional standard to correct errors. It’s the news the majority of Americans consume. The brand of conservatism that has emerged from those early beginnings at Human Events requires the absence of professional standards. The entire purpose of this ever-increasing brand of conservative journalism—and it does great violence to the profession to call most of it by that term—is to confirm not just your opinion but also your feelings.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy. 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.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“Like my native Mississippi. 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. 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.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became 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.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“A political party without a higher purpose is nothing more than a cartel, a syndicate. No one asks what is the greater good OPEC is trying to achieve. Its purpose is to sell oil at the highest prices possible. So it is with today’s Republican Party. It is a cartel that exists to elect Republicans. There is no organized, coherent purpose other than the acquisition and maintenance of power.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“As Steve Goldsmith, then mayor of Indianapolis and the chief domestic policy adviser for Bush, put it, “The Republicans’ message was that government had been harmful. Therefore, eliminate government, and people in tough circumstances will suddenly be better off. Both the public and many Republican mayors said that’s naive. Merely the absence of bad action is not going to be sufficient.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“As it was in Mao’s China with the Red Guard, it is a political crime in today’s Republican Party to appear well educated. So we find Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri tweeting a rant about “unelected progressive elites in our govt.”16 The senator went to Stanford, taught at St. Paul’s School in London (founded in 1509), and graduated from Yale Law School. Senator Ted Cruz denounces “coastal elites who attack the NRA.”17 Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada, graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School, was a Supreme Court clerk, worked in the Bush administration, and is a former assistant attorney general. His wife was born in the coastal town of San Luis Obispo, California, and holds a BA from Claremont McKenna College, an MA from Université Libre de Bruxelles, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She works as a managing director at Goldman Sachs.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy. 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. What is the forum in which the key issues of the day are discussed? Talk radio and the television shows sponsored by the team, like Fox & Friends, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“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.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“They aren’t voters using active intelligence or participants in a civil democracy; they are fans.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“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. 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.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“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.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“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.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“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.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“In Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, Jennifer Burns described how Rand toward the end of her life “had one last word of warning to issue. Referring to the upcoming Republican primaries she wrote, ‘I urge you, as emphatically as I can, not to support the candidacy of Ronald Reagan.’ Reagan was a conservative in ‘the worst sense of the word,’ she told her readers.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“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. In reality, the Republican Party isn’t serious about deficit reduction, because politicians know their voters don’t feel affected by the mind-boggling numbers and subsequently don’t really care.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“The entire modern Republican definition of the conservative movement is about efforts to define itself as “normal” and everything else as “not normal.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“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.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“Each has Republicans losing the Electoral College from 2024 to 2036.2 These trends have been evident for over two decades, and as someone who has sat in the room for five presidential campaigns and tried to figure out how to get a Republican candidate over the 270 mark, the math has been increasingly oppressive. The obvious choice for the party was to expand its appeal beyond white voters. That diagnosis was as obvious as telling a patient with lung cancer to quit smoking. But at the same time, Republicans were taking steps to change the electoral math by making it harder for nonwhites to vote. In this, they were continuing a long tradition of efforts by powerful white politicians to remain in power by suppressing votes.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“The party will only change when its desire to revel in its worst instincts is challenged by its fear of losing power.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

“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.”
― Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump