Former Republicans' Case Against Trump’s GOP

I often reference my times as a Republican activist - something that ended close to 20 years ago - because I remained shocked by what the Republican Party has become and how blind so many who continue to vote Republican are to the reality of how ugly the GOP has become and how today's GOP has betrayed everything that the party once claimed to care about, including personal responsibility, character, fiscal conservatism, science and knowledge and a minimum level of decency.  All this has been thrown away with Trump at the head of the party.  That said, the change did not happen overnight and I continue to blame the betrayal of one time Republican values on the rise of the evangelicals and Christofascists (many of whom are racists) within the party base.  Others remained in the GOP long after I exited believing the party was past saving. Some continued to work to elect Republicans and, like me, continued to respect the GOP values of 30 - 40 years ago.  Now, as we face the 2020 elections, a number now find it critical that Trump and the warped, evil version of today's GOP be defeated.  A very long piece in Politico Magazine centers on Stuart Stevens, a never Trumper, who during his interview indicts not just Trump but all of his enablers within the GOP who are studies in cowardice and who only want to remain in power at any price.  The following are length excerpts from the piece that ought to be required reading for Republicans who still pretend to value morality and decency:

Stuart Stevens spent four decades helping Republicans—a lot of Republicans—win. He’s one of the most successful political operatives of his generation, crafting ads and devising strategies for President George W. Bush, Republican presidential nominees Mitt Romney and Bob Dole, and dozens of GOP governors, senators and congressmen. He didn’t win every race, but he thinks he had the best won-lost record in Republican campaign world.

And now he feels terrible about it.

Stevens now believes the Republican Party is, not to put too fine a point on it, a malign force jeopardizing the survival of American democracy. He’s written a searing apologia of a book called It Was All a Lie that compares his lifelong party to the Mafia, to Bernie Madoff’s fraud scheme, to the segregationist movement, even to the Nazis. He’s pretty disillusioned.

While Stevens is one of the most prominent “Never Trump” Republicans, and It Was All a Lie is predictably scathing about the failures of President Donald Trump, the book does not blame Trump for the failures of the party he leads. It essentially takes for granted that Trump is as bad a president and a human being as his worst Democratic critics say—and that he constantly violates supposedly bedrock Republican commitments to free trade, family values, limited government and the Constitution. His point is that Trump is a fitting representative of the modern GOP.

It Was All a Lie is really about the party that spawned Trump and now marches in near-lockstep behind him—the party to which 67-year-old Stevens has devoted his career. The GOP’s abject surrender to its unorthodox and unconservative leader was a surprise to Stevens, but he has concluded that he shouldn’t have been surprised.

[H]e always knew there was hostility toward minorities and immigrants and science within his party. But he thought that strain was a recessive gene, when it turned out to be the dominant gene. He was an unapologetic political hack whose job was helping Republicans win, but he always thought he was fighting for conservative policies and ideas, for a party that cared about something more than winning.

He doesn’t think that anymore, and his conversion story is getting a lot of buzz. It debuted at No. 8 on the New York Times best-seller list, helped in part by an attention-grabbing op-ed in the New York Times, and he’s been featured on National Public Radio, the New Yorker, the Ezra Klein podcast, and other outlets that Republicans consider the heart of the liberal media establishment.

The book makes it abundantly clear that Stevens feels shame about his role in perpetuating Republican lies, but it’s not entirely clear whether he thinks he was lying, lied to, or just lying to himself.

[I]t really struck me when I read the memoir by [the late German Chancellor] Franz von Papen, it’s exactly the same message you hear today. In 1953, he was still trying to justify Hitler: “You have to understand, the Bolsheviks were a threat, we had to counter them.” Of all the books I read to write my book, the Franz von Papen thing haunts me the most. It’s not to say that what happened in Germany is going to happen here. But the idea that you can’t talk about that—well, I think you have to talk about that. The parallel is so striking.

You have good people letting evil happen. For the most part, these Republicans aren’t bad people. If you moved in next door, they’d be a great neighbor. But that was true of a lot of segregationists I knew growing up in Mississippi. They wouldn’t have used a racial slur for a million dollars, but they wouldn’t stand up—“Oh, we need to be slow about change.” And what is Germany but a story of people who faced a moral moment and failed? You had a powerful political aristocracy that thought they could control this necessary evil for their own purposes. They thought they could harness it. Like the atom, or something, and they ended up with Chernobyl. All these Republicans who know Donald Trump is a disaster will try to justify it, because they got something they wanted. Mitch McConnell thinks Trump will be remembered as his fool, and I think the odds are pretty good it’s going to be the other way around.

Republicans always say that you can’t negotiate with terrorists; well, Donald Trump is a terrorist, and the Republican Party decided to negotiate with him. How has that worked out? He’s destroyed conservatism. He’s the most anti-conservative president of my lifetime.

[O]ne conclusion I’ve reached is that leaders really matter. In the 1930s, why didn’t we become fascist? Probably because Roosevelt was president and not Lindbergh. Why was the civil rights movement defined by nonviolence? Probably because of Martin Luther King. If Stokely Carmichael had a similar role, it would’ve been different.

But part of a role of a political party should be to form a circuit-breaker function. To me, with Trump, it all goes back to the Muslim ban in December 2015. The party should’ve rejected that. If the Republican Party stands for anything, it’s supposed to be the Constitution.

I keep coming back to: What does the party stand for? Four years ago, 90 percent of Republicans would say personal responsibility, character counts, strong on Russia, fiscal sanity, legal immigration, free trade. But now the party’s 100 percent against all these things. We’re left of Bernie Sanders on trade. We’re way to his left on Russia; Bernie may have honeymooned in Russia, but he didn’t marry Putin. We’re for an imperial presidency. I guess when the next Democratic president does an executive order for a wealth tax, we’ll be OK with it.

Why does the Republican Party exist today? It exists to beat Democrats. That’s not a political party. That’s a cartel. Why do bowling clubs exist? Because you like to go bowling. Fine. Just don’t kid yourself that you’re joining anything to do with principle or purpose. And I don’t think you can undo this stuff. What happened to the party in 1964 with African Americans? You went from 40 percent with Eisenhower to 7 percent with Goldwater and they never came back. Is this going to happen with Hispanics? Goldwater wasn’t out attacking black people; he just wasn’t for the civil rights bill. I wouldn’t call him a bigot. Trump is out there attacking Hispanics. Why did Republicans used to get 70 percent of Asian Americans, now we lose 70 percent? . . . . they got the message that if you weren’t white, you weren’t welcome in the party.

How does the party allow that to happen? How does the party that’s supposed to be for family values stand by while the president, the head of the Republican Party, wishes a woman well who’s just been arrested for being at the center of an international child rape ring?

The deficit has gone down much more under Democrats than Republicans. That’s a fact. You can’t argue with that. It’s a perfect example of how Republicans never believed what they were saying. If you asked them to take a lie detector test, do you believe in lower deficits, they’d say yes and pass. But they were never willing to do anything to back it up. . . . this Republican idea that you can magically cut taxes and grow your way out of the deficit, it’s no different than trying to argue that gravity is a regional phenomenon.

You look at a lot of Democrats getting elected in the Northeast today, like Conor Lamb, they would have been Republicans back then. And there aren’t any Republican senators like Bill Weld would’ve been. They don’t exist. The people who normally would be like that, someone like [Missouri Senator] Josh Hawley, very smart guy, went to Stanford, Yale Law, taught at St. George’s in London, wrote a very good biography of Teddy Roosevelt. Perfect example of a guy who could’ve been a positive influence in the party, like [former Missouri Senator] John Danforth. Instead, he’s running against the elites. Really, Josh? Really?

The party has basically joined the Red Guard and the Khmer Rouge, attacking higher education. And it’s never the peasants leading the charge. It’s the educated. These are the most phony people in the world. Ted Cruz. Here’s a guy that’s punched every establishment button there is to punch, and he’s attacking elites. Really! Your wife is at Goldman Sachs. You were born in Vancouver, dude.

[L]et me just say: I never would have believed what’s happening now would happen. I never would’ve believed that John Cornyn, serious Texas Supreme Court jurist, reluctant politician, would be tweeting complaints about how nine out of 10 new Texans are Hispanic. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how we could have the worst economy in the history of America, more Americans have died from a disease in the last four months than have ever died of anything in America, and John Cornyn is in a hearing asking questions about Hillary Clinton’s emails. I don’t get it.

I’ll never wonder again how 1938 happened in Germany. The cowardice is contagious. I think there’s a sort of conspiracy of cowardice—when everyone’s a coward, you don’t feel like a coward. That’s why these Republicans resent Mitt Romney. He reminds them that they don’t have to be cowards, and it makes them feel bad.

[W]hy don’t they understand how they’re going to be remembered? I’m not talking about 40 years from now when everyone’s dead. I’m talking about two years from now. Why can’t they grasp that this is a moral test? This is Kitty Genovese getting raped and nobody saying anything. That’s what Donald Trump is. So what if you lose a primary? Would you have rather been the guy who ran against George Wallace or the guy who endorsed him?

You don’t undo this stuff. Look at Nikki Haley, a once-serious person, trying to negotiate with this, like she’s going to be the good segregationist. You can’t do it. You just can’t do it.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible that a president in 2020 would be defending Confederate monuments and the Confederate flag, or that his chief of staff John Kelly would be arguing that slavery wasn’t the cause of Civil War. I would’ve thought it was no more likely than that we’d be having a debate about gravity. I was wrong.

What’s going to change is they’re going to lose. We don’t know how long it will take before they lose. Maybe they’ll hang on longer than we expect. But the majority of Americans under 15 are nonwhite. The odds are damn good that when they turn 18 they’ll still be nonwhite. That’s a death sentence for the Republican Party. We know what’s going to happen: Look at California. It was the beating heart of the Republican Party, and now not much happens there that the Republican Party is involved in.