Free It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump by Stuart Stevens

PROLOGUE
IT WAS ALL A LIE
    I have no one to blame but myself. I believed. That’s where it all started to go wrong. I was drawn to a party that espoused a core set of values: character counts, personal responsibility, strong on Russia, the national debt actually mattered, immigration made America great, a big-tent party invited all. Legislation would come and go, compromises would be necessary, but these principles were assumed to be shared and defined what it meant to be a Republican for the last fifty years.
    What a fool I was. All of these immutable truths turned out to be mere marketing slogans. None of it meant anything. I was the guy working for Bernie Madoff who actually thought we were really smart and just crushing the market. What I missed was one simple reality: it was all a lie.
    I come to this not out of bitterness but out of sadness. It’s not that I failed. I was paid to win races for Republicans, and while I didn’t win every race, I had the best win-loss record of anyone in my business. So yes, blame me. Blame me when you look around and see a dysfunctional political system and a Republican Party that has gone insane. To be sure, others share blame, but if there is any sane path forward for something resembling a conservative governing philosophy in America—and I’m not sure there is—it must start with honesty and accountability. I have this crazy idea that a return to personal responsibility begins with personal responsibility.
    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. Among the many Republicans who find Donald Trump somewhere between distasteful and abhorrent, there are two distinct tendencies. 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.
    As much as I’d love to go to bed at night reassuring myself that Donald Trump was some freak product of the system—a “black swan,” as his ludicrously unqualified son-in-law says—I can’t do it. I can’t keep lying to myself to ward off the depressing reality that I had been lying to myself for decades. 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.
    I saw the warning signs but ignored them and chose to believe what I wanted to believe: the party wasn’t just a white grievance party; there was still a big tent; the other guys were worse. Mostly, though, I just didn’t think about it. I loved to win and I won a lot. I loved the feeling that I had a big lever and could move if not the world, then a big enough hunk of it to make a difference.
    Donald 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. This is not an “I am better than them” plea. I’m not. But I was more than just a witness to this. I spent 2016 predicting that Donald Trump would not win because I refused to believe what Donald Trump proved about Republicans, about myself, could be true.
    I was wrong.
    Hold Donald Trump up to the mirror and that bulging, grotesque orange face is today’s Republican Party. Working intensely in politics is joining a tribe, and if you do it for many years, a comfortable familiarity begins to define the experience. Do it professionally at a high level with success, and at a certain point you look around and you know where you belong in that tribe. Every two years you work in governor and Senate races, and every four years you probably end up