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

Also by Stuart Stevens

The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear: A Novel

The Last Season: A Father, a Son, and a Lifetime of College Football

The Big Enchilada: Campaign Adventures with the Cockeyed Optimists from Texas Who Won the Biggest Prize in Politics

Feeding Frenzy: Across Europe in Search of the Perfect Meal

Scorched Earth: A Political Love Story

Malaria Dreams: An African Adventure

Night Train to Turkistan: Modern Adventures Along China’s Ancient Silk Road

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION

Copyright © 2020, 2021 by Stuart Stevens

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2020.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Names: Stevens, Stuart, author.

Title: It was all a lie : how the Republican Party became Donald Trump / Stuart Stevens.

Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. | This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019048755 | ISBN 9780525658450 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525658467 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Trump, Donald, 1946– | Republican Party (U.S. : 1854– )—History. | Conservatism—United States—History. | Political culture—United States—History. | United States—Politics and government—1945–1989. | United States—Politics and government—1989– Classification: LCC JK2356 .S746 2020 | DDC 324.2734—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019048755

Ebook ISBN 9780525658467

Cover art and design by Chip Kidd

www.vintagebooks.com

ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r3

To the Deep State patriots who

are defending America

Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.

—PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by Stuart Stevens

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface to the Vintage Books Edition (2021)

Prologue: It Was All a Lie

1 Race, the Original Republican Sin

2 Family Values

3 The Long Con

4 Confederacy of Dunces

5 Machinery of Deception

6 What Are They Afraid Of?

7 The Anti-American Patriots

8 The Empire’s Last Stand

9 How Do Lies End?

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

A Note About the Author

PREFACE TO THE VINTAGE

BOOKS EDITION (2021)

I keep getting it wrong.

A lot of people were wrong about Donald Trump in 2016, but it’s difficult to find anyone more wrong than me. I didn’t think that Donald Trump would win the Republican primary, and I didn’t think he’d win the general. In retrospect, much of my thinking was influenced by my inability to admit that the party in which I’d worked for decades at the highest level could embrace Trump. Asking myself how it happened and how I got it so wrong led me to write It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. It was my bleak assessment that the Republican Party wasn’t hijacked by Donald Trump, but rather he was the logical conclusion of what the party had become.

Writing this in May 2021, it’s clear that my dark conclusion about the party was wrong. I was overly optimistic.

As honestly as I had tried to confront the reality of the party that I had helped win so many elections, I never would have thought that the events of the post–2020 election were possible. Had you asked me on November 2, 2020, if Republican senators and members of Congress would accept a Biden victory if he won by over eight million popular votes and north of three hundred Electoral College votes, I would have said of course they would. They wouldn’t like it, but they would not challenge a peaceful transition of power. Had you asked me on January 5, 2021, if it was possible that the United States Capitol would be attacked and breached by a group of domestic terrorists attempting to overthrow the government of the United States, I’d have called it paranoid and impossible.

I was wrong. I could not conceive of the Republican Party becoming the greatest internal threat to democracy since the Civil War. But that is the reality of this moment. That is the challenge we face if the American experiment is to survive this decade.

Today there is a patina of much-missed normalcy across the country. After four years of a despotic lunatic, we have a normal president dedicated to the normal business of government. As comforting as it is, within this illusion of normalcy is a seductive threat. The greatest danger we face is not confronting the greatest danger. For the first time since 1860, a major American political party does not believe we live in a democracy. It is the official position of the Republican Party that Joe Biden is not a legally elected president, that Donald Trump was illegally removed from office, that 2020 was not a legitimate election.

Which means that it is the official position of the Republican Party that America is not a democracy. The dividing line in American politics is no longer ideology or policy. The line is between those who believe in democracy and those who believe in democracy only when their side wins.

I spent decades making ads about tax policy, health care, foreign policy. None of that is now important. In retrospect those campaign issues seem almost quaint. Certainly, they were naive. While I was focused on defeating Democrats, an evil was building in the Republican Party, an antidemocratic, pro-autocracy movement based in white grievance. I should have recognized this for what it was, but I was too focused on winning each election to think about losing a country. I looked the other way.

Not again. None of us choose history, but history has a way of choosing us. Most modern democracies do not end because of violent coups but at the ballot box and in the courtroom. This is the path the Republican Party is on as it dedicates its purpose to subverting democracy. This is the fight of our time. The outcome of this struggle will determine if the legacy of free democratic elections is passed on to another generation or ends on our watch.

The storming of the Capitol on January 6 was not an end of the 2020 election but the beginning of a long fight to defend the America many of us love. I would like to say that I believe the outcome is certain, but that would be naive and the time for naivety has ended. The effort to deny Joe Biden the presidency was a betrayal of all those who had sacrificed to defend America.

Men like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley who led the effort on January 6 to disenfranchise millions of African American voters do not share the values of those of us who support a pluralistic democracy. We should not grant them the privilege of considering they will change. They believe in a different America. We cannot compromise with their vision of what it means to be an American. We cannot take one step back. The evil they represent must be confronted and defeated.

I spent the 2020 election working with the Lincoln Project, and I had hoped that the defeat of Donald Trump would allow me the personal justification to withdraw from politics. In the long days and short nights of that campaign, I allowed myself to envision what a life removed from political battle would be like. It was a different place and I longed to move there, to put all of the anger and intensity that comes with campaigns behind me.

That’s not possible today. I helped create this crisis, and I must use the skills and dark arts that I had mastered building the modern Republican Party to destroy what it has become.

It was all a lie. But this is my truth.

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 toward the top of a presidential campaign. I’ve worked in five presidential races. Four out of five we won the nomination. Two out of five we won it all.

This is a book I never thought I’d write, that I didn’t want to write. But it’s the book I now must write. It’s a truth to which I can bear witness. Many will argue that my view of the Republican Party is distorted by my loathing of Trump. The truth is that Trump brought it all into clarity and made the pretending impossible.

A word of caution on what this book is not. Those looking for this to be a detailed indictment of sins and horrors committed by those I worked for and with will be disappointed. I am not writing to settle scores or name names. This is no bill of indictment to prepare for the political war crimes trials of the future. There is a collective blame shared by those of us who have created the modern Republican Party that has so egregiously failed the principles it claimed to represent. My j’accuse is against us all, not a few individuals who were the most egregious.

Yes, it was all a lie. But this is the truth.

1

RACE, THE ORIGINAL REPUBLICAN SIN

You start out in 1954 by saying, Nigger, nigger, nigger. By 1968 you can’t say nigger—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.

—Lee Atwater, 1981¹

I played the race card in my very first race.

It was 1978 and my first client was running for Congress in Mississippi. His name was Jon Hinson. He had been chief of staff to a Mississippi congressman named Thad Cochran, who was now running for the Senate. (Actually, back then they called the head staffers administrative assistants, or AAs, but as government became more about positioning for that next job and less about service, that sounded too much like secretaries, so the more elevated chief of staff became common. What lobbying shop wants to pay $500,000 for a former AA?) In high school I had been a page when Hinson ran the congressional office, and I’d kept in touch when visiting the office on trips to D.C.

Hinson was running against the son of Senator John Stennis, a Mississippi icon of the Democratic Party. The son, John Hampton Stennis, was a state representative, and it was assumed he would win easily. I was in film school then at UCLA, and Hinson called and asked if I could make television commercials for his campaign. I told him I didn’t know how to make commercials, that I just made silly little films and wrote scripts I couldn’t sell. That doesn’t matter, he said. You have to do it. I can’t afford to pay anyone who does this for real. In retrospect, this might not have been the most compelling pitch. But like anyone who has gone to film school, I was eager to get out and actually do something even vaguely related to film, so I said yes.

I’d been one of those kids who loved politics and campaigns and had walked precincts since the 1967 William Winter for Governor campaign in Mississippi. Winter ran against the last avowed segregationist to be elected governor, John Bell Williams, and it was a race full of death threats and drama. Winter lost, but I fell in love with politics and read Teddy White’s Making of the President, 1960 over and over.² It seemed a strange and intoxicating world, and when I left film school and started working in the Hinson campaign, I instantly felt at home. There was this sense of doing something that might actually matter. If I came up with the right ad, I might make a little history—or at least that’s what I told myself. It was the tiniest bit of history—a Mississippi congressional seat—but it seemed infinitely more consequential than student films and debating what was the greatest opening camera move in cinema. The only problem was we were losing.

Stennis was a towering figure in Mississippi, and his name on the ballot was the obvious default choice for voters. Hinson was right when he said he couldn’t afford to hire anyone, because no one thought he would win and for good reason. We raised some money, put up a few positive ads, and moved comfortably into second place, which is where we seemed stuck. The problem was that the congressional district, which included a lot of Jackson, Mississippi, and Vicksburg, was around 30 percent African American and, true to form, Hinson was getting less than 10 percent of that vote.

Thad Cochran was facing the same problem in his Senate race. No Republican had been elected statewide in Mississippi since Reconstruction, mostly because there really wasn’t much of a functioning Republican Party in Mississippi. Cochran had won a congressional race against a very weak Democrat and then relied on incumbency to win easy races, but every other member of the Mississippi congressional delegation was Democratic. In his Senate race, Cochran had one great advantage: Charles Evers, the brother of the assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers, was running as an independent. Not surprisingly, he was drawing a significant portion of the African American vote. With the bulk of the black vote going to a third-party candidate, the race between the Republican and the Democrat largely came down to a fight for white voters. And that was a fight Cochran was winning. He was a young, likable attorney from Jackson and had a strong base in his former congressional district. Evers had no chance of winning, but he was enabling Cochran to move into first place.

What we needed in the Hinson campaign was a like dynamic of an independent African American drawing black votes from the Democrat. And we had one: Evan Doss