Why Deal with the Devil?

Lessons Learned: ‘It Was All a Lie’

Former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens’ new book It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump describes his choice to defect from the party following Trump’s 2016 election. Growing up in Mississippi in the 1960s, Stevens was familiar with a Democratic party that was segregationist, and he felt more politically at home in the center-right. He tried to assist candidates he perceived as basically decent; he wanted them to win because he believed in their values. He was a top strategist for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012. But Trump’s nomination in 2016 revealed to him some hard truths that prompted him to declare there is nothing left of the Republican Party to salvage.

Today’s moderate Republican governors who govern blue states — he names Larry Hogan, Phil Scott, and Charlie Baker — are, far from being admired for their ability to unite Americans, mostly ignored by the national party, an attitude that Stevens finds “self-defeating, but very telling.”

In his career as a campaign strategist, Stevens gravitated toward “moderate” Republican candidates who seemed to him to be reasonable people. He says he avoided outright anti-Black and anti-gay candidates and simply ignored that kind of rhetoric. His work involved crafting messages for politicians’ campaigns, and in this he sometimes tried to make the language more inclusive in an attempt to appeal to Black voters (e.g. rephrasing the promise of “jobs” to “meaningful jobs”)…