Of all the “Never Trumpers,” Stuart Stevens might be the most interesting.
Stevens is one of the most successful GOP operatives in the last couple of decades. He helped lead several presidential campaigns (notably George W. Bush’s two campaigns and Mitt Romney’s failed bid in 2012) and multiple gubernatorial and congressional races. He’s as seasoned as they come in Republican politics.
But Stevens stands out among Trump’s conservative critics
because of his candor about the deeper rot at the core of the GOP. And
in a new tell-all book, called It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump,
he offers a grand mea culpa for his own role in paving the way for
Trumpism. “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,” Stevens
writes.
Stevens isn’t the only Republican who has criticized the GOP’s capitulation to Trump. He’s part of the Lincoln Project,
a group of former Republicans who are spending a ton of money pushing
anti-Trump ads. But he is somewhat unique for openly implicating himself
and apologizing for his role in the party’s open embrace of nativism
and bigotry.
I spoke to Stevens by phone about the story he wanted to
tell in this book and why he insists that “Donald Trump did not change
the Republican Party as much as he gave the party permission to reveal
its true self.” Then we discuss which Republicans, in his words,
“bamboozled” him by pretending to care about conservative principles
only to toss them out the window the second it was convenient to do so.
Read more at:
RNC 2020: Stuart Stevens, an ex-GOP operative, on why the party should be burned to the ground - Vox
No comments:
Post a Comment