For 30 years, Stuart Stevens was some of the influential operatives in Republican politics. He was Mitt Romney’s prime strategist in 2012, serve
For 30 years, Stuart Stevens was some of the influential operatives in Republican politics. He was Mitt Romney’s prime strategist in 2012, served in key roles on each of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns, and labored on dozens of congressional and gubernatorial campaigns — constructing the most effective profitable information in politics. Then Stevens watched his celebration throw its assist behind a person who stood towards every little thing he believed in, or thought he believed in.
Most dissidents from Trumpism take a well-recognized line: They didn’t depart the Republican Occasion, the Republican Occasion left them. However for Stevens, Trump compelled a extra elementary rethinking: The issue, he believes, is just not that the GOP grew to become one thing it wasn’t; it’s that lots of these inside it — together with him — did not see what it truly was. In Stevens’s new ebook, It Was All a Lie, he delivers a searing indictment of the celebration he helped construct, and his position in it.
This can be a dialog concerning the Republican Occasion’s previous, current, and future. Stevens and I focus on the variations between the Democratic and Republican coalitions, whether or not celebration elites might have prevented Trump’s rise, the facility the GOP base holds, the connection between tax cuts for the wealthy and white identification politics for the poor, the place the celebration can and might’t go after Trump, the GOP operatives attempting to place Kanye West on the 2020 poll, how Stevens performed the race card in his first campaigns, why Romney misplaced whereas Trump gained, and extra.
You’ll be able to hearken to our dialogue by streaming it right here, or by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Present wherever you get your podcasts.
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