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

[Danascot]

Last edited Sun Aug 2, 2020, 11:15 AM - Edit history (1)

More Republican regrets by Stuart Stevens
Out 8/4/20.

From the most successful Republican political operative of his generation, a searing, unflinching, and deeply personal exposé of how his party became what it is today

Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass.

This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else. Stevens shows how Trump is in fact the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Stevens shows how racism has always lurked in the modern GOP's DNA, from Goldwater's opposition to desegregation to Ronald Reagan's welfare queens and states' rights rhetoric. He gives an insider's account of the rank hypocrisy of the party's claims to embody "family values," and shows how the party's vaunted commitment to fiscal responsibility has been a charade since the 1980s. When a party stands for nothing, he argues, it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room.

It Was All a Lie is not just an indictment of the Republican Party, but a candid and often lacerating mea culpa. Stevens is not asking for pity or forgiveness; he is simply telling us what he has seen firsthand. He helped to create the modern party that kneels before a morally bankrupt con man and now he wants nothing more than to see what it has become burned to the ground.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48806578-it-was-all-a-lie

This isn't news to anyone on this board.

[eppur_se_muova]

1. link ? nt

[Danascot]

3. Link

This review is from Goodreads though there are other reviews that say much the same thing.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48806578-it-was-all-a-lie

[magicarpet]

2. Don't blame trDump, he is only a symptom and a henchman.

.... The Republican Party is the direct cause of the disease and illness. The party is the mafioso thug calling the shots that brought us here to this point. This has been decades upon decades in the making it did not start yesterday.

Getting rid of trDump, is only half the job done. The entire Republican Party must be changed and reformed of its Fascistic hated, racism, selfishness, gluttony, greed cruelty, and the propensity to be prevaricating liars, plunderers, pilfers, thieves, and cheats.

[demmiblue]

4. ...

[JonLP24]

5. I was about to post this

Stevens has just published a book, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, in which he traces the destruction of the modern Republican Party to the civil rights movement, when the party first lost a huge chunk of the nonwhite vote and never looked back. He said his book concludes that racism has been embedded in the modern Republican Party since that time.

“A pattern becomes pretty obvious that there were always these two elements within the party,” Stevens said. “So in the ’50s it was an Eisenhower element and a Joe McCarthy element, and the Joe McCarthy element was imbued with a lot of racism.”

He lays some of the blame on William F. Buckley Jr., the intellectual dean of the modern Republican Party and, in his early days, “a stone-cold racist,” in Stevens’s description, who supported continued segregation in the South. Citing the memo by Pat Buchanan to President Richard Nixon that became the backbone of the so-called Southern Strategy — a tactic for attracting white voters by appealing to their racist instincts — Stevens said Trump’s Republican Party is cynically exploiting racism just as much or more than its predecessors.

(Snip)

“There was almost an audible sigh of relief: ‘We can just throw that out the window,’” Stevens said of the Republican reaction. “It’s like, ‘Thank God, we don’t have to pretend we care about this [race] stuff anymore. We can just win with white people.’”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.yahoo.com/amphtml/veteran-gop-operative-stuart-stevens-says-beating-trump-is-so-urgent-he-would-vote-for-bernie-sanders-if-he-had-to-215125952.html

He really breaks it down in the article. Trump exposed who the Republican party really is.