Stuart Stevens

It was all a lie, says a former top Republican strategist. This week on Firing Line. 

Stevens Charney Report, 2001 We all became Republicans not because we knew what Republicans were, but because we knew we didn’t want to be like in the old-line Democrats. 

After more than four decades in GOP politics, Stuart Stevens’ resume includes five presidential campaigns. When Donald Trump ran four years ago, Stevens opposed him.

Stevens on Fox, 2015  I think as a presidential candidate, he’s sort of ridiculous.  

He still does today, and is going even further.

Stevens on PBS 2020  The Party clearly doesn’t believe in what it said it believed in. // I’m going to work with Democrats. 

With the election less than three months away, what does Stuart Stevens say now?

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HOOVER:  OK. Stuart Stevens, welcome to Firing Line. 

STEVENS: Great to be here. Thank you.

HOOVER: Listen, you have worked in Republican politics for more than four decades. You were part of five Republican presidential campaigns, including that of Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and Bob Dole. And now you are working to defeat the current Republican president through a group called the Lincoln Project. And we’re gonna get to all that. But first, you have just published a book. It is titled, “It Was All a Lie:  How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.” So let’s start with, what was the lie, Stuart?

STEVENS: You know, Margaret, if you go back to the Dark Ages, say four years ago, I think 90 percent of Republicans would have agreed that there was a handful of values that united Republicans. So what were those? Character counts; personal responsibility is critical; strong on Russia; free trade; pro legal immigration. You know, Ronald Reagan announced in front of the Statue of Liberty, signed a bill that made everybody in the country before 1983 legal. And we would have said that these unite the Party. And it’s now not that the Party has drifted away from those, which happens sometimes. It’s that the Party is actively against each of those. So, you know, I start from a premise: Do people abandon deeply held beliefs in four years or three years? I don’t think so. I think it just means you didn’t deeply hold them.

HOOVER: One of the other things you write is that, “Trump isn’t an aberration of the Republican Party. He is the Republican Party in purified form.” So I’d love to unpack that. What do you mean by that?

STEVENS: Well, you know, in 2016, a lot of people who were wrong about Donald Trump. It’s hard to find anybody who was more wrong than me. And I realize in retrospect, it’s because I didn’t want to believe it. And then a lot of us, myself included, went through this period after Trump won. It’s like,  that’s not really the Republican Party. I don’t really see how you can say that. I think it – and I’ll try to trace this in the book –  there’s always been these two elements of the Party. It goes back to Eisenhower and McCarthy, and it plays itself out. Those of us who were drawn to George Bush in ‘99 and 2000, and the concept of compassionate conservatism, we were confident that we were on the right side of history and that we were, if you’ll have it, the dominant gene. And that the dark side of the Party, which was always there, was a recessive gene. I think we were wrong. And I think that the alacrity in which the Party embraced Trump, and the comfortableness that it had for Trump, proves that this is what really the Party wanted to be.

HOOVER: Is it what the Party wanted to be, or is it just what won? I mean, here’s my sort of pushback. You know, it seems to me that parties aren’t anything other than these dynamic organisms that represent their current leadership. The people that were able to acquire power, and then they get to set the tone in the direction themselves. And the Party that was the Democratic Party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, or LBJ and the Great Society, was a very different Party than the Party of Bill Clinton and the era of big government is over. Right? So to what extent is the GOP, again, like the Democratic Party, this dynamic organism that has succumbed to a person that doesn’t represent any of the values of the principles that its predecessors or successors had represented, but has just fallen? And that falling is a result of, not DNA, it’s just a result of circumstances?

STEVENS: Well, you know, I think it’s a really interesting point.  I mean, you can make a case that the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign basically ran against the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign. You know, what was ‘100 thousand more cops on the street’ became ‘mass incarceration.’ What became ‘ending welfare as we know it’ became income inequality. So I think the Democratic Party grew and changed, and has evolved to a very different place. What I think is different about the Republican Party is race. So if you go back to 1956, Eisenhower gets almost 40 percent of African Americans. Then it drops to seven percent with Goldwater. So for the remainder of that time, the Party spent most of its energies talking to white voters. So I think that the diversity in the Democratic Party has given it a strength that we don’t have in the Republican Party. And it’s given it a dynamic ability to change that we don’t have in the Republican Party.

HOOVER: It’s true. I mean, the Republican Party, as you and I both know, has become less diverse and more monolithic. It’s become older and whiter and more rural. But I’m glad you, you point to race because, I mean, race is one of the things that you spend a lot of time on in your book. And I think a lot of Republicans, especially in the Trump era, have spent a lot of time reflecting about. So let’s, let’s go to your book. Your first experience as a political operative in the Republican Party was working for a Mississippi congressional candidate. And you openly admit that you played the race card in that first race. You were a film student. You were asked to cut an ad. And I wonder if you could tell us about that ad. Tell us about the dynamics of how race played into that congressional race.

STEVENS: There was a white Republican I was working for. There was a white Democrat. And then there was a Black independent. So the district at that time was probably 40 percent African American. So that 40 percent, 90 percent of it was either going to go to the Democrat or go to the Black independent. It was in our best interest that it go to the Black independent because the Black independent wasn’t drawing enough white votes to be a real threat. So I made this commercial. I thought it was very clever. It wasn’t negative in any sense or pejorative toward the African American, but it informed African American voters who might not have been aware of the fact that there was an African American – because the guy didn’t have a lot of money and wasn’t running that robust a campaign – that there was. And it was sort of this crucible lesson that race is the key in which certainly all Southern politics is played and, to a certain degree, all American politics. 

HOOVER: Let’s just go to Kanye West. I mean, Kanye West is said to be contemplating a run for the presidency as an independent third party candidate. And it is reported that there are GOP operatives working to get him on the ballot in several states. Is this what you’re talking about? Is this the oldest trick in the Republican playbook? Is the same thing you did 40 years ago?

STEVENS: Yeah, except, you know, he’s a lot more famous and richer than the guy that I was running. What it is, is this admission that we’re going to not get African American votes. So, we used to try to address that and change — unsuccessfully, but we tried. Now, there’s not even trying. There’s just a sense of consolidating the white vote by playing white grievance. It’s an incredibly destructive strategy. And ultimately, it’s a death knell for the Party as a national government force as currently constructed.

HOOVER: So, I mean, you talk about this in your book, you referenced it just a second ago, that the original sin of the modern GOP was, with respect to race, was in 1964 when Barry Goldwater refuses, who is the Republican nominee for president, refuses to say that he would support the Civil Rights Act. And since then, no Republican nominee for president has won a meaningful number of African American voters. The South flipped after that, solidly Republican, and has remained Republican ever since. This is the Southern strategy which you referenced. And even though, you know, William F. Buckley and some other leading conservatives who eventually recanted their position and admitted that they were wrong. Is it your view that the die was cast after 1964 for Republicans and race?

STEVENS: No, I don’t think it was cast.. I think the fundamental flaw was… When I was working on these races all these years, there was this phenomenon of the Republican Party hiring African American political consultants to try to teach those candidates who were white, which most of them were, and those of us working in the campaigns, most of whom were white, how to talk to African Americans. So the conceit there was there’s– the Republican Party really should be the natural home for African Americans because we’re culturally conservative, the role of faith in the public square, entrepreneurship. It’s just that Blacks don’t understand this. That’s why they’re not coming to us. Which I mean, I think I bought that for a long time. But the reality was, I think African Americans understood Republicans really well. It was the policies that Republicans are advocating that never appealed to African Americans enough. And I think my sort of proof point of this is African American Republican candidates tend not to do much better with African Americans than white Republicans. So, it’s hard to say those African American Republicans candidates don’t know how to talk to African Americans.

HOOVER: Yeah, Tim Scott’s not winning 80 percent of the Black vote in South Carolina. Listen, you call Donald Trump a racist and you compare him to a politician of another era, the avowed segregationist George Wallace, who also was the governor of Alabama and ran for president on an independent ticket in 1968. George Wallace was a guest on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. in 1968. I want to show you a clip of one of their exchanges that I think will resonate with you. Let’s take a look.

BUCKLEY: It’s clear part of the historical record, which I think nobody who isn’t a cynic will dispute, that the South not only didn’t encourage its Negroes to vote, but encouraged them not to vote.

 

WALLACE: In Alabama, people were not allowed to vote if they couldn’t read or write or sign their name, and take a simple literacy test, in which the answers to the test were right on the test itself. 

 

BUCKLEY: Once again, I’m not going to, here, to substantiate the fact that the Negroes have not had the same civil liberties in the South that the white people have, because this would be a venture in redundancy.

HOOVER: He says, ‘this would be a venture in redundancy.’ Look, so here you have George Wallace, who is a Southern segregationist, defending voter suppression in the form of literacy tests, debating Buckley, who is, you know, leading an emerging movement of modern conservatism, calling him out for voter suppression. So what’s your reaction?

STEVENS: Well, I wish that that side of William Buckley was the dominant side in the Republican Party today. Because I think that voter suppression in the 2020 race is basically accepted by the Trump campaign and, by default, Republicans, as the key to victory. And I think you’re going to see it playing out. You’re going to see it in legal ways. You’re going to see it in as many illegal ways as they can get away with, and quasi-legal ways. It’s symbolic of a great failure of the Republican Party.

HOOVER: So, Democrats moving forward, you know, they end up rejecting George Wallace. They reject him over his racism. And he lost the Democratic Party’s nomination for president 1964. You write about it in your book and your quote is, “The rejection of Wallace was as much a statement for the Democratic Party as the acceptance of Trump by the Republican Party.” Explain that.

STEVENS: The Party didn’t accept George Wallace. They went in a different direction. It’s fascinating to think, had Wallace won the nomination, what would the Democratic Party establishment have done? I’d like to think, and I think I’m right, that they would’ve rejected George Wallace. And maybe it would’ve cost them an election, but they would have saved the soul of the Party. With Trump, the Party just acquiesced to Trump. Now, you know, to me, the key moment in this is December 2015 when Trump comes out for a Muslim ban, which is a religious test. So what should have happened there is that Reince Priebus, who is chairman of the Party, and other Republican leaders, should have come out and said, ‘look, if we stand for anything, it’s the Constitution. I mean, that is sort of the essence of being a conservative. This is a religious test. We can’t stop Donald Trump from running. We can’t stop people from voting for him. But this is not going to be the Republican Party.’ So I think there’s a lot of reasons that didn’t happen. And now Donald Trump controls the Republican Party.

HOOVER: Let’s go to Kamala Harris. You know, the Democratic Party, Joe Biden has nominated the first African American woman to be on the ticket as a vice presidential candidate. Has this bolstered his chances of winning?

STEVENS: Yes. I felt that Kamala Harris was the best pick for him. And one of the advantages of picking somebody who’s run for president before is you know what you’re getting with their culture, who comes with this candidate. To me, this is all about the nonwhite vote. So I think — I can’t tell you how much picking Kamala Harris helps Biden turn out nonwhite vote — but I think the not picking of an African American woman when there are qualified African American women options would have been terribly detrimental to the Biden candidacy. 

HOOVER: So if you were advising a Republican Party that you respected, how would you advise them to attack Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the V.P. pick?

STEVENS: If you believe, like I do, that this is all about nonwhite turnout, I can’t think of a better way to guarantee you’re gonna have record nonwhite turnout than the path they’ve gone down now, which is to play the race card and to attack Kamala Harris, at a level we have never seen by a president, certainly this last two centuries. And I just don’t think it works. I think it’s a classic miscalculation politically. And trying to make suburban housewives – good luck calling them ‘suburban housewives’– fear Black people, which Donald Trump has embarked on his campaign to… I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s going to work. I think it’s going to head to a historic defeat.

HOOVER: Well, Stuart, then help me understand how you understand the fact that Donald Trump still has very strong support within the Republican Party. Self-identified Republican voters — 85, 95, somewhere in there — support him and they’re going to vote for him. And, you know, they’re disenchanted with your old boss, Mitt Romney. They think he’s, you know, his brand is tarnished right now. You know that even though they are repulsed by the behavior of Donald Trump, those people still believe in the conservative principles that you say the Party has rejected, and that the apparatus of Republican politics will provide them, with policies that will be better for the economy, probably better for deregulation, better for, you know, America’s stance in the world. All these people who support the Republican Party still, right? They still believe in, frankly, the policies that Republicans have believed in all along. 

STEVENS: So I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that there are these principles out there that they think they’re voting for. I think they’re voting for power. I think they’re voting to beat Democrats. And this is why I compare the Party to a cartel. I mean, nobody asked OPEC what’s it’s higher moral purpose. It sells oil. Why do narco cartels exist? They sell dope. Why does the Republican Party exist? To beat Democrats. I mean, say what you will about Elizabeth Warren. She can articulate a theory of government. You can hate it, you can love it, but you can argue with her and she can defend it. Who in the Republican Party with credibility can articulate a theory, backed up by reality, of what it is to be a conservative today? I don’t know of anybody. 

HOOVER: But you were in it for ideas, or do you think, you know, you were in it for power, too? 

STEVENS: Listen, I probably represent, and I have for a long time, the worst of the American political system. You know, I’m a political consultant. You know, I never worked in government. Now, you know, there’s a contradiction in how I feel, that I wrestle with, because I work for people I like, people I respected. I mean, they were good people. If they saw you stopped on the side of the road they’d stop and help you. If they lived next door to you they’d be a great neighbor. So I think it’s a collective failure of the Party not to stand for what it said it stood for. Now, I really did believe this stuff. and as I’ve said–

HOOVER: Do you not believe any of it anymore? Or are there conservative ideas that you still stand by?

STEVENS: I still believe in it.  People say, you know, ‘well, OK, Donald Trump is this horrible person but what about Bill Clinton?’ I go, ‘I was against Bill Clinton. I worked against Bill Clinton.’ I believed this stuff. I believed that we needed to restore honor and dignity to the White House, It’s the same White House. So why don’t we need to restore honor and dignity to it again? Just because it’s not our guy? You know, I don’t–

HOOVER: But what about the ideas? I mean, there are successful center right politicians, right? You, in fact, three of the most successful governors in the country are center right politicians. They’re Republicans in blue states. They’re Larry Hogan and Charlie Baker and Phil Scott. You know that, you’re in Vermont, right? So, I mean, what about those guys?

STEVENS: Well it’s almost like a different Party. Now,  I worked for all of those guys. I love them. They’re wildly popular. If the Republican Party really wanted to operate like a business, it would be all over these guys saying, like, ‘dude, teach us what you know. How do we become more like you?’ Because if we can win these states in a presidential race, we’re going to own the world. Instead, they treat them with sort of benign neglect. And it just shows how far Trumpism has become ingrained in these states. And how it’s not going to go away after hopefully Trump loses. 

HOOVER: You worked for Mitt Romney in 2012. You helped run his campaign. And there was a moment in the Romney campaign where Mitt Romney accepted Donald Trump’s endorsement. I’m going to show you a clip of that. 

TRUMP: It’s my honor, real honor and privilege to endorse Mitt Romney. So Governor Romney, go out and get them. You can do it.

ROMNEY: There are some things that you just can’t imagine happening in your life. This is one of them. Being in Donald Trump’s magnificent hotel and having his endorsement is a delight.

HOOVER: You write in the book, “in the American political system the major political parties should serve a circuit breaker function to deny the exploitation of the darkest side of our politics.” Looking back on that moment, did you help legitimize Donald Trump? I mean, this is the man who ran against Obama on the birther…

STEVENS: I mean, this probably wouldn’t have happened had it not been for me so I should take the hit on this. So what’s interesting is we started getting calls, I started getting calls, you know, from Donald Trump’s people: ‘Mr. Trump has cleared his schedule and is free to travel, leave Nevada, with Governor Romney.’ And it was like, no, that’s not going to happen, we’re not going to do that. And what was fascinating talking to Michael Cohen and the other people, they literally couldn’t understand it. They thought you’re saying that because you didn’t want to inconvenience Donald Trump. So we said no to Donald Trump…

HOOVER: So you actually feel that so you actually feel that you did play the circuit breaker function with Donald Trump as much as you could?

STEVENS: Well, listen we– the idea that those 10 minutes with Mitt Romney legitimized Donald Trump, I think is an absurdity. It was 10 minutes, that’s it, that’s all it was, in a campaign that was like a lot of ten minutes. 

HOOVER: Let’s talk about the Lincoln Project. 

STEVENS: Yeah

LINCOLN PROJECT AD: “America is better than Donald Trump…” 

HOOVER: You’re an adviser to the Lincoln Project. What is the goal of the Lincoln Project in 2020? 

STEVENS: Well, our immediate goal is to beat Donald Trump and to beat Trumpism. We really see ourselves as trying to stand for American democracy, American values. We’re just campaign consultants. And we know how to do some stuff. And we’re faced with kind of three choices right? We either support Donald Trump. Well that’s not going to happen. Do nothing. Well, that kind of stinks, or work to beat Trump. So we know how to do certain things, we’re just doing those to try to beat Trump. We see Donald Trump as being the most anti conservative president, really, of our lifetime. And it offends us, and we don’t understand why others in the Republican Party don’t feel the way we do. But, apparently they don’t. So we’re going to go out and do what we’re going to do. And hopefully it will have some impact. I think it already has had some impact. I think that we distracted Trump, and every hour that the Trump campaign isn’t focused on Biden and he’s over there like fuming about the Lincoln Project or responding to an ad that we did, that’s a good day for the Biden campaign. So we’re going to keep at it.

HOOVER: One of the things you’re also doing is attacking every Republican senator who is up for reelection that didn’t vote against Donald Trump for impeachment. And I wonder if the strategy, sort of the burn-the-house-down strategy, doesn’t enable the Party to move forward. 

LINCOLN PROJECT AD: “Susan Collins never stands up to Donald Trump…”

HOOVER: Somebody like Susan Collins, who has only voted with Donald Trump 46 percent of the time in the last Congress. Is that the kind of person you want to get rid of in the Republican Party?

STEVENS: Well, you know, if you go back to the George Wallace analogy. George Wallace actually did some good stuff as governor. He passed free textbooks. But nobody’s remembered as the free-textbooks George Wallace supporter. And I think Trump is the same. That when you have a racist as president, you have a moral obligation to oppose that prejudice and to oppose his racist policies. So what happened a few weeks ago, the President of the United States, at the White House, went out and wished best wishes to a woman who had just been arrested at the center of an international child rape ring. 

HOOVER: Of course, you’re talking about Ghislaine Maxwell, who was Jeffrey Epstein’s former partner.

STEVENS: It is the most disgusting, appalling thing. And if you go along with that then what else does it matter? Well, OK you’re going to vote for like lower marginal tax rates and corporations. Big deal. If you really think that’s going to be remembered? When you have Donald Trump out there attacking judges by name and jurors by name, you really think you’re defending the American judicial system more by voting for one judge over another? I don’t think so.

HOOVER: What happens if Nikki Haley gets the Republican nomination in 2024?

STEVENS: I’ll do everything I can to beat her. I find her behavior appalling. She thinks that you can negotiate with Trumpism. I think it’s like negotiating with segregation. You can’t. I mean, I grew up in the South, a lot of really good people, they wouldn’t have said a bad word to an African American or used a slur, they’d cut off their hand before they did that, but they were segregationist. And Nikki Haley thinks that she sort of can praise Charlie Kirk, say, you know, Jared Kushner’s a genius and then represent the new Republican Party. It’s like, no. You can’t have it both ways. You understood what Trump was, you saw what Trump was, you opposed Trump in the primary. And then he offered you a job, you took it, you went along with Trumpism. No. Trump’s a moral test. So I would take somebody who really believed in Trump and could back that up than someone who doesn’t believe in Trump and goes along with Trump. I just find that appaling. 

HOOVER: So what’s next for you? 

STEVENS: Oh, listen, I don’t think there’s any place in the Republican Party for me. I’ve been pretty clear about how I feel and the Party’s been pretty clear about how it feels, and I think the Party’s going to win. So I’m going to work with Democrats to my involvement in politics. I mean, the way I see it, really, is that the future of the country is going to be decided by the battle within the Democratic Party. So I really see there’s three parties in America now. We say, why do we have a two Party system. I’d say we have three, because there’s really two parties, at least within the Democratic Party, kind of an AOC/Sanders wing and say a Biden wing. So whoever wins that battle, that’s what’s going to decide most of the major policy in America. So I’d rather be part of that decision making. And, you know, I spent up all these years attacking Democrats, it’s not like all of the sudden I think they’re perfect. But I think they’ve remained truer to what they said that they believed than Republicans did. And I’ll– there are a lot of people out there I respect, a lot of friends of mine, they say ‘oh I can’t vote for Biden I can’t vote for Trump. I’m going to do something else, like write in my mom, or whatever.’ That’s just not my choice. I’ll enthusiastically vote for Biden and I’ll enthusiastically support Democrats.

HOOVER: Stuart Stevens, thank you for coming to Firing Line. Thanks for your time. 

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