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IT WAS ALL A LIE

Stuart Stevens

How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

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.

Stuart Stevens is the author of seven previous books, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, and Outside, among other publications. He has written extensively for television shows, including Northern Exposure, Commander in Chief, and K Street. For twenty-five years, he was the lead strategist and media consultant for some of the nation's toughest political campaigns. He attended Colorado College; Pembroke College, Oxford; Middlebury College; and UCLA film school. He is a former fellow of the American Film Institute.
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Published 2020-08-01 by Alfred A. Knopf

Comments

"An epitaph, of interest to all politics junkies, for a formerly venerable party by a champion-turned-gravedigger."

"Washington in 2020 often beggars belief: an American President answering a deadly pandemic with ignorance, inflaming racial unrest with racism, stoking violent confrontations while his fearful party stands mute... What if the accounting comes from one of the Republican Party's most accomplished political strategists, an insider provoked by Trump to reconsider his life's work? In fact, it has. Stevens dissects several categories of deception. Though he could not have anticipated it -- the book, completed last September, does not include the words 'coronavirus' or 'George Floyd' -- events of recent days keep offering improbably-vivid evidence for his assessments."

"A blistering attack on the modern Republican Party and its wholesale surrender to Donald Trump... His willingness to tell the truth should serve as a model for the mea culpas that Republicans who enabled Trump's corruption, norm-shattering, and immorality owe us." (Michael A. Cohen)

New York Times bestseller! (#7 on August 23, immediately after publication)

“A sustained attack Refreshingly frank.”

Stuart Stevens on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah Read more...