Stuart Stevens has been a top strategist for Republican presidential candidates George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. His knack for advertising and media has helped conservatives like Haley Barbour, Thad Cochran, and Roy Blunt get elected. Stevens has been many things — a TV writer for Emmy-winning television programs, travel writer and media strategist — but he has always been an unapologetic Republican.
Donald Trump changed that.
“It’s just been a complete collapse,” Stevens told the Yahoo News
Skullduggery podcast in reference to the Republican Party since Trump’s election. “The only thing I can compare it to is the collapse of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union.”
Stevens said he is registering as a Democrat in this election, abandoning the party he has worked for throughout his professional life. He said he hopes to expand upon his work designing ads for the Republican “Never Trumpers” at the Lincoln Project by working for the Democrats in the future because he believes “the big questions that affect us as a country are going to be decided in the Democratic Party.”
In short, Stevens said, the Republican Party as he knew it is dead. He said he would even vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders, the self-designated “democratic socialist,” over Trump because “the necessity of defeating Donald Trump is so urgent.”
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.
