On the latest episode of Inside the Hive, former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens described the GOP under Donald Trump as a party of cynics, stooges, racists, and obsequious enablers whose profiles in cowardice bear an uncomfortable resemblance to 1930s Germany. “When I talk to Republican politicians, I hear Franz von Papen,” he says, referencing the German chancellor who convinced Germans that so-called radical leftists were a far greater threat than Adolf Hitler. “They all know that Trump is an idiot. They all know that he’s uniquely unqualified to be president. But they convinced themselves that he was a necessity.”
Not surprisingly, Stevens, an adviser to two George W. Bush presidential campaigns and a top strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 bid against Barack Obama, has become the latest apostate to his party, declaring in his best-selling book, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, that Republicans have sacrificed every last belief and principle they held dear on the bonfire of Trump’s vanity. And now, not even the catastrophically mismanaged coronavirus pandemic can wake them from their stupor.
“It is the combination of the anti-intellectualism, the anti-education elements of the Republican Party, and the anti-elite elements of the Republican Party, so-called, that have culminated in this toxic brew that is killing tens of thousands of Americans,” says Stevens, who recently joined the independent Never Trump organization the Lincoln Project. “I mean, more Americans are going to die because of this combination of political beliefs than major wars. This virus [is] attacking Americans. And Donald Trump is making it a lot worse, and we all know this. But Republicans won’t even stand up to defend America.”
Consequently, Stevens calls Trump a “traitor” to his country. “I really think he is against America,” he says, blaming the Republican Party for “a complete collapse of responsibility that they had to defend democracy in America.” The following is an edited transcript of two conversations with Stevens conducted by Joe Hagan.
Vanity Fair: Stuart Stevens, welcome to Inside the Hive. We’ve seen a lot of madness this summer and I can’t figure out how to think about both the Republican National Convention and what’s happened afterwards, and the things that the Trump campaign has decided this election is going to turn on: Chaos in the cities to scare suburbanites, voter suppression, and then the prospect of some kind of fly-by-night vaccine the week before the election. As a tactician, what’s your analysis of whether this is a good strategy or not?
Stuart Stevens: I think it’s fascinating. You have to assume that the Trump campaign did a lot of research, polling, focus groups to determine who does Donald Trump need to be to win this race. And they tried to present that image in their convention. That would be a person who cares about people, who likes Black [people]. Black people like him, women like him. And so then the convention ends and two days later he’s celebrating a 17-year-old kid who shoots two unarmed protesters. So it’s clear they understand that Donald Trump shouldn’t be the Donald Trump that he is to win.
I look at the race as very stable. I wrote a piece in the Washington Post saying what’s happening in Wisconsin, I think, helps the Democrats. I know it does. Look, this race is about two things that are interrelated: the worst economy in the history of the country and more people dying of a disease than at any time in the history of the country. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men are not going to make it about anything else. We have a 9/11 every three days in the country, you can’t ignore it. You can’t just syntactically put it in the past tense and think that works. You’re not diagramming a sentence. You’re living through a pandemic. So until Trump comes to grips with that in some coherent way, he’ll continue to lose.