National and Minnesota Report
Stuart Stevens, as a Republican operative, is accepting responsibility for Donald J Trump (R) and is broadcasting the fact, the GOP is steeped in racism and bigotry. Last night, in an interview on the Newshour, based on his recently published book; It was all a lie. How the Republican Party became Donald Trump, he spelled it out.
At the onset, in answer to the question from Judy Woodruff, “The book is jarring. I have to say, you write about how the Republican Party, over the last half-century, its hypocrisy, what you call self-delusion, led it naturally to embrace Donald Trump and to embrace what had been its racism. Explain what you meant.
He said, “Well, I think there’s been two strains in the party. Call it an Eisenhower strain going back to the ’50s and a McCarthy strain.” You can watch the full interview or read the text here. Longtime GOP strategist says he’ll ‘work with Democrats’ to defeat Trump
With this as the foundation Stevens paints an interesting picture of a political party taken over by a virus and transformed into a cult of personality for what we consider a charlatan and carnival barker. His words if true sing a death knell for the GOP, because of the systemic component it portrays which is the embracing of racially-based divisionary tactics that isolate the GOP rather than welcome other races or cultures into their tent.
He calls out the responsible people who led up to this point, first with Sen Joseph McCarthy and the red scare, then ties his party to the Dixiecrats through George Wallace, shows the furtherance of these elements through Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America and shows it fully formed through Trumpism and his full-throat-ed expression, or rather devolution to White Supremacy and the Antebellum South.
It’s ironic, that the party of Lincoln has reversed itself from freeing the slaves to becoming their overseers. If as he says in the result of a Trump loss, “For myself, Judy, I’m going to work with Democrats. I think that the future of America, the policy is going to be decided by decisions inside the Democratic Party.” The Trump effect will remain and the GOP will become a footnote in history and fallen due to its eroded foundation.
The question is how far will this impact the 2020 election results? There are pockets of Trump voters concentrated enough to hold some power, but when the head is cut-off and burned how will the body survive? We will see the results on November 3rd, because as we predict the 1,322,951 votes he received in 2016 are his high water mark and the Republican fortunes of US Senate candidate Jason Lewis, Congressmen Jim Hagedorn and Pete Stauber, Michelle Fischbach, the MN House bid for majority and the MN Senate’s ability to retain it, are all tied to Trump’s coattails, and we believe he doesn’t have any. We excluded Congressman Tom Emmer from this list because the principles of Trump are quite evident in the 6th Congressional District, that is until redistricting.
Stevens also penned an opinion piece in USA Today entitled Trump’s Republican Party is defined by racism and those who tolerate it: GOP strategist
There is an expected take on his book, which obviously the National Review needed to make ‘It Was All a Lie’: A Sanctimonious Stuart Stevens Scolds the GOP
Of course, you can always read parts of the book on Amazon, It was all a lie. How the Republican Party became Donald Trump.