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How did leading Republicans go from being Cold Warriors to apologists for Russian President Vladimir Putin?
For insight, we turned to Stuart Stevens, who knows Republican politics from the inside. He was a top Republican political operative who worked on five presidential campaigns, including the campaigns of Mitt Romney in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.
Stevens, who lives in Vermont, now finds himself inside a very different political operation. He is a central player in the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and argues the current Republican Party should be “burned to the ground.” His latest bestselling book is, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”
“I think that there is a large element of the conservative movement that has become a pro-Putin autocratic movement. … Donald Trump did not change the Republican Party. He revealed it. And for those of us who worked in the Republican Party for a long time, it’s a devastating conclusion. But I think it’s the only honest one,” Stevens told The Vermont Conversation.
“We have an autocratic movement in America that is threatening democracy itself,” Stevens said. “They’ll be for democracy when they win and they won’t be for it when they lose. That means you’re not a democracy. And if we don’t wake up and face this, we’re going to lose democracy.”
Below is a partial transcript, edited for length and clarity.
David Goodman
Trump conservatives seem to be in crisis over the invasion of Ukraine. Politico has a story this week about an emergency meeting held by pro-Trump conservatives in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It featured some of the leading lights of the party, including JD Vance, who’s running for Senate in Ohio. He told the crowd, “Using American power to do the dirty work of Europe is a pretty bad idea.” That is a pretty remarkable statement, given that we fought World Wars I and II based on the idea that defending Europe was in the basic interest of the U.S. and we refer to World War II veterans as “the greatest generation.” What’s going on here?
Stuart Stevens
I think that the compromising of the Republican Party by Putin and Russian intelligence is the most successful intelligence action in modern history. It really isn’t complicated. Russia supported Trump in 2016. We know that. You can argue whether or not they made a difference. That’s always difficult in politics because causality is the hardest thing to determine. But we know that they made a concerted, massive effort to elect Donald Trump. They were so successful that when this was exposed, conservatives defended it by calling it a “Russian hoax.” Can you imagine, if you’re a Russian intelligence officer, how you’re chortling? At one time, the Republican Party was the chief antagonist to the Soviet Union, then Russia. And now that party has become an apologist for Putin. So Russia supports Donald Trump. Donald Trump gets elected. Donald Trump does everything he can to weaken NATO. He tries to leverage critical defense weapons like Javelins (anti-tank missiles) with Ukrainian President (Volodymyr) Zelenskyy. The result of that is a nine-month delay in arming and training Ukrainians. It is no exaggeration that a lot of Ukrainians are dying because Donald Trump tried to leverage Zelenskyy. And Republicans still wouldn’t impeach Trump.
A large element of the conservative movement has become a pro-Putin autocratic movement. They see Putin as a white Christian nationalist. There are no gay people in Russia. You never see any women in power in Russia. It is not a democracy. Putin is a strong man. All of this draws much of the Republican Party.
Donald Trump did not change the Republican Party. He revealed it. And for those of us who worked in the Republican Party for a long time, it’s a devastating conclusion. But I think it’s the only honest one.
David Goodman
For the Republican Party that you and I grew up with, the Cold War was a foundational part of the Republican brand. In any national election in my lifetime until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the candidate who was considered tougher on Russia — that could determine the outcome of an election. It is head-spinning where we are at this moment with Republicans defending Putin against the U.S. It’s as if Sen. Cory Booker in 10 years was running by crusading against civil rights and gay rights. How did we get here?
Stuart Stevens
A lot of people were wrong about Trump in 2016, but it’s hard to find anybody who was more wrong than me. I didn’t think he could win the general election, and when he did, I really asked myself exactly these kinds of questions. That led me to really start trying to understand the party. And that ultimately led me to write this book, “It Was All a Lie.” I think that a lot of the ideas of the Republican Party were presented as values. They were, in fact, marketing slogans. Because I don’t think that you abandon deeply held beliefs in a few years unless there’s tremendous contrary information. It’s not that the Republican Party drifted away. They’re completely opposite now.
The key here is what the Republican Party has become. It’s not a normal political party in an American sense. It has become an autocratic movement. There is no conservative philosophy that anyone involved in the Republican Party can articulate with any consistency or conviction. It exists to beat Democrats, to gain power. And that is why cartels exist, not political parties. Nobody asks OPEC or a narco cartel, What is your higher purpose?
Republicans are drawn to Putin because he is so much of what they fantasize they would like the world to be. And when people say, Well how can Putin be a representative of Christian nationalists when he’s not a Christian? My answer to that is, Have you ever met Donald Trump? He’s the darling of these people. We’re at this point where we don’t know who’s going to win this battle. I can’t tell you that the autocratic forces aren’t going to win.
Modern democracies usually don’t end in violent coups like in Chile. They end at the ballot box or in the courtroom. That’s what happened in Hungary. And that is what is trying to happen now in the United States. And at the heart of it is race. Because 85% of the Trump coalition is white. The country is 57% white. Of the new Americans in the new census, 1 out of 10 was white. Trump backers see this. They know this. So their only hope is to change the way people vote and to make it more difficult for those who are nonwhite to vote. That is a concerted effort. It’s organized. It’s well financed, and it should not be taken lightly.
David Goodman
It’s not a new idea that race is at the heart of this. The Southern strategy that Nixon utilized with great success was built on racial grievance. And you were part of that enterprise of exploiting race to electoral advantage. So what are you surprised about now?
Stuart Stevens
There was always these two strands of the Republican Party post World War II. There was the (Dwight D.) Eisenhower strand, which was the boring, governing strand. And there was the Joe McCarthy strand, conspiratorial, xenophobic, often racist, nongoverning. Those two strands sort of fought each other out at different times in the Republican Party.
Those of us who were drawn to George W. Bush and the concept of compassionate conservatism, we believed we were the dominant gene. The great failure of the Republican Party was not to appeal to nonwhite voters. And Ken Mehlman, who was Republican Party chairman, went before the NAACP in 2005 and apologized for the Southern strategy. Does that matter? I think it does.
The reality is that the Republican Party never came up with the fundamental political policy that would appeal to those at the bottom edge of the economic spectrum who were not white. We used to think it was a communication problem. But the problem wasn’t that African Americans didn’t understand the Republican Party. The problem for the Republican Party is that African Americans did understand them. And they knew exactly what it was.
In 1956, Eisenhower gets 45% of the Black vote; Nixon got in the 30s. Then in 1964, Goldwater campaigns against the Civil Rights Act, and it drops down to 7%. So the Republican Party in 1964 has become a predominantly white party. They had a choice: Do the hard work to examine what it was about your political philosophy and proposals that were not appealing to these people. Or just accept that you’re going to be a white grievance party and go all in. And the tragic choice that they made was to become a white grievance party.
David Goodman
What is the fascination with autocracy in the modern Republican Party?
Stuart Stevens
It’s simple. The problem with democracy is two things. One, somebody’s got to be willing to lose. A fundamental tenet of democracy is that everybody gets to vote. So that means people unlike you get to vote. At the core of that is this debate: Should only men vote? Should only white people vote? The Republican Party is dominated by white men on all levels. And it is an unwillingness to accept that others should have an equal voice.
There are lots of gay people in Russia. There are lots of women in Russia. But Putin says I don’t have to listen to them. I can deny their existence. There is a willingness to ignore what is true and create your own false narrative. This is the essence of George Orwell’s 1984.
There is no difference between Donald Trump saying, “I won this election,” and Putin saying, “There are no war crimes,” or saying, “We’re not going to believe Covid is really out there. It’s a government plot.” Why do so many conservatives go out and attack the Mueller report and say it is a Russian hoax? “Hoax” is a favorite word of autocrats. They accuse people of what they are.
America is expected to become a majority minority country by 2045. So if your essence is a sense of entitlement for being white and male, this is terrifying. This is why you want an autocrat. There’s a crazy logic to it.
David Goodman
Let’s turn to the future of the country and the future of democracy. You are a close watcher of elections and of polling. Voter suppression laws are being passed by the dozen in Republican-led states. What do you believe will be the impact of these voter suppression efforts?
Stuart Stevens
First, you’ve got to step back and recognize that there’s only three times the last 125 years that a party in power gained seats in the off year. So there are strong historical precedents that Democrats lose the House in 2022, and it shouldn’t be taken as a catastrophic event for the Democratic Party. It should be taken as that’s how American politics works.
If I was running the Democratic Party, my message to Democrats would be to nationalize this race. Make it a race about democracy. Make it unpatriotic to vote Republican, and people will respond to that. If it’s about inflation, you’re going to lose, so I would try to make it about something that you have a chance to win. I would say to the Democrats, walk with confidence, get a little swagger. You’re right, they’re wrong. There’s more of you than them.
David Goodman
What did you see on display in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson? Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female Supreme Court justice, was confirmed with a 99-0 vote. There was talk that if another justice were to get a lopsided majority like that, it might be the first Black female justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson. That’s not what happened.
Stuart Stevens
At the heart of the Republican Party is a deep racism. Now when I say this, all my old Republican friends go through the roof and tell me, “Are you trying to say that the (74 million) people who voted for Trump are racist?” My answer to that is well, there probably are 74 million racists in the country, so don’t act so surprised. But secondly, you don’t have to be a racist to vote for Trump. You just have to be willing to accept that something is more important to you than having a racist as president.
A lot of the message I heard from these Republican senators was congratulating Judge Jackson for rising to a point where they could vote against her. This is where we are. Bipartisanship is a myth. This is one of my frustrations. If you’re sitting in the White House and you’re working for (President Joe) Biden and you’re trying to get Republican votes, here’s what’s different: 70% of Republicans don’t think you’re a legal president. That’s never happened before. That’s 1860. We gloss over this.
No one will be nominated for president in 2024 on the Republican side who will aggressively assert that they are running against a legal president. So what does that mean? If Joe Biden is not a legal president, that means we’re an occupied country. It means we’re not a democracy. So the 2024 election is not going to be about who’s going to win in a democratic system. The 74 million are saying, Can we restore what has been stolen from us? This is in a country with 400 million guns. We are in a civil war. We just don’t acknowledge it.
There is a great lust for normalcy that we all have. We’re tired of wearing a mask. We have a normal-looking president, right? We have a normal White House. Fine. Things are normal.
But things aren’t normal. This has never happened. We have an autocratic movement in America that is threatening democracy itself. They’ll be for democracy when they win, and they won’t be for it when they lose. That means you’re not a democracy. And if we don’t wake up and face this, we’re going to lose democracy.
This is where we suffer from the sin of American exceptionalism. Why can’t we become (an autocracy) like Hungary? There’s absolutely no reason. Everything is in place. If you go back and read the book “How Democracies Die,” they describe 10 steps to how democracies die. We are way ahead of schedule for what they thought was going to happen. You have a party that is an autocratic movement that has taken over a major political party. They have a major propaganda wing. They have tremendous finances. They have stormtroopers. They have shock troops. And they are working to build a legal theory to support autocracy.
Those are all the elements you need — they are missing nothing. If we sit over here and Democrats start arguing about are we going to have a $3.1 billion Build Back Better bill or a $1.8 billion bill, I can guarantee you in 20 years, no one on God’s green earth is going to remember that. But they will remember if 2024 is the last election in America that resembled any election in our lifetime.
Whenever I say this, Democrats say, “Who the hell are you to tell the Democratic Party what to do?” And they’re right. All I can do is beg. Because I know these people. And as bad as you think they are, they’re worse. This is what they want. They don’t want the same thing that most of us want. And they are a minority, just like National Socialists were a minority. Just like (Hungarian Prime Minister) Viktor Orban started out as a minority. And it is extraordinarily dangerous.
There’s two tests here. So you’re Mitch McConnell, you go to sleep on Jan. 5, 2021, and you’re Senate majority leader. You wake up on Jan. 6. You’re minority leader, and your colleagues are running for their lives in their own office. And you still won’t vote to hold that person responsible. That’s one test. If they’re trying to kill your colleagues and you still won’t vote, what else are they going to do?
David Goodman
It’s worth remembering that at that moment, Mitch McConnell held in his hands the ability to remove Donald Trump as a political force.
Stuart Stevens
It’s worse than that. To this day, McConnell says he will vote for Donald Trump if he’s the Republican nominee. As far as I know, every Republican leader who’s voted for Trump says they will support him again. What do you do with that? You accept it. They’re not going to change.
The other test is what’s happening in Ukraine. The Republican Party is a pro-Putin party. The official platform of the Republican Party is whatever Donald Trump wants. And Donald Trump is a pro-Putin candidate, 100%. If Donald Trump was president today, what would be happening? How many dead Ukrainians would there be? You don’t think Russia would be on the steps of Warsaw? Of course they would.
I just wish to God that Democrats understand that Joe Biden is about the business of saving the world. It is like Churchill. All of these things that people said were negative about Biden — he’s been there forever; he was vice president; he was a senator — all of those are strengths now. Because he has this experience. He has the steadiness, the level emotions to be able to deal with this stuff. And he has serious people working with him.
Don’t forget: Donald Trump’s campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, foreign policy adviser, national security Adviser, chief political adviser, personal lawyer — they all are felons. All of them. So that’s who Donald Trump picked first. So this frustration that a lot of progressives have with Biden because he’s not delivering on all this stuff — I get that. But if you don’t think that Jan. 6 was just practice, you’re crazy. If you don’t think that they are determined to change this country, you’re wrong. They are.
David Goodman
Well on that note, Stuart Stevens, we’re going have to leave it there. Thanks so much for joining us on The Vermont Conversation.
Stuart Stevens
Thanks, David. I’ll try to be less depressing next time.
David Goodman
I won’t hold you to that.
