Veteran GOP Strategist Takes On Trump — And His Party — In ‘It Was All A Lie’

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President Trump speaks at a rally in Manchester, N.H., on Feb. 10, 2020. «I’ve never heard any Republican office-holder speak of President Trump as if he should be president,» says GOP strategist Stuart Stevens.

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Code Switch
Why Did Black Voters Flee The Republican Party In The 1960s?

I think Reince Priebus, who is the chairman of the party, and there’s a lot of credit for initiating that so-called autopsy. It’s always difficult to be self-critical. And what’s fascinating about that is the conclusions were fairly obvious. You had to appeal more to non-white, yet appeal more to younger voters who had to appeal more to women. But it was presented not only as a political necessity to win elections — because we’d only won the popular vote once since [the] 1988 presidential votes — it was presented as a moral mandate, that if you are going to deserve the right to be the governing party of this big, confusing, loud, changing country, you needed to reflect that. So then Donald Trump comes along, and you can almost hear this audible sigh of relief and all that got thrown out and go, ‘Well, thank God we don’t have to pretend we care about this stuff. We can just win with white folks and we can just be comfortable with that.’ And I mean, it just showed how phony it was.

On Trump’s campaign strategy for the fall

It is going to be the ugliest campaign we’ve ever seen by a desperate man.

Stuart Stevens on Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign

It’s going to be a racial grievance campaign unlike we have ever seen on the national stage. I think it is going to be the ugliest campaign we’ve ever seen, by a desperate man. So Donald Trump is behind now and he’s talking about suspending the elections. Think about a week out if he’s behind: If I was a Canadian minister of defense, I’d be worried he’s going to invade Ottawa. This is an unstable man who is headed to potentially a historic defeat. And I think he’s going to wave the bloody shirt and try to scare white voters, and I think they’re going to do everything they can to suppress non-white votes. Legal, illegal, quasi-legal. That’s what they’re going to try to do because they think that’s the only way they can win.

On what he believes is next for the Republican Party

I really am extraordinarily negative on the prospects of the party, and it’s an unusual position for me because I’ve always been sort of the eternal optimist and always thought that we could come back from any deficit. I came across a statistic recently that just absolutely blew my mind: Of Americans 15 years and under, the majority are non-white. … And what does that mean for the Republican Party? It’s just a stage-4 cancer warning and the party gives no reason that it’s going to change.

So I see the Republican Party, [what will] happening nationally, as what happens to the Republican Party in California. So California was the beating heart and soul of the Republican Party. It was an electoral citadel that we based all victory on. And now where’s the Republican Party? It’s in third place, not second, third [in registration]. … And the Republican Party, really, for the most part, became irrelevant in the debate of policy in California. They’ve made themselves irrelevant. And I see the same thing happening with the national Republican Party.

There is a market for a center right party and a need for it in America. I think something else will evolve. But to get a sense of how deep Trumpism is instilled, there’s another Republican Party out there and that’s these governors. So if you look at these very popular governors in blue states like [Larry] Hogan in Maryland, Charlie Baker, Massachusetts, Phil Scott here in Vermont, I work for all these guys. And if the Republican Party had any sense, I’d say, look, these guys are wildly popular in the hardest market. What can we learn from them? Instead, the party kind of treats them with benign neglect. But each of these governors, wildly popular as they are, they can’t pick their own party chairman. They’re Trump people, and the idea that a governor couldn’t pick a party chairman is so mind boggling, it just shows how deep Trumpism has become in the party.

Sam Briger and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.