A review by jaredpence
It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump by Stuart Stevens

3.0

Stevens seems angry, especially in audio book format. His arguments are compelling and I was persuaded that Trump is the culmination of the direction the Republican Party has been headed in for the last 50 years, not an aberration. Stevens’s experience and confessional guilt about participating in Republican campaigns gives him loads of credibility and makes him fully believable. The argument he makes about the impending demise of the Republican Party (if they don’t shift their approach of upholding themselves as the white, racist party) was also convincing. I felt a little frustrated that his complaints against Trump often focused on criticizing his character (he talked about how Trump paid off a pornstar and talked about wanting to date his own daughter a lot). I wish that instead of focusing solely on Trump’s moral bankruptcy Stevens equally emphasized Trump’s harmful policies since many of the Trump defenders I know seem willing to overlook his lack of ethics and morals because they support his policies. I think part of Stevens’s point is that that willingness to overlook morals is precisely the corrupting problem of the Republican Party (they alway choose party and power over country and ethics), but it seems to minimize racist, classist, and disingenuous policies which are perhaps even more harmful than the hypocrisy and selfishness that characterize Trump’s personality.