{"id":"5f801fb66cee07000646ad03","slug":"it-was-all-a-lie-en","title":"It Was All a Lie","audio_url":"https://hls.blinkist.io/bibs/5f801fb66cee07000646ad03/5f801fb66cee07000646ad05-T1602232356.m4a?Expires=1642560651&Signature=KwvQTFzbGmFaFFvJLsab2ziUAzV~T22aHUPsnxGqVhQRfY4mrxQhc~L9CN1vrFBOv1sbF6FYGl~1JdkorCWeOMrqqX7x00WHUMSPMGCVvwgQAZBKoA3nYcFqwwVD13QekP3-2-tmBDQIHsZ9OiVB5lrw3YS3cxd48QoB5CdQPvOTbbPWlHGJTY83HOvmGoPrO34YHwqVxVWTFIIQqhJrlwlOCD6ajnDUu6tG0sWxpEvNCFhubiin3gzAK5ANlZMOFx2tQkppKbZ60sqNKZX80DSGm4FR7MSl15GFITkv1UTjFZIF4aGMs7WHGAWp~QLAEJUCAINxJEcYFQ4ULDMLAw__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJXJM6BB7FFZXUB4A","chapters":[{"id":"5f801fb66cee07000646ad05","title":"The precedent for Trump’s coded racist language was set by the Republican Party’s favorite son, Ronald Reagan.","text":"

Trump’s appeal to the worst, racist impulses of some white voters is nothing new in Republican politics. But Trump’s white nationalist politics, viewed by many Republicans as a unique characteristic of an unconventional president, actually have deep roots in the Republican Party. One of the most surprising precedents for Trump’s racism is Ronald Reagan, heralded by many Republicans as the shining example of everything they hold dear. As we’ll see, Reagan had a dark side – darker than many choose to admit.

The key message here is: The precedent for Trump’s coded racist language was set by the Republican Party’s favorite son, Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan is revered by many Republicans as the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln. But many don’t know – or have chosen to ignore – that Reagan used race as a magnet to attract right-leaning Democratic voters. In the run-up to his presidency, Reagan often talked about African American “welfare queens” defrauding the government. This dog whistle, or subtle, racist message that resonates with racists but may go undetected by others, was well understood by many white voters, who threw their support behind Reagan.

On the campaign trail in 1980, Reagan spoke in Mississippi’s Neshoba County. His rally was held just a few miles from where three civil rights volunteers were murdered in 1964. Not only did Reagan fail to mention the murders to his predominantly white audience, he said he believed in states’ rights fully. Now, this isn’t an overtly racist statement. But by promoting states’ rights in Mississippi, whose leaders used them as an excuse to fight integration as long as they could, he was sending a clear message. It was a racist appeal to white voters in Mississippi.

There’s a direct line between Reagan’s genteel prejudice and Trump’s sputtering white nationalism. Thirty-seven years after Reagan’s speech in Neshoba County, Trump gave a speech in Alabama, a neighboring state with an equally violent history of resisting civil rights. In his speech, again to a predominantly white audience, Trump criticized NFL players for taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police killings of unarmed Black men. “That’s a total disrespect of our heritage,” he said. No prizes for guessing who the ‘we’ in that statement is.

But as we’ll explore in the next blink, Trump’s racism isn’t just an aberration. In fact, according to Stevens, it’s actually an essential element of the modern Republican Party.

"},{"id":"5f801fb66cee07000646ad06","title":"In backing Trump, Republicans made it undeniably clear that theirs is a party of white grievance.","text":"

Though many African American voters traditionally vote Democratic, there was a time when African Americans voted for Republicans. In 1964, for example, Republican presidential candidates could expect to get up to 40 percent of the Black vote.

Obviously, that moment is long gone. By 2016, only 3 percent of African Americans considered themselves Republicans, for the simple reason that Republican policies don’t benefit Black voters. As America’s demographic shifts, Republicans’ failure to attract voters of color was one of the major reasons they struggled in the polls – before Trump.

With Trump’s election, though, Republicans were free to show the true colors of their party. And that color is white.

The key message here is: In backing Trump, Republicans made it undeniably clear that theirs is a party of white grievance.

As we learned in the last blink, Reagan used racist appeals to white voters to great effect. But actually, Richard Nixon and his political guru Pat Buchanan were the first Republicans to pioneer this strategy back in the 1960s.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what happens when a party spends decades appealing only to white voters, and, at best, ignoring everyone else. The Republican Party has become a party of white people, bitterly clinging to the racist system which privileges them.

This has not only meant subtle, coded racist language like Trump’s Alabama speech, but actual efforts to suppress the votes of young people, poorer people, and people of color. Republican efforts to do this have worked very well. In 2016, African American voter turnout declined for the first time in 20 years. In Wisconsin, Black voting rates plummeted from 78 percent in 2012 to under 50 percent in 2016. Analysts blame a restrictive voter ID law passed at the eleventh hour.

What’s more, Republican legislators consistently oppose automatic voter registration at age 18. Why? Young voters are disproportionately poorer and nonwhite – and, therefore, less likely to vote Republican.

After Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012, the Republican National Committee worried that it needed to broaden its base in order to survive. But it viewed diversity as a political necessity and nothing more. When Trump won, the Republican establishment seemed to breathe a sigh of relief that it could win without voters of color – and therefore could stop pretending to care about them.

But race isn’t the only issue about which today’s Republican Party has been deceitful and disingenuous. In the coming blinks, we’ll see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

"},{"id":"5f801fb76cee07000646ad07","title":"Despite their claims to the contrary, Republicans and the Christian right have never cared about family values.","text":"

Pundits express surprise that the Republican Party – the so-called party of family values – could champion a man like Donald Trump, who has five children by three wives and has made inappropriate sexual remarks about his daughter. But Trump doesn’t represent Republicans lowering their standards. Instead, he proves how little they ever cared about these issues in the first place. Family values never truly mattered to Republicans. They just found them useful in attacking everyone else.

The way Republicans wield family values is a weaponization of politically conservative Christianity. The Christian right would like American voters to believe that it’s the political arm of Jesus, come back to save America from its sins. Really, it’s more like a lobbyist group for white America. The politicization of Christianity as a right-wing force is more about gaining power than serving Jesus.

The key message here is: Despite their claims to the contrary, Republicans and the Christian right have never cared about family values.

Trump is just the latest in a long line of men with massive evangelical followings who have scammed the public. In fact, many of them actually live their lives in a way exactly opposite to what they preach. There are many similarities between Trump and the archetypal white megachurch preacher. They both are liars and philanderers, frauds who live extravagantly above their means. Their followers purport to value authenticity, but their cherished leaders are characterized by their elaborate artificiality – whether it’s an inscrutable comb-over or skin the color of stained Tupperware.

Many of Trump’s evangelical supporters like to say that Trump’s victory was a sign from God. Stevens finds this idea funny. If God had wanted Trump to be president, one would think he could have found a way for Trump to win the popular vote. He probably also could have arranged to do it without Russian help.

When Trump was elected, many of his evangelical supporters argued that he deserved the chance to grow into the presidency. That stepping foot into the Oval Office would inspire in him a gravitas he’d never exhibited before. In 2020, this pretense is impossible to maintain. Especially now that everyone knows that as president, Trump paid hush money to a porn star he had sex with ten days after his youngest son was born.

Distasteful as it may be, there’s some utility in watching evangelical preachers encourage their congregations to support the least religious president in history. Misogyny, dishonesty, and hypocrisy have always been present in the religious right. Only now, we can see them plainly.

"},{"id":"5f801fb76cee07000646ad08","title":"Republicans’ support of Donald Trump shows that they don’t care about fiscal responsibility.","text":"

One of the reasons Republicans supported Trump as their candidate, and then their president, was because of his business savvy and investment smarts. Stevens thinks they were either fooled or deluded. According to a 2019 New York Times report, Trump is a man, who over the course of one decade, managed to lose more money than any other American. In some years, he actually lost twice as much.

Republicans should have been able to recognize that Trump was scamming them, given the number of scams they’ve run on the American people over the years. Like Trump, the Republican Party claims to understand the importance of running the government efficiently, but it’s really just like Trump: addicted to debt and selling false promises.

The key message here is: Republicans’ support of Donald Trump shows that they don’t care about fiscal responsibility.

To understand why Stevens believes that Republicans never really cared about fiscal responsibility to begin with, we can use Bill Clinton as an example. His administration was the greatest modern-day economic success story. He was the only president in recent memory who was able to balance the budget. He even presided over the first budget surplus since 1969. And yet, he was fiercely opposed by Republicans. Not one Republican voted for his 1993 budget package. In fact, Stevens and every other political consultant in Washington made doomsday attack ads, predicting economic collapse if the budget package wasn’t repealed.

But the economy didn’t collapse. Instead, Clinton’s plan launched one of the greatest periods of prosperity in modern history. Nevertheless, Clinton was stymied at every turn by his Republican legislative colleagues and continues to be scorned by Republicans.

Republicans frequently rail against out-of-control federal spending. But actually, many Republican elected officials hesitate to cut budgets – not because of their deeply held commitment to fiscal responsibility, but because it would damage them politically. Here’s why: for every dollar people in Stevens’ home state of Mississippi pay in federal taxes, they get just over $3 back from the government. If Mississippi’s overwhelmingly Republican elected officials cut the federal budget, folks in their districts would suffer. A logical next step would be to blame their elected officials. The same is true in West Virginia, and many other predominantly rural, Republican states.

What’s more, look what’s happened with Trump in office. The first time since 2007 that Republicans controlled all three branches of government, the federal debt has increased to record levels: $2 trillion in just two years.

And yet, the Republican establishment still stands by its man.

"},{"id":"5f801fb76cee07000646ad09","title":"Trump’s presidency is an acceleration of a long-standing Republican culture of deceit.","text":"

As we’ve seen, truth is one of the greatest casualties of the Trump era. But while Trump’s lies may be the most blatant in modern political history, we can’t give him full credit for the Republican apparatus of duplicity.

In fact, the Republican machine of deception has been in the works a long time, way before Trump came to power. For decades, so-called conservatives in America have been cultivating their own culture, and attempting to seamlessly integrate it into the mainstream. Part of this has been a gradual but steady distortion of truth. Republicans have continually been testing how much truth they can withhold from civil society without total disaster. Stevens believes they’ve finally crossed that threshold with their support of Trump.

The key message here is: Trump’s presidency is an acceleration of a long-standing Republican culture of deceit.

The most important cog in the Republican machine of deception is Fox News. Cable news wasn’t always like this. But in 1987, the Federal Communications Commission stopped enforcing the fairness doctrine, which required that broadcasters cover matters of public importance in a balanced way. This was a boost for conservative media, which subsequently became a billion-dollar industry. Conservative journalism no longer needed to bother with facts or correctness.

Fox News bills itself as honest and balanced. But the way it goes about convincing its audience is clever and sneaky. Because Fox advertises a worldview that’s distinct from the majority, its commentators have to assert that everyone else simply does not have the right information.

In fact, unhindered by the need to report facts, conservative journalists are free to cover feelings. For example, Trump and the so-called birthers had a “feeling” that a Black man with the foreign-sounding name of Barack Hussein Obama couldn’t possibly be a real American. Hospital records and other incontrovertible evidence proving otherwise couldn’t dissuade them from their racist, xenophobic narrative.

Trump’s bald-faced lies as president are the logical culmination of this Republican culture of dishonesty. One scene in particular seems ripped from George Orwell’s 1984. Leading up to a visit to the UK, Trump was recorded calling Megan Markle “nasty” after being informed of comments she’d made during his campaign. Later, he tweeted “I never called Megan Markle ‘nasty.’ Made up by the Fake News Media.” By simply using the words “fake news,” Republicans have an easy rebuttal to anything that doesn’t fit their narrative.

"},{"id":"5f801fb76cee07000646ad0a","title":"The Republican political machine creates, and feeds on, fear.","text":"

We all know change is hard, and the Republican Party has designed itself to utilize the fear of change – in both its voters and its elected officials.

It’s been convenient for Republicans that America is changing quickly – which means there’s more uncertainty for them to exploit. Today, more than 44 million Americans were born in a different country. That’s the largest percentage since 1910. And this rapid change in demographics has caused some Americans to feel insecure and fearful. In his run for presidency, Donald Trump exploited these fears by vilifying immigrants and playing on the fears of white Americans.

But once again, it’s not just Trump. The leaders of today’s Republican Party have figured out that fear is the way they can push reasonable people into unreasonable positions.

The key message here is: The Republican political machine creates, and feeds on, fear.

We’ve seen that Republican politicians peddle fear to their electorate. But conservative special interest groups also put the fear of God into Republican elected officials. They make it all but impossible for Republican officials to express a nuanced point of view that diverges from the increasingly extremist party line.

The National Rifle Association is a great example. Over the course of a couple of decades, it went from a gun-safety organization to a group that rewards its leaders with millions of dollars for their ability to convince elected officials to do what they know is wrong.

For Republican elected officials, the cost for crossing an organization as powerful as the NRA is their job. In 1994, Stevens was working for a congressman from Pennsylvania, who voted against the NRA on an assault weapons ban. He was among 38 Republican congressional leaders who went against their party on the issue. Today, all 38 officials are either no longer in office or no longer Republicans. Coincidence?

Because Republicans have been cowed into silence by their fear of losing power, Trump has been given free rein to make extreme claims. These extreme claims – like an “invasion” of South and Central Americans over the southern border – result in extreme policies, like a border wall.

In the end, the impulse behind Republican support for Donald Trump is that Republicans are afraid of America’s changing landscape. They’re afraid of losing power, while forgetting the responsibility that goes along with it.

"},{"id":"5f801fb76cee07000646ad0b","title":"Republican support of Trump is the death knell for the party as we know it.","text":"

The truth is that a great deal of Americans voted for Trump. But when the Trump era is studied, it won’t be the belligerent Trump ralliers screaming to the press that will carry the most blame. It won’t even be Trump himself, the damaged psychological paralytic from a broken home, who makes up for crippling insecurity with boasting, like a child.

It’ll be the Republican establishment that’ll carry the weight of history. To be fair, at first it was in denial. None of Stevens’ colleagues thought Trump would win the election against a former Secretary of State and senator with decades of experience. Stevens himself couldn’t imagine it.

But once he was the nominee, nearly every Republican made an undeniable choice to support him, a man they knew to be wholly unqualified to lead the nation.

The key message here is: Republican support of Trump is the death knell for the party as we know it.

For Stevens, watching the modern Republican Party is like watching a friend slip ever further into addiction. Stevens feels sadness, anger, and sympathy. But addiction is a disease, and cowardice is just weakness.

Stevens takes this failure on the part of the Republican establishment personally. He helped elect a great number of Republican legislators who have mortgaged their self-respect and responsibility as elected officials in exchange for a few more years of power. He knows he’s something of a hypocrite, having built wealth and influence on the back of helping Republican officials get elected.

But his hypocrisy doesn’t hold a candle to that of the Republican Party. The party that has crowed about “seriousness of intent” and “commitment to character” continues to support a man who has made fun of the disabled, defended the murder of journalists by dictators, boasted about assaulting women, and asked foreign governments to investigate his political opponents.

This moment should signal a reckoning and a clear-eyed assessment of how the party can use its purported values to serve a changing America. Will it? Stevens would like to think so.

But that would be a lie.

"},{"id":"5f801fb76cee07000646ad0c","title":"Final summary","text":"

The key message in these blinks is:

Republican support for Donald Trump is cynical and desperate, an attempt to cling to power in a changing world. The leaders who mortgaged their values in exchange for a few more years of power, Stevens believes, will go down in history as cowards.

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What to read next: Un-Trumping America, by Dan Pfeiffer

You’ve just read about how former Republican political consultant Stuart Stevens believes today’s Republican Party has set aside the values it’s purportedly cherished for decades to support Donald Trump. Daniel Pfeiffer believes it too, despite the fact that he’s had an entirely different career trajectory. He served as Communications Director under President Barack Obama, and now works as a spokesperson for former vice president Al Gore.

In Un-Trumping America, Pfeiffer offers his own view on how Trump is a logical conclusion of the modern Republican Party. He argues that there’s nothing more crucial than defeating Trump in 2020 – but Trump’s defeat will be just the first step on the road to fixing American democracy. Head over to the blinks to Un-Trumping America to find out more.

"}]}

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