(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The Trump presidency has been a boon for publishing if nothing else. In the past four years, there have been around 200 books about the man and his administration: meticulously reported accounts of what went down in the White House, punchy jeremiads about the death of democracy and/or truth, earnest anthropological road trips through Trump country, juicy tell-alls from former staffers who figured they might as well get a sweet book deal out of their spell in the belly of the beast. I lack either the pay cheque or the masochistic instinct necessary to have read them all but none I’ve encountered is as bracing as Stuart Stevens’ It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, a pre-election US bestseller that has just come out in the UK.
Stevens is a former Republican political consultant who began his career on the 1978 campaign of Mississippi Senate candidate Thad Cochran. His clients include Bob Dole, George W Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney and dozens of down-ballot Republicans over four decades. In the summer of 2015, he declared that Trump shouldn’t, and wouldn’t, win the Republican nomination. “For Donald Trump to win, everything we know about politics has to be wrong,” he told New York magazine. “And I don’t think it is.” It was. The annihilation of that assumption set off a chain reaction that ended with Stevens utterly alienated from the party to which he had given so much. “It is a strange, melancholy feeling to turn sixty-five and realize that what you have spent a good portion of your life working for and toward was not only meritless but destructive,” he writes in his book.
For Stevens, the easier path would have been to claim that the Republican Party was an honourable institution hijacked by a boorish narcissist and that he got out the moment he realised that it was betraying its professed ideals. In his analysis of Trumpology, What Were We Thinking, the critic Carlos Lozada calls such books “meh culpas”: “Had Trump come close but failed to win the 2016 Republication nomination, the conscience and corrosion of conservatism, the mind of the Right, would remain undisturbed and unexamined.”
Unlike those writers, Stevens punishes himself for his own complicity in the long-term decay from which he averted his eyes in order to keep drawing a handsome salary and remain in good standing with his tribe. “So yes, blame me,” he writes. “Blame me when you look around and see a dysfunctional political system and a Republican Party that has gone insane.”
Stevens argues that Republicans could only have abandoned the principles they allegedly believed in — the importance of character, free trade, balanced budgets, a muscular foreign policy — if they had never really believed in them at all. Such a swift moral collapse could not have occurred unless the foundations were already rotten. Even as he derides the current voices of conservatism as “paranoids, kooks, know nothings, and bigots,” he describes the late William F Buckley, the dapper avatar of a more gentlemanly and intellectually robust phase of conservatism, as “a well-educated racist”. The current disaster is a culmination, not a twist. “Hold Donald Trump up to the mirror and that bulging, grotesque orange face is today’s Republican Party.”
Stevens’ argument is well-made but it’s the sense of painful personal catharsis that makes It Was All a Lie so compelling. The book belongs to a powerful genre that you might call the heretic’s confession, or the renunciation narrative, which draws its energy from the act of denouncing one’s own sins and throwing off the baggage of years of self-deception. This form of writing traditionally comes from the opposite end of the political spectrum, as Stevens noted in a recent interview with Mother Jones. “The only analogy I can find is the collapse of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union,” he said, “when the difference between reality and what is believed became so disjointed.”
He chose the right party but the period he described was 40 years too late. In 1949, the Labour MP Richard Crossman edited The God That Failed, a collection of six essays by former communists — Arthur Koestler, Louis Fischer, Stephen Spender, André Gide, Richard Wright and Ignazio Silone — who had dramatically rejected the party. “You hate our Cassandra cries and resent us as allies,” Koestler told Crossman, “but, when all is said, we ex-Communists are the only people on your side who know what it’s all about.” The book is remembered now as a cornerstone of early Cold War propaganda, but it is out of print and rarely read. When you do read it, the emotional impact is startling, the urge to confess being far more potent than the desire to persuade.
Such books and essays are written at great personal cost. An ideology is not just a belief but an identity, which defines your place in the world and moulds your social circle. Reject that and you risk losing everything.
In his 1938 book Assignment in Utopia (an important influence of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four), the former US communist and Moscow correspondent Eugene Lyons described in self-flagellating detail the part he had played in Stalin’s propaganda machine, most shamefully the destruction of Gareth Jones, the Welsh journalist who exposed Stalin’s man-made famine in Ukraine and was rewarded with denials and character assassinations from his fellow reporters. On his return to New York, Lyons agonised over whether to spill the beans, knowing that he would be shunned and smeared by his old comrades. That is exactly what happened. “I was guilty of the most heinous offense: puncturing noble delusions.”
This willingness to be lonely is one essential quality of renunciation narratives. Stevens, a wealthy man with a second career as a travel writer, is no shivering outcast but he hasn’t crossed the floor to join the Democrats, most of whom regard Never Trump conservatives with suspicion. While the Right is inclined to welcome fugitives from the Left and brandish them like trophies, recovering Republicans occupy a very small, inhospitable niche in US politics. “While such a loss can be melancholy it can also be liberating,” writes Tim Miller, another consultant turned GOP refugee, in a recent blogpost called Goodbye to All That. “Getting rid of the shackles of toxic identities give you new perspectives and the freedom to be honest. You don’t have to make excuses for stuff you know is wrong.”
Such political solitude is hard to maintain, which is why many anti-communists rode the pendulum to the opposite extreme. Eugene Lyons dabbled in Trotskyism as a kind of ideological methadone but wound up as a full-throated member of the red-baiting Right. In a little over a decade, James Burnham went from being America’s most prominent Trotskyist to a McCarthyite and pioneer of neoconservatism who quit his consultancy role with the CIA because he deemed it insufficiently anti-communist. In The God That Failed, Louis Fischer criticised this personality type for gravitating to “a new pole of infallibility, absolutism and doctrinal certainty. “When he finds a new totalitarianism, he fights Communism with Communist-like violence and intolerance. He is an anti-Communist ‘Communist.’” To remain in political limbo, absent a replacement clique, requires an unusually strong personality.
The second crucial feature is timing: you have to leave the ship before it becomes clear that it is sinking. Many western communists abandoned the party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 but they deserved no bravery medals for that, just as Republicans who are waiting until Trump is out of the door before they speak out will have missed their shot at integrity. As Stevens observes, “the ranks of ‘Good Republicans’ who maintain they really didn’t know the extent of what Trump did will make Washington feel a lot like 1946 Berlin.”
The third and most important quality is brutal self-examination. In order to remain a valuable member of the party, Koestler wrote, a communist had to “confirm and deny, denounce and recant, eat your words and lick your vomit.” Real liberation is not possible without admitting guilt. The prose trembles with the nervous exhilaration of throwing off a lie and giving full vent to all the doubts that have been suppressed for too long.
Louis Fischer minted the idea of the “Kronstadt moment”: the epiphanic realisation, named after Lenin and Trotsky’s crushing of the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion, that Soviet communism was a murderous lie and there was no way back. “Until its advent,” Fischer explained, “one may waver emotionally or doubt intellectually or even reject the cause altogether in one’s mind and yet refuse to attack it.” Stevens’ Kronstadt moment was the de facto nomination of Donald Trump in May 2016, which convinced him that the Republican Party not only could not be saved but did not deserve to be saved. It confirmed what he had doggedly ignored for many lucrative years. “I was there and, yes, I contributed,” he writes. “This is not an ‘I am better than them’ plea. I’m not.”
Renunciation narratives are valuable because they are rare, particularly on the Right. People generally do not want to admit when they have been colossally wrong, preferring either to double down or blame others. Nor do they enjoy being hated by those they used to call their friends. To confess, in private and in public, that you have wasted years of your life on a fraud, to burn bridges before you’ve built new ones, to see what is in front of your nose rather than what you need to believe is true, takes a certain courage that is, let’s say, not a defining feature of political life.
As Koestler said, you may not like or trust these people but they are the only ones who know what it’s all about. Stevens closes It Was All a Lie by raising the possibility that the Republican Party could still redeem itself and become more than a cynical mechanism for acquiring and maintaining minoritarian power. “But that would be a lie, and there have been too many lies for too long.”
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeSo the writer wants a return to the Republican party of the last few decades does he? This will mean invading various countries on entirely spurious grounds, enabling mass immigration that damages the lives of American workers, and doing whatever the corporate donors tell them to do. There is no difference between the Dems and the Reps with respect to any of these policies.
Trump gave working people some hope. That hope has been removed by a combination of the lying MSM, the censoring of views and stories by Big Tech, and various forms of voter fraud. Disgusting article.
Yes, I was thinking yesterday, Tom Lehrer wrote the line ‘until someone we like can be elected’ in ‘Send the Marines’ in the early sixties. Yet those who hate Trump are still cheering because the old military industrial complex is back in power, leaving the American system of democracy under a cloud.
When a Republican is in power the lefty establishment and the BBC hate that specific man. When a Democrat is in power they just hate the bl**dy Yanks.
Yes, you now have the bizarre spectacle of the left in the US calling for all the troops to remain in Afghanistan and the ME simply because Trump wants to bring them home. And they are supported by the media. The evil and the madness is without end.
Mutti Merkel came out the other day imploring the United States to maintain its presence in Afghanistan. Bizarre, indeed.
Lefties love the FBI and CIA and the military. Haw?
I couldn’t have said it better. Another elitist looking in the mirror when speaking about Trump and his electoral.
It’s quite amazing how people who have spent their lives dedicated to politics still don’t seem to get it.
Trump won because he wasn’t one of them (i.e. any politician). Of course he’s hardly a man of the people either, but he was not part of the proven established lot.
It was natural that someone like him would crop up in the Republican party for a few reasons. The democrats had Obama in power (and the US rarely vote in a party for a 3rd term), the democrats were increasingly in step with modern new-money corporations (big tech etc) compared to the Republicans, plus in a related manner were also more woke-friendly. So it made sense that the person to subvert the system was from a more right-leaning persuasion.
But crucially he wasn’t even really of the right or any particular party (despite countless attempts to label him white supremacist or fascist).
This phrase is really telling. Whatever you views on Trump’s aesthetics – those who voted for him clearly don’t care that much. However those howling and wailing about his success still seem fixated on trivialities such as this. Speaks volumes how little the those critics listen and understand.
Oh, they get it just fine. That Trump is not one of them is the crux of their argument. Already, the fluffling of Biden has begun, conveniently forgetting the various scandals that occurred during Joe’s last job, from the extrajudicial droning of the brown people to siccing govt agencies on political opponents and some reporters.
No, Alex, Trump is certainly not one of ‘us’, nor anything I would want my friends, my children, grandchildren nor great-grandchildren to emulate. And nor would you. A liar (lets just start with the bone-spurs and go forwards, there’s tens of thousands to chose from). A cheat (take your pick, whether it’s cheating on his wives, his business partners, or the nation via the IRS). A con man (Trump U. for starters, but you can select your own favorite). A failed businessman (how many bankruptcies does it take to seal that deal?). A rapist and sexual predator (on tape, in the courts, and 20+ cases pending). A grifter (how much has he funneled to his own business while in office, money effectively stolen from real US taxpayers). I could go on, but you get the point. The man, not the politics, not the policies… the man, the man is human garbage, a documented representative of so many bad traits that, as you said, are the reasons Trump is not one of ‘us’.
Policy aside, we prefer leaders who are not liars, cheaters, con men, failed businessmen, rapists and grifters. Just ONE of these traits would have been disqualifying, he’s got them all… and you’re still defending him?
Regarding policy, do yourself a favor and chart, from 2008, any metric that fancies you; unemployment, inflation, interest rates, manufacturing as a percentage of employment, the DOW or S&P… whatever. Now let me tell you what you’ll find.
Straight lines. Straight lines starting in 2008-10, once the GFC was stabilized, to the present. You will NOT find some Trump economy, some trump bump, some miracle on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. No. What you’ll see is a straight line that starts under Obama and simply continues in the same direction under Trump… up to, of course, the first real problem that Trump faced… Covid.
At that point, it all goes to hell, and it does so because the man is what I mentioned in the first part of this response; an incompetent, vainglorious, egocentric narcissistic liar… and you’re now living in the REAL Trump economy. Well done.
There’s an English football team called Millwall. They sing “Nobody likes us, we don’t care”. It comes from a reputation they had as hooligans which attracted negative media coverage. Obviously being sneered at as scumbags didn’t make them see the error of their ways. Instead they embraced the label. It’s human nature to bind tighter with your group when it’s being abused. It explains why the Trumpers can never back down. A protest vote gone wrong has morphed into a belief system. They can’t admit they screwed up, it’s become intrinsic to who they are.
Speak for yourself.
Still on about that bloody stupid tape, which by the way referred to certain women who use their sexuality to improve their circumstances, not “our daughters” as the Fake news” implied. Many women voted against DJ T on that premise while realising that all women are aware of their sexuality and its natural effect on males, If these people do not understand how human sexuality works , they are not competent to vote.
Shame on Trump for making the Republican party the de facto party of the American blue collar/working class.
Clowns like Stevens spent decades getting filthy rich in a cosy symbiosis with Democrats – let in illegals and we can give them an off the books low-wage job and you can use their vote to promote your wacko social policies – with a lot of “across the floor” golf and glad-handing.
Trump may be annoying but his policies were good for Americans and his fraudulent replacement will be a disaster.
Knowing the USA Deep South extensively I will tell a Mississippi political cliche from the old days, that a Politician stands on the platform of being ‘For Motherhood, and Against the Bole Weevil’. This guy quoted here “Stevens is a former Republican political consultant who began his career
on the 1978 campaign of Mississippi Senate candidate Thad Cochran.” has been doing this for decades, peddling feelings to buy votes rather than real issues. Trump gave issues, he gave plans to MAGA.
But the article above has one valid point, although it is the basis of Liberalism: “In order to remain a valuable member of the party, Koestler wrote, a
communist had to “confirm and deny, denounce and recant, eat your words
and lick your vomit.” Real liberation is not possible without admitting
guilt.” And here you have the entire platform of Liberalism as well as Leftism, self denunciation. The people must first be made to loath themselves, then they can be made to loath their nation, thus they can be divided and conquered. This is what the entire Biden/Harris campaign was run on. It is UK, Germany, Sweden, Holland summed up. TDS is this phenomena. Only the self loathing can really be a Liberal and a Democrat.
And for renouncing Trump, I say ‘Mr President, you are a National Treasure who was shot down by the Liberal machine, thank you for giving us the concept of MAGA in contrast to Democrat managed, intentional, American Decline.
The Author sounds Like The typical ”I know best remain idiot” sanctomonious and a waste of undemocratic space..he’s CANCELLED..get lost twerp..
I’m not at all clear about what Trump has done that is so wrong. Anyway, the project is now back on track for business, globalists, the CCP and the PoMo lunatics who infest our cultures. Bye-bye the West, it was nice for a couple of decades.
Spot on Tom, the anti-Trump so-called intellectuals have to live with the fact that while his words were annoying, his actions were effective and businesslike. The results spoke, and still speak, for themselves unless the old fudged order undoes his work.
Trump kept Energy prices low, ”green wash” Scum will put up the Cost of energy especially for blue collar workers..mid terms could be interesting, trump in 2024 will be too old for President,but Could leave a legacy by Ordering postal ballots to be counted 10-14 days before the election.
Name me a political leader who does not have narcissistic tendencies. Yes Trump is not a very likable person. But he still has the support of roughly 50% of his country (possibly more if the truth be known). Surely then the claim “to renounce him and redeem yourself” is not only disrespectful and offensive to all those people who voted for him but also indicates a stubborn refusal to acknowledge and accept that he has this level of support. However the author is a “remainer” so that no doubt explains the mindset behind this article. All very depressing.
All the Trump-hating and -bashing which has gone on for the past 5 years misses the Central Point about Donald Trump’s being chosen as their president by 63,000,000 Americans four years ago.
What that proved is that the current Ruling Caste in the western world is unfit to rule.
It is a camorra of ”elites” who are really dim. It is a ‘meritocracy’ with hardly any merit.
Groupthink fixated, it is managerially incompetent (cf its handling of the Chinese WuFlu pandemic and pretty much everything else). It is an echelon of people mostly schmoozing, networking and governing solely in the interests of their own aggrandisement.
That Donald Trump (of all people) could shoulder aside the 16 supposedly respectable normative Republican Party candidates for the presidential nomination of 2016 and their 14 Democratic Party counterparts showed that the Political Class and its Siamese Twin the mainstream media folk, Academe, the bureaucracy, the quangocracy, Big Money and the major honchos in the Chamber of Commerce, had offered at least half the general public NOTHING for years.
The intelligent response to this would have been for this awful useless Ruling Caste, at home and abroad, to step back and do some hard thinking. – ‘What have we been getting wrong, to be so flung overboard; and, in many cases, by people who used to vote Republican and Democrat loyally?’
I know of only one member of the House of Commons in this country who has reacted like that – in her case having an epiphany in re our Leave vote victory in the 2016 Referendum: Lisa Nandy, the Labour MP for Wigan.
All the rest have wailed and moaned about Mr Trump’s elevation (as about Brexit) without doing ANY self-criticism or assessment.
Today’s Occidental Ruling Caste members are just like the Bourbon princes of eighteenth century France as described by Voltaire: ‘They forget nothing and they learn nothing’.
If anyone should apologise for Trump and there are many would question the need to, perhaps it should be those political and cultural elites and the middle classes that made his Presidency possible?
Those who squeezed the incomes of the lower classes whilst enriching themselves with cheap labour, cheap imports and tax payer subsidies for their pet projects. Who reduced the MSM and cultural institutions to a monoculture, which has spawned the authoritarian and intolerant “cancel culture” and locked out anyone who doesn’t share their beliefs.
Perhaps if established politicians had offered something to actually make the lives of those who voted for Trump better, they wouldn’t have turned a unqualified political amateur to have their voices heard.
Those are very good points. Trump and other populists don’t spring into existence without reason. It’s painfully clear that large sections of society are feeling screwed over by globalization. Whatever benefits it brings, they don’t see it. The increasing divisiveness of identity politics makes it worse, with self-interested groups blaming each other for their problems. But Trump was absolutely another symptom of the problem, not a solution. He’s a spit in the face of the establishment, which was maybe long overdue, but Trump himself had nothing to offer to make the US or the world a better place. His main value is as a lesson to be learned, by both sides of the political divide. Democracy is more fragile than we knew. It doesn’t work if you only cater to those who support you. The worse angels of our nature are always ready to step in.
Something to ponder, Stuart: “Trump didn’t create the problem, the problem created Trump”. Dinesh D’Sousa. If that’s the case, you were part of the problem, and while your “mea culpa” sounds honest on its face, to me, it looks like a fig leaf to cover the nakedness of someone who, even now, still thinks he’s too good to give any credit to a man as crass and vulgar as Donald Trump. You haven’t changed, Stuart. Not really.
The foreign policy of the last 4 years has been better than the foreign policy of the last 30 — unless you think the wars in Iraq, the interminable war in Afghanistan, the appeasement of the irresponsible regime in Iran are fine ideas.
I could vote in presidential elections starting in 1988. The first vote I ever made enthusiastically was 2016. The only vote I’ve made more enthusiastically than that was 2020.
Then there are other policy successes: the roll-back of regulation, the development of energy resources, the improved employment prospects for working-class folks …
But, let’s bring back the Self-anointed Best-an-Brightest to mess all that up.
I know these people, myself being an Ivy League graduate and PhD. They’re not very smart.
re: Best & Brightest…wasn’t Hillary Clinton and her “60 policy papers” which she wagged at us all rather tedious?!
One of the sillier complaints we’ve heard is that Trump getting us out of Syria cedes Syria to the Russians, whatever that means. But, hey. If the Russians want Syria, they can have it. Like we’re supposed to take possession of it and magically turn it into a vibrant democracy?
Absolutely. And maybe we could ditch Turkey as well and let Russia be saddled with them too. I’ve no idea why an Islamic theocracy should be part of NATO.
This author’s heartrending TDS is grotesque enough to cause severe warts and knock-knees. He lists his “clients” as Romney, McCain, Bush, and other RINO founding members. Let’s have more endless wars. And God forbid anyone do anything that might upset the CCP or Iran. Everyone knows they’re everybody’s friends. And we need an immediate return to an economy that provides “victims” that will reliably vote for a free lunch. The record and historically low unemployment figures for all US minorities before the China flu were the result of a sinister plot to undermine the leftist “identity politics”. Thank goodness that’s over. Let them eat cake.
People generally do not want to admit when they have been colossally wrong, preferring either to double down or blame others.
Like the people who’ve been wrong about Trump? Like the people calling everyone else a white supremacist for four years?
How about those who called Jared Kushner’s father-in-law and the bringer of peaceful rapprochement to the Middle East an anti-Semite?
When Stuart Stevens – loser of multiple presidential campaigns and active participant in a GOP that made Trump possible – is your oracle, just be honest and say you have no actual argument to make. Nice job, though, of mirroring the left and its desire for purges of people now deemed guilty of wrong think.
As others have already said below, this is quite the most bizarre, nauseating and manipulative of articles.
I personally don’t believe that the vote was rigged to such an extent that Trump lost to be honest, but it’s worth remembering that Trump actually delivered one of the, if not the highest ever Republican votes in the party’s history off the back of a none too shabby record in office, certainly compared to his predecessors, so where this gentleman gets off defending the faux mea culpa after the fact scribblings of some flag of convenience, doubtless grown rich, amoral recanting political apparatchik presumably trying to keep his already fat hat somewhere in the political ring is beyond me, let alone a supremely patronising and insulting sideswipe at a huge majority of those who voted in good faith for Trump.
As I’ve said before, it’s not the elections themselves that bother me quite so much as American pharma giant Pfizer’s timing of its mooted 90% effective vaccine announcement but two days after the election….a week sure is a long time in politics, as they say.
This was an election we were repeatedly told was more of a referendum on Trump the man and, even more pertinently, his apparently ‘uniquely’ disastrous handling of covid in the US, so it makes one wonder quite how some of the electorate, particularly given America’s often finely balanced electoral state-based system, might have reacted to this apparently ‘miraculous’ news (it’s a given that a swaggering Trump would naturally have taken all the credit) had it arrived days or even weeks prior to US polling day.
Yes I agree with most of that resume of a very biased article. I see no “pain” or admissions of guilt by Stevens in his book, just the usual hit job on a man who was not a politician yet pointed out that there was an alternative to “wokery” and served for four years as one of the more successful American presidents. It seems to me that the “fraud” was rather the coercion of voters in high density poor areas, who were “persuaded” to cast postal votes for one candidate by various left wing groups like BLM.
This entire article is ludicrous. Stuart Stevens did not become some scorned pariah for turning on the Republican Party, similar to the way Whitaker Chambers did. (Funny how that famous example, author of the great confession and self-analysis “Witness” was unmentioned in the article.)
Like most Never Trumpers, and unlike Chambers’ own fears, Stevens has joined the winning, not the losing, side. The side with all the money, all the perks and all the glitzy policy panels. Now he gets adulatory book reviews, not deplatforming. Now he gets gigs on many cable and network news shows, instead of being relegated to the conservative ghetto of Fox News. Now, to paraphrase that old line about Hollywood, he gets to eat lunch in “This Town” whenever he wants.
Poor Stuart Stevens. And Rick Wilson. And Steve Schmidt. And Mike Murphy. And Ana Navarro. And Nicole Wallace. What will happen to the poor dears?
Turncoats never had it so good. The more wretchedly they confess their “sins,” the more feted they become.
You might want to read some of Glenn Greenwald’s columns. Trump kicked a hornet’s nest.
It is difficult to see any sensible comparison with former acolytes who renounced communism. What is remarkable is how even long after the regimes in the Soviet Union and China were exposed the useful idiots in the west still kept cheerleading for them. Even more remarkable is how many on the left still hold torches for the likes of Lenin, Trotsky and Guevara despite there murderous record or why former and not so former Leninists, Marxists and Trotskyists are not held to account for their foibles in the same way as individuals on the far right, and this shows how one sided the debate is. I suppose it is too much to hope that Dorian Lynskey will fess up any time soon to having wasted years of his life on a fraud.
It would be better if the orthodox media & its adjuncts would renounce their hysteria & admit they’ve been pushing one lie after another for the past 5 years.
It certainly would be better for the public than renouncing a largely successful chief executive, despite (or, possibly, because of) the discomfort it would cause Lynskey, Stevens, et al who have, in one fashion or another, peddled those lies.
I think Dorian should go up into the attic and look at his own portrait
Isn’t it amazing how the Trump haters are still fixated on Trump and they have virtually nothing to say (good or bad) about president elect Biden? The only thing truly bi-partisan in US politics is Trump hating by the “old guard” Republicans and all Democrats. These old guard Republican swamp creatures are on life support for now, but they will soon die out – whether they renounce Trump or not. President Donald Trump has transformed American politics forever by revealing the truth about how it works. There are “insiders” and there are “outsiders” – party affiliations are just window dressings so the “outsiders” have something to root for.
”As Stevens observes, “the ranks of ‘Good Republicans’ who maintain they really didn’t know the extent of what Trump did will make Washington feel a lot like 1946 Berlin.” ”
What did Trump do ? ?
He said…..stuff…..in a mean way.
Isn’t that enough?
When I read the heading, I figured it was sarcasm: a kick in the guts of the partisan establishment selling Western Democracy out as quickly as possible, but no. Just another smoocher smooching up to those with the contacts and the money in their hands. Free trade was not free. It was a Trojan Horse.
hmmm.
Pray for us Americans and the world if indeed Biden is confirmed President. Capitalism will be dead with the new Biden administration. Democrats are not the old Democrat party. Democrats along with other world Leaders will tell the other 99.999% what to do, how to raise their families, what cars to drive, what to eat, where to worship.
Before Britain applauds a Biden win, remember what he has said. Biden is against Brexit and perfectly willing to hold up any trade deal between America and Britain hostage with a NO Brexit deal. America will side with Iran, no Middle East peace deal. Continued strong arming around the world to achieve an egalitarian philosophy that has empirical evidence to not work. Ignoring the human atrocities around the world, most notably China with millions of the Chinese who are held in forced work camps for being Muslim, Christian, not going along with the state. Forced Organ harvesting and more.
Polls show that 60% of Americans, including 1/3 of the Democrats think the 2020 election was fraudulent or stolen.
The message the author exposes is; it’s more important what people look like or how they say it then what they do, following through on promises.
America; Opioids deaths are upwards 50k/year, homelessness upwards of 60k and getting worse, mental illness on the rise. Suicides especially among young white males drastically up, black on black crime all but ignored and on the rise. Border Patrol, just this Month seized enough Fentanyl to kill 200k people all but ignored by the press. Censorship is not only accepted more freely its practiced frequently without push back. Speech is controlled. Education results show well over 50% of public schools are failing the young by graduating kids who can only read at an 8th grade level, math results are worse. These statics are ignored by politicians or the media. The elite enforce expensive and lousy alternative energy sources while buying beach front homes at a price tag of around $12mil dollars.
This article and this book ignores any culpability to the political class with the Russia hoax, founded on an illegal FISA application and pushed non-stop by the press, an impeachment that showed no crime, lawsuits of infidelity that were thrown out as baseless and ordered to pay Trumps legal fees. No one cares about Trumps taxes or the Access Hollywood recording that was said in a private conversation. Kennedy, Clinton, Hoover, FDR all did or said worse. Celebrity’s can thank themselves for desensitizing the American public when they pump “vulgarities and crudeness” into homes as in, video games and cable entertainment.
The Aristocracy in America will eventually learn the Left eats its own. The Pyramid only has only so much room at the top, it’s a long fall.
As to be expected, the Trumpettes are out in force in the comments section!
But all of what I’ve read misses the point. What is to become of the Republican party? Before the election, when the polls were looking poor for Trump, we were led to believe he could come back in 2024, or any candidate looking for the nomination would need his endorsement.
Now we know he’s out of office – even he has tacitly admitted it with the move to transition – what’s next? Some leading party figures were at least supporting him recently, but the calls for him to actually concede defeat are getting stronger. What looks to the outside world as a rather childish obsession with legal cases that have no merit can only reduce his influence in future.
All those who seem to think the Reps will go back to their corporatist ways if Trump goes are missing the point. Without the votes of blue-collar workers, the party looks finished. So regardless of whatever establishment figure ends up getting the nomination in 2024, Trump will have moved the party. Maybe it’ll just be led by someone a little less chaotic and absurd.
This is probably one of the worst articles I’ve read on unherd. Trumpism is very popular and the disconnect between left and right in the US is larger than ever. This election did nothing to change it and it is Trump’s nomination for 2024 if he wants it. The left absolutely hates and despises poor people in the USA. A democratic take over is only going to make the elitist left even more disconnected for the next election. The greatest advantage Trump has over the establishment politicians is that he bothers to speak to the poor. He might not doing anything to help them but he at least acknowledges their existence.
Most people would look at politics and see that it looks wrong. It just takes a while longer for these politicians, maybe something to do with power and money. Do they realise that the whole system of chosing candidates is wrong, with only the wealthiest people and their relatives able to get in? This is not helped by unrestricted, undemocratic campaign financing and lobbying. If you look back at how many compromises you had to make to get into power, is it any wonder that system must be corrupt? Why are these things not able to be said by representatives at the time, surely this is the problem? We have to get rid of the bad incentives. Donald Trump was elected because there was no one better offered to voters or no one that was able to refute his ignorant, populist policies.
So the fact that a great majority of the Population agrees with you (being populist) is now classed as “ignorant”
Where is this ‘great majority’ you reference? Trump got far more votes than in 2016, and I’m to believe that Biden outpolled his old boss. And believing half the country is ignorant is a curious way of pursuing the unity some of the left is now pushing for.
You can be both ignorant and popular, as Trump is. He’s also a liar, amoral, narcissistic, selfish and greedy. Hitler was a populist, being popular doesn’t mean much.
I’m reading that Trump will absolutely prove the level of voter fraud and Biden will never take up the office.Wait and see how this plays out.
How about a bet, there, John, that what you’re reading is scatological garbage written from fantasy land. Say, £1,000?
Money talks, bullshit walks. The saddest part is that people can believe such idiocy.
It would be nice to have a more NUANCED approach to this matter.
For instance: there was such enthusiasm for the Trump campaign that up and down the land huge rallies (10,000 to 30,000 people) congregated, not only to see and hear Mr Trump or some other leading Republican or some celebrity; but in all manner of places where simply vast crowds got together together (with lines stretching to the horizon to enter these ad hoc arenas) without any such Speaker at all.
By contrast, the Biden rallies consisted – on those few days when Mr Biden left his lodgings and did something after 9 a.m. – of between 7 and 12 persons (handpicked party members) lobbing very gentle questions at the candidate who struggled to answer them.
When finally President Obama came to ‘throw his weight’ behind the Democratic Party candidate, near the very end of the campaign, he addressed largely empty carparks with about 45 people for an audience.
These facts of themselves do not prove that there was a big majority in nearly every state for Mr Trump and not for Mr Biden. By no means. But they add yet another very odd feature to the landscape of this election and the very many exceptionable and disgraceful voting and vote-counting procedures which many individuals (including election officials) have formally made affidavits about, under oath and penalty of perjury.
When the police are summoned to something which may have been the scene of a crime, they evaluate, on a prima facie basis, whether or not there is something to investigate; or whether it is just wind and misprision.
In view of all I have seen on video to date, I think there are a lot smoking guns to look into in this matter.
Just dismissing it all out of hand becomes itself rather a suspect position.
What an absolutely rotten miserable unapprciative ignorant article, full of emotional rage an very short on substance and fact.
Many people have been putting forward the actual realities showing how President Trump first raised the morale and self-respect of so many Americans with is Make America Great Again approach that was such a huge contrast to obama’s appeasement approach that has led to the tragedy of ignorant people being sucked into the thug-hate-anti-Smerican anti-capitalism anti-progess virulently anti-Semitic anti-police destructive blm movement,
I see the pathetic football association is still encouraging teams to perform this nauseating ritual at the beginning of games.
But President Trump did far more, boosted the economy by encouraing growth, lowering excessive taxes, encouraging companies to relocate to the US,
President Trump took the US out of obama’s disastrous Iran deal that oropped up the world’s number 1 terrorist-sponsoring country, and that stlll vows to destroy Israel.
President Trump lowered contrbutions to totally corrupt UN organizations such as UNRWA, a pathetic money-sucking waste that should have been shut down years ago and is only maintained to support the fantasies of those who still hope to finish hitler’s work and destroy the one Jewish homeland.
President Trump offered the unworthy palestinians the opportunity to have a state on what is really Jewish territory – but they rejected that because they want it all, not just a part, and they would also have to fulfill conditions that for them are impossible to accept, such as the presence of a Jewish state and stop indoctrinating their children to hate and want to kill Jews.
President Trump met with the leaders of Russia and North Korea, and while ith neither has there been the development of the sort of warm peace treaties that President Trump and his very smart son-in-law Jared Kushner and his Secretary of State Pompeo are directly responsible for nurturing between Arab countries and Israel, at leat there have been no major was, and the only important ongoing “war” is the very much belated tarrif-economic war between the US and the very-troubling Chinese bullying-dictatorship.
There are many other major achievements of President Trump’s term of office that msy very well be turned back by the presence of so many ex-obama disasters in biden’s proposed cabinet, the worst of which surely is seeing that idiot kerry back.
A book that appreciates none of this is a book that belongs in the trash basket.
Trump’s actions up until now have been venal and largely irresponsible. His actions of the last few weeks, spreading rumour and baseless accusation about the state of US democracy, look pretty unforgivable. He’s using his cult of personality to shake the foundations of the system, and to polarise people further, trying to make them believe that when things don’t go their way it’s not because a democratic process came out against them, it’s actually systematic cheating across all levels of society.
It really isn’t a good look, and I dislike the direction of travel here.
do you also fear the left’s demand for reprisals, the call for enemies lists, the ongoing effort by big tech to silence non-leftist voices, and the ever-present threat of more rioting? Because the Trump record includes record-low unemployment, a huge GDP bounceback in Q3 that Biden is intent on ensuring is not repeated, no new wars which Biden is also intent on not repeating, taking out the Iranian general which the left condemned, etc etc.
Dave, are you completely unaware of what is happening within US and UK society? Mr Trump was one of the very few people prepared to stand for traditional values against the flood which is enveloping our services our business practices and even our families Donal John may have been our last chance to halt the downward spiral. I for one don’t wish to see him denigrated for telling it like it is.
He’s taking his sincere complaints to the courts and to committees of the state legislatures. What more peaceful, non-authoritarian process should he follow, other than accepting what he and millions of his supporters believe was an unfair, perhaps criminally fraudulent vote?
What is wrong with you people?
A great article. Nails it exactly, not why Trump won the first time, but why so many voted for him again, against all the evidence that they’d screwed up by putting him in power.
“An ideology is not just a belief but an identity, which defines your place in the world and moulds your social circle. Reject that and you risk losing everything”
People just can’t do it. As dozens of Trump apologists on here show. (And don’t even mention the B word)
I might mention the “B word” if I knew what it is. Is it “bombing”?
Screwed up how? The country saw record lows of unemployment. We did not get ourselves into a single new war; in fact, he wanted to bring troops home. There are Middle East peace deals that four people saw as reason to nominate Trump for a peace prize he’ll never get. We got out of the Paris Accords AND had lower emissions than the countries in it. It’s almost like the fantasy of the administration painted by the tinfoil hat media does not match the reality.