Preview
  • It Was All a Lie

  • How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump
  • By: Stuart Stevens
  • Narrated by: Dan John Miller
  • Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (1,756 ratings)

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It Was All a Lie

By: Stuart Stevens
Narrated by: Dan John Miller
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Publisher's summary

New York Times Best Seller

From the most successful Republican political operative of his generation, a searing, unflinching, and deeply personal exposé of how his party became what it is today

“A blistering tell-all history. In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses [that] the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies." (The New York Times)

Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass.

This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else. Stevens shows how Trump is in fact the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Stevens shows how racism has always lurked in the modern GOP's DNA, from Goldwater's opposition to desegregation to Ronald Reagan's welfare queens and states' rights rhetoric. He gives an insider's account of the rank hypocrisy of the party's claims to embody "family values", and shows how the party's vaunted commitment to fiscal responsibility has been a charade since the 1980s. When a party stands for nothing, he argues, it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room.

©2020 Stuart Stevens (P)2020 Random House Audio
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History
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Critic reviews

"Stevens stands out among Trump’s conservative critics because of his candor about the deeper rot at the core of the GOP.... He offers a grand mea culpa for his own role in paving the way for Trumpism." (Sean Illing, Vox)

"This book is going to become an important reference volume for future historians trying to explain what happened to the Republican Party in the second half of the 20th century and the Trump era. It takes someone with Stuart Stevens' insights as a writer to be able to see this story and deliver it to us the way he has." (Lawrence O'Donnell)

"An epitaph, of interest to all politics junkies, for a formerly venerable party by a champion-turned-gravedigger." (Kirkus)