DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies, in today for Terry Gross. My guest, Stuart Stevens, is a veteran political consultant who says he spent decades waking up every morning eager to fight Democrats. Stevens was a strategist for scores of Republican campaigns, including the presidential bids of Bob Dole, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. But now he’s written a new book excoriating party leaders for their support of President Trump. The distinguishing characteristic of the current national Republican Party is cowardice, Stevens writes, the base price of admission is a willingness to accept that an unstable pathological liar leads it and pretend otherwise.
Stevens argues that the party’s support for Trump isn’t just a pragmatic choice. He says it reflects the party’s complete abandonment of principles it long claimed to embrace, such as fiscal restraint, personal responsibility and family values. His book is called “It Was All A Lie: How The Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”