Author Stuart Stevens ran Republican campaigns but joined the Lincoln Project. His second book delivers a chilling warning
Donald Trump, accompanied by senior Republicans including Mitch McConnell, far left, speaks to the media at Camp David in 2018.Donald Trump, accompanied by senior Republicans including Mitch McConnell, far left, speaks to the media at Camp David in 2018.onald Trump’s supporters want an American Caesar. Back in 2016, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, made it explicit. “We need ato show some authoritarian power in our country,” he declared.
“Trump understood the true nature of the Republican party better than those who were the party’s leaders,” Stevens writes of Trump’s first campaign, launched in 2015, a tacit admission that the author himself did not fully comprehend the world around him. It was about resentments, not upward arc: “Hate was creating a surge of appeal.”
Back then, in Stevens’ telling, the German aristocracy lost touch with the workers. Fearing communism, they and the industrialists made peace with Adolf Hitler – much as GOP donors opened their wallets to Trump. Stevens leaves little to the imagination: “Like Adolf Hitler, Trump hated the establishment figures who supported him, and they despised him.”