Quotes from Stuart Stevens

No one wanted this moral test, but most of my tribe have failed it.

Today in the Trump era, many conservatives who believe Trump has denigrated all political discourse and destroyed any meaning of conservatism—which, of course, he has—look back longingly at the National Review as being everything that Trump World is not: clever, erudite, committed to principle.

Courage is not standing up to a ludicrous man-child like Donald Trump. Courage is getting out of the boat when the soldier in front of you was just killed. That's the legacy of the current generation of our politicians, and while there is failure of courage enough to go around across the political spectrum, my brief is the Republican Party and its total collapse as a moral force.

but the truth is that Trump's racism is a direct descendant of William Buckley's early racism.

Rudy Giuliani's

The Republican Party, like the Democratic Party, is a vastly wealthy, powerful force. Though there is no mention of parties in the Constitution, these conglomerates have come to be the most powerful forces in our democracy. Each party is a multibillion-dollar industry that, like any powerful business, will respond when threatened. The greater the threat, the more desperate the reaction.

A year or so into the Trump presidency, it occurred to me that so many of the most strident voices against Trump were those I'd worked with in the Bush campaigns:

It concluded that nothing positive would have much effect, so the logical and best course was to minimize the impact of black voters in various ways. This was the Nixon strategy in 1972. It was the Trump strategy in 2016. It was so obvious that even the Russians adopted it, attempting to instigate tensions among black voters to help Trump win.

Jeb Bush lost for many reasons, but the basic one is that he was running to win a race in a party that no longer existed. He was like a guy who showed up with a tennis racket at a bowling alley.

As the Democratic Party drifts more leftward, there is an urgent need for a center-right party to argue for a different vision and governing philosophy.

Black workers earn over $11,000 less annually than white workers. Twenty percent of black and Hispanic Americans live in poverty, compared with less than 9 percent for whites. The median wealth for white Americans is $171,000, compared with $17,600 for black Americans. Less than half of black households are homeowners, compared with nearly three-quarters of white households.13

Not many Americans know Myron Magnet or his work, but they know Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, Lou Dobbs, and an endless stream of professional nuts and cranks who roam the internet selling conspiracies, bitterness, grievance, and anger, in search of an argument.

defeated Senate candidate Roy Moore's passionate claim that blacks were better off during slavery.

How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don't. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren't deeply held. In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Donald Trump because if that was the deal needed to regain power, what was the problem? Because it had always been about power. The rest? The principles? The values? It was

Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing.

Pride is a powerful narcotic, but it doesn't do much for the auto-immune system.

There's a dark side to each and every human soul. We wish we were Obi-Wan Kenobi, and for the most part we are, but there's a little Darth Vadar in all of us. Thing is, this ain't no either or proposition. We're talking about dialectics, the good and the bad merging into us. You can run but you can't hide. My experience Face the darkness, stare it down. Own it. As brother Nietzsche said, being human is a complicated gig. Give that old dark night of the soul a hug Howl the eternal yes

If the Republican Party had been in charge in 1776, we'd all still be celebrating the queen's birthday.

Love of sports will always break your heart, but in doing so, it reminds us we have one.

One of the hallmarks of the Trump era is the alacrity with which intelligent people embrace stupidity.

Trump's Deep State is just a variation of Joe McCarthy's mythical Communists infesting the State Department, the "enemies within.

Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy. It isn't the quiet fans in the stands who get on television but the lunatics who paint their bodies with the team colors and go shirtless on frigid days.

Like my native Mississippi. For every dollar Mississippians pay in federal income tax, the state receives just over $3 back from the federal government. More than 40 percent of Mississippi's entire budget comes from Washington. Who pays for that? Those evil states like California and New York, where the good citizens pay a dollar in taxes and get less back from the government.

My dad was in the FBI when Hoover ordered the roundup of Asian Americans. He hated it and quit, joined the navy, and spent the next three years fighting in the South Pacific. Like so many, he didn't talk a lot about the war. But when it came to leaving the FBI, he told me once, "You can always say no.