>> It was all a lie, says a former top Republican strategist this week on "Firing Line."

>> We all became Republicans not because we knew what Republicans were, but because we knew we didn't want to be like the old-line Democrats.

>> After more than four decades in GOP politics, Stuart Stevens' résumé includes five presidential campaigns.

When Donald Trump ran four years ago, Stevens opposed him.

>> I think as a presidential candidate, he's sort of ridiculous.

>> He still does today and is going even further.

>> The party clearly doesn't believe in what it said it believed in.

I'm going to work with Democrats.

>> With the election less than three months away, what does Stuart Stevens say now?

>> "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by... Corporate funding is provided by... >> Stuart Stevens, welcome to "Firing Line."

>> Great to be here.

Thank you.

>> Listen, you have worked in Republican politics for more than four decades.

You were part of five Republican presidential campaigns, including that of Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, and Bob Dole.

And now you are working to defeat the current Republican president through a group called the Lincoln Project.

And we're going to get to all that, but first, you have just published a book.

It is titled "It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump."

So let's start with what was the lie, Stuart?

>> You know, Margaret, if you go back to the dark ages, say four years ago, I think that 90 percent of Republicans would have agreed that there was a handful of values that united Republicans.

What were those?

Character counts, Personal responsibility is critical, strong on Russia, free trade, pro legal immigration.

You know, Ronald Reagan announcing from the Statue of Liberty, signed a bill that made everybody in the country before 1983 legal.

And we would have said that these united the party, and it's now not that the party has drifted away from those, which happens sometimes.

It's just the party is actively against each of those.

So, you know, I start from the premise, do people abandon deeply held beliefs in four years or three years?

I don't think so.

I think it just means you didn't deeply hold them.

>> One of the other things you write is that Trump isn't an aberration of the Republican Party.

He is the Republican Party in purified form.

So I'd love to unpack that.

What do you mean by that?

>> Well, you know, in 2016, there were a lot of people who were wrong about Donald Trump, but it's hard to find anybody who's more wrong than me.

And I realize in retrospect it's because I didn't want to believe it.

And then a lot of us, myself included, went through this period after Trump won that's like, "That's not really the Republican Party.

I don't really see how you can say that.

I think that -- and I try to trace this in the book -- There's always been these two elements of the party.

It goes back to Eisenhower, McCarthy, and it plays itself out.

Those of us who were drawn to George Bush in '99 and 2000 and the concept of compassionate conservatism, we were confident that we were on the right side of history and that we were, if you'll have it, the dominant gene, and that the dark side of the party, which was always there, was a recessive gene.

I think we were wrong.

And I think that the alacrity in which the party embraced Trump and the comfortableness that it has with Trump now proves that this is what really the party wanted to be.

>> Is it what the party wanted to be or is it just what won?

I mean, here's my sort of pushback.

You know, it seems to me that, you know, parties aren't anything other than these dynamic organisms that represent their current leadership, the people that were able to acquire power.

And then they get to set the tone and the direction themselves and the party that was the Democratic Party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal or LBJ and the Great Society was a very different party than the party of Bill Clinton.

And the era of big government is over.

Right?

So to what extent is the GOP, again, like the Democratic Party, this dynamic organism that has succumbed to a person that doesn't represent any of the values or the principles that its predecessors or successors had represented, but has just fallen and that falling is a result of not DNA, is just a result of circumstances?

>> Well, you know, I think it's a really interesting point.

I mean, you can make a case that the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign basically ran against the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign.

You know, what was 100,000 more cops on the street became mass incarceration.

What became ending welfare as we know it became income inequality.

So I think the Democratic Party grew and changed and has evolved to a very different place.

What I think is different about the Republican Party is race.

So, if you go back to 1956, Eisenhower gets almost 40 percent of African-American votes.

Then it drops to seven percent with Goldwater.

So for the remainder of that time, the party spent most of its energies talking to white voters.

So I think that the diversity in the Democratic Party has given it a strength that we don't have in the Republican Party and has given it a dynamic ability to change that we don't have in the Republican Party.

>> It's true.

I mean, the Republican Party, as you and I both know, has become less diverse and more monolithic.

It's become older and whiter and more rural.

But I'm glad you point to race because, I mean, race is one of the things that you spent a lot of time on in your book.

And I think a lot of Republicans, especially in the Trump era, have spent a lot of time reflecting about.

So let's go to your book.

Your first experience as a political operative in the Republican Party was working for a Mississippi congressional candidate.

And you openly admit that you played the race card in that first race.

You were a film student.

You were asked to cut an ad.

And I wonder if you can tell us about that ad and tell us about the dynamics of how race played into that congressional race.

>> There was a white Republican I was working for.

There was a white Democrat and then there was a black Independent.

So, the district at that time was probably 40 percent African-American.

So that 40 percent, 90 percent of it was either going to go to the Democrat or go to the black Independent.

It was in our best interest that it go to the black Independent because the black Independent wasn't drawing enough white votes to be a real threat.

So I made this commercial.

I thought it was very clever.

It wasn't negative in any sense or pejorative towards the African-American, but it informed African-American voters who might not have been aware of the fact that there was an African-American because he didn't have a lot of money and wasn't running that robust of a campaign that there was.

And it was sort of this crucible lesson that race is the key in which certainly all Southern politics is played in, to a certain degree, all American politics.

>> And let's just go to Kanye West.

I mean, Kanye West is said to be contemplating a run for the presidency as an independent third-party candidate.

And it is reported that there are GOP operatives working to get him on the ballot in several states.

Is this what you're talking about?

Is this the oldest trick in the Republican playbook?

Is this same thing you did 40 years ago?

>> Yeah, except, you know, he's a lot more famous and richer than the guy that I was running.

What it is, is this admission that we're going to not get African-American votes.

So we used to try to address that and change.

Unsuccessfully, but we tried.

Now it's not even trying.

There's just a sense of consolidating the white vote by playing white grievance.

It's an incredibly destructive strategy and ultimately it's a death knell for the party as a national government force as it's currently constructed.

>> So, I mean, you talk about this in your book and you referenced it just a second ago that the original sin of the modern GOP was, with respect to race, was in 1964 when Barry Goldwater refuses, who is the Republican nominee for president, refuses to say that he would support the Civil Rights Act.

And since then, no Republican nominee for president has won a meaningful number of African-American voters.

The South flipped after that solidly Republican and has remained Republican ever since.

This is the Southern Strategy.

And even though William F. Buckley and some other leading conservatives who eventually recanted their position and admitted that they were wrong.

Is it your view that the die was cast after 1964 for Republicans and race?

>> No, I don't think it was cast.

I think the fundamental flaw was when I was working on these races all these years, there was this phenomenon of the Republican Party hiring African-American political consultants to try to teach those candidates who were white, of which most of them were, and those of us working in the campaigns, most of whom were white, how to talk to African-Americans.

So the conceit there was there's -- the Republican Party really should be the natural home for African-Americans because we're culturally conservative, the role of faith in the public square, entrepreneurship.

It's just that blacks don't understand this.

That's why they're not coming to us, which I mean, I think I bought that for a long time.

But the reality was I think African-Americans understood Republicans really well.

It was the policies that Republicans were advocating that never appealed to African-Americans enough.

And as a sort of proof point of this is African-American Republican candidates tend not to do much better with African-Americans than white Republican candidates.

So it's hard to say that those African-American Republican candidates don't know to talk to African-Americans.

>> Yeah, Tim Scott's not winning 80 percent of the black vote in South Carolina.

Listen, you call Donald Trump a racist and you compare him to a politician of another era, the avowed segregationist George Wallace, who also was the governor of Alabama and ran for president on an independent ticket in 1968.

George Wallace was a guest on "Firing Line" with William F. Buckley Jr. in 1968.

And I want to show you a clip of one of their exchanges that I think will resonate with you.

Let's take a look.

>> It's a clear part of the historical record, which I think nobody who isn't a cynic will dispute that the South not only didn't encourage its Negroes to vote, but encourage them not to vote.

>> In Alabama, people that were not allowed to vote if they couldn't read or write or sign their name and take a simple literacy test in which the answers to the test were right on the test itself.

>> Once again, I'm not going to try to substantiate the fact that the Negroes have not had the same civil liberties in the South that white people have because this would be a venture in redundancy.

>> He says this would be a venture in redundancy.

Look, so here you have George Wallace, who is a Southern segregationist, defending voter suppression in the form of literacy tests, debating Buckley, who is, you know, leading an emerging movement of modern conservatism, calling him out for voter suppression.

So what's your reaction?

>> Well, I wish that that side of William Buckley was the dominant side in the Republican Party today because I think that voter suppression in the 2020 race is basically accepted by the Trump campaign and by default Republicans as the key to victory.

And I think you're going to see it playing out.

You're going to see it in legal ways.

You're going to see it in as many illegal ways as they can get away with and quasi-legal ways.

It's symbolic of a great failure of the Republican Party.

>> So Democrats moving forward, they end up rejecting George Wallace.

They reject him over his racism, and he lost the Democratic Party's nomination for president in 1964.

You write about it in your book, and your quote is...

Explain that.

>> The party didn't accept George Wallace.

They went in a different direction.

It's fascinating to think had Wallace won the nomination, what would the Democratic Party establishment have done?

I'd like to think, and I think I'm right, that they would have rejected George Wallace and it maybe would have cost them an election, but they would saved the soul of the party.

With Trump, the party just acquiesced to Trump.

Now, you know, to me, the key moment in this is December 2015 when Trump comes out for a Muslim ban, which is a religious test.

So what should have happened there is that Reince Priebus, who was chairman of the party, and other Republican leaders should have come out and said, "Look, if we stand for anything, it's the Constitution."

I mean, that is sort of the essence of being a conservative.

That this is a religious test.

We can't stop Donald Trump from running.

We can't stop people from voting for him.

But this is not going to be the Republican Party.

So I think there's a lot of reasons that didn't happen, and now Donald Trump controls the Republican Party.

>> Let's go to Kamala Harris.

You know, the Democratic Party, Joe Biden has nominated the first African-American woman to be on the ticket as a vice presidential candidate.

Has this bolstered his chances of winning?

>> Yes, I thought that Kamala Harris was the best pick for him.

One of the advantages of picking somebody who's run for president before, you know what you're getting with their culture.

Who comes with this candidate?

To me, this is all about the nonwhite vote.

So I think -- I can't tell you how much picking Kamala Harris helps Biden turn out nonwhite vote, but I think the not picking of an African-American woman, when there were qualified African-American women were options, would have been terribly detrimental to the Biden candidacy.

>> So if you were advising a Republican Party that you respected, how would you advise them to attack Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the VP pick?

>> I think that they're going to attack -- I think they're going to overreach.

And if you look at -- if you believe, like I do, that this is all about nonwhite turnout, I can't think of a better way to guarantee you're going to have record nonwhite turnout than the path that they've gone down now, which is to play the race card and attack Kamala Harris at a level we have never seen by a president, certainly this last two centuries.

And I just don't think it works.

I think it's a classic miscalculation politically and trying to make suburban housewives -- good luck on suburban housewives -- fear black people, which Donald Trump has embarked on his campaign to.

I don't think so.

I don't think it's going to work.

I think it's going to head to a historic defeat.

>> Well, Stuart, then help me understand how you understand the fact that Donald Trump still has very strong support within the Republican Party, self-identified Republican voters.

85, 95, somewhere in there, somewhere in there, support him and they're going to vote for him.

And, you know, they're disenchanted with your old boss, Mitt Romney.

They think his brand is tarnished right now.

You know, that even though they are repulsed by the behavior of Donald Trump, those people still believe in the ideas of the conservative principles that that you say the party has rejected and that the apparatus of Republican politics will provide them with policies that will be better for the economy, probably better for deregulation, better for America's stance in the world, of all these people who support the Republican Party still, right?

They still believe in, frankly, the policies that Republicans have believed in all along.

>> So I don't buy it.

I don't buy that there are these principles out there they think that they're voting for.

I think you're voting for power.

I think they're voting to beat Democrats.

And this is why I compare the party to a cartel.

I mean, nobody asked OPEC what's its higher moral purpose.

It sells oil.

Why do narco cartels exist?

They sell dope.

Why does the Republican Party exist?

To beat Democrats.

I mean, say what you will about Elizabeth Warren.

She can articulate a theory of government.

You can hate it, you can love it, but you can argue with her and she can defend it.

Who in the Republican Party with credibility can articulate a theory backed up by reality of what it is to be a conservative today?

I don't know of anybody.

>> But you were in it for ideas or do you think, you know, you were in it for power too?

>> Listen, I probably represent, and I have for a long time, the worst in American political system.

You know, I'm a political consultant.

You know, I never worked in government.

Now, you know, there's a contradiction in how I feel that I wrestle with because I worked for people I like, people I respected.

I mean, they were good people.

If they saw you stopped on the side of the road, they'd stop and help you.

If they lived next door, they'd be a great neighbor.

So I think it's a collective failure of the party not to stand for what it said it stood for.

Now, I really did believe this stuff.

>> Do you not believe any of it anymore?

Or are there conservative ideas that you still stand by?

>> People say, you know, well, okay, Donald Trump is this horrible person.

But what about Bill Clinton?

I was against Bill Clinton.

I worked against Bill Clinton.

I thought that was -- I believe this stuff.

I believe that we needed to restore honor and dignity to the White House.

It's the same White House.

So why don't we need to restore honor and dignity to it again, just because it's not our guy?

You know, I don't -- >> But what about the ideas?

I mean, there are successful center-right politicians, right?

In fact, three of the most successful governors in the country are center-right politicians.

They're Republicans in blue states.

They're Larry Hogan and Charlie Baker and Phil Scott.

You know that.

You're in Vermont, right?

So, I mean, what about those guys?

>> Well, it's almost like a different party.

Now, I worked for all of those guys.

I love them.

They're wildly popular.

If the Republican Party really wanted to operate like a business, it would be all over these guys saying like, "Dude, teach us what you know.

How do we become more like you?"

Because if we can win these states in a presidential race, we're going to own the world.

Instead, they treat them with sort of benign neglect.

And it just shows how far Trumpism has become ingrained in these states and how it's not going to go away after hopefully Trump loses.

>> You worked for Mitt Romney in 2012.

You helped run his campaign.

And there was a moment in the Romney campaign where Mitt Romney accepted Donald Trump's endorsement.

I'm going to show you a clip of that.

>> It's my honor, real honor and privilege to endorse Mitt Romney.

So, Governor Romney, go out and get them.

You can do it.

>> Thank you, thank you.

There are some things that you just can't imagine happening in your life.

This is one of them.

Being in Donald Trump's magnificent hotel and having his endorsement is a delight.

>> Now, you write in the book...

Looking back on that moment, did you help legitimize Donald Trump?

I mean, this is the man who ran against Obama on the birther.

>> I mean, this probably wouldn't have happened had it not been for me, so I should take the hit on this.

So, what's interesting is we started getting calls.

I started getting calls from Donald Trump's people.

"Mr. Trump has cleared his schedule and he's free to travel, leave Nevada with Governor Romney."

I was like, "No, that's not going to happen.

We're not going to do that."

And what was fascinating, talking to him, Michael Cohen and the other people, they literally couldn't understand it.

They thought you were saying that because you didn't want to inconvenience Donald Trump.

So we said no to Donald Trump.

>> So you actually feel that you did do -- play the circuit-breaker function with Donald Trump as much as you could?

>> Well, listen, the idea that those 10 minutes with Mitt Romney legitimized Donald Trump I think is an absurdity.

It was 10 minutes.

That's it.

That's all it was in a campaign that was like a lot of 10 minutes.

>> Let's talk about the Lincoln Project.

>> Yeah.

>> America is better than Donald Trump.

>> You're an adviser to the Lincoln Project.

What is the ultimate goal of the Lincoln Project in 2020?

>> Well, our immediate goal is to beat Donald Trump and to beat Trumpism.

We really see ourselves as trying to stand for American democracy, American values.

We're just campaign consultants, you know, and we know how to do some stuff.

And we're faced with kind of three choices, right?

We either support Donald Trump.

Well, that's not gonna happen.

Do nothing.

Well, that kind of stinks.

Or work to beat Trump.

So we know how to do certain things.

We're just doing those to try to beat Trump.

We see Donald Trump as being the most anti-conservative president really of our lifetime.

And it offends us.

And we don't understand why others in the Republican Party don't feel the way we do.

But apparently they don't.

So we're going to go out and do what we're going to do and hopefully it will have some impact.

I think it already has had some impact.

I think that we distracted Trump and every hour that the Trump campaign isn't focused on Biden and he's over there like fuming about the Lincoln Project or responding to an ad that we did, that's a good day for the Biden campaign.

So we're going to keep at it.

>> One of the things you're also doing is attacking every Republican senator who is up for re-election that didn't vote against Donald Trump for impeachment.

And I wonder if the strategy sort of the burn the house down strategy doesn't enable the party to move forward.

>> Susan Collins never stands up to Donald Trump.

>> Somebody like Susan Collins, who has only voted with Donald Trump 46 percent of the time in the last Congress.

Is that the kind of person you want to get rid of in the Republican Party?

>> Well, you know, if you go back to the George Wallace analogy, George Wallace actually did some good stuff as governor.

He passed free textbooks.

But nobody can remember as a free textbook George Wallace supporter.

And I think Trump is the same, that when you have a racist as president, you have a moral obligation to oppose that president and to oppose his racist policies.

So what happened a few weeks ago?

The President of the United States at the White House went out and wished best wishes to a woman who had just been arrested at the center of an international child-rape ring.

>> Of course, you're talking about Ghislaine Maxwell, who was Jeffrey Epstein's former partner.

>> It is the most disgusting, appalling thing.

And if you go along with that, then what else does it matter?

Okay, you're going to vote for marginal tax rates and corporations.

Big deal.

If you really think that's going to be remembered, when you have Donald Trump out there attacking judges by name and jurors by name, you really think you're defending the American judicial system more by voting for one judge over another?

I don't think so.

>> What happens if Nikki Haley gets the Republican nomination in 2024?

>> I'll do everything I can to beat her.

I find her behavior appalling.

She thinks that you can negotiate with Trumpism.

I think it's like negotiating with segregation.

You can't.

And Nikki Haley thinks that she sort of can praise Charlie Kirk, say, you know, Jared Kushner is a genius and then represents the new Republican Party.

It's like, no, no, you can't have it both ways.

You understood what Trump was.

You saw where Trump was.

You opposed Trump in the primary.

And then he offered you a job, you took it, you went along with Trumpism.

No.

Trump's a moral test.

So I would take somebody who really believed in Trump and could back that up than someone who doesn't believe in Trump and goes along with Trump.

I just find that appalling.

>> So what's next for you?

>> Oh, listen, I don't think there's any place in the Republican Party for me.

I've been pretty clear about how I feel and the party's been pretty clear about how it feels, and I think the party's going to win.

So I'm gonna work with Democrats to my involvement in politics.

I mean, the way I see it, really, that the future of the country is going to be decided by the battle that's within the Democratic Party.

So I really see there's three parties in America now.

They say, "Why do we have the two-party system?"

I say we have three because there's really two parties, at least within the Democratic Party, kind of an AOC/Sanders wing and, say, a Biden wing.

So whoever wins that battle, that's just going to decide most of the major policy in America.

So I got to be part of that decision making, and I spent all these years attacking Democrats.

It's not like all of a sudden I think they're perfect, but I think they've remained truer to what they said that they believed than Republicans did.

And I'll -- There are a lot of people out there I respect, a lot of friends of mine who say, "Well, I can't vote for Biden, but I can't vote for Trump.

I'm going to do something else, like write in my mom or whatever."

That's just not my choice.

I'll enthusiastically vote for Biden and I'll enthusiastically support Democrats.

>> Stuart Stevens, thank you for coming to "Firing Line."

Thanks for your time.

>> "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by... Corporate funding is provided by... ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> You're watching PBS.