Stuart Stevens

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome everybody to the Jim Acosta Show. It is Thursday
or another day that ends. And why if we were
talking about Trump's cover up in the Epstein Gates scandal.
So I want to go very quickly to Stuart Stevens,
who has been very nice to wait while the Senator
I have been speaking. I've known Stuart for just quite
a long time. Now I should say I don't want

(00:21):
to date the two of us, but it's been some
time now. He was a key advisor with the Romney
campaign and has since become a really sharp critic of
Donald Trump. He wrote what I considered to be just
a classic book on politics.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
It was all a lie.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Stuart is just one of the best thinkers in politics
right now. So sending him the invite right now. Stuve's
going to chime in.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
There's stuar right there. Hey, Stuart, how are you good?
To see you? Great to see him, man, He thanks
a lot. Sorry, I was running a few minutes later.
I was talking to Senator Guyego there. I was watching
and loving it.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
Yeah, no, I was having a good conversation with him,
and you know, one of the things that he said,
and to hit through so many issues I really didn't
get to go back to it. He was talking about,
you know, people think that the Democrats are kind of
suck right now, and he's trying to He too, is
trying to figure out ways to sharpen the message, I
think he said at one point, and I guess what's
your sense of things right now? I do want to

(01:16):
talk about Trump and Epstein. But the other issue is that,
you know, today Gallup comes out with a poll that
says Trump's at thirty seven percent. That's about as bad
as it's been since, you know, the January sixth days,
and you know, you just have to wonder, are Democrats
capable of capitalizing on that next year?

Speaker 2 (01:33):
What do you think at this point, how do they
do that? You know, Jim, what's happening now reminds me
of when I was a Republican consultant while we were
on a bunch of races we had no business winning.
You know, I'm sort of baffled by this moment because
here we have a president of the United States who's
involved with Epstein, who's appointed these Yeah, these really just

(01:54):
horrible people across the government. I mean, and you have
a Congress, public and Congress it basically has abdicated any role.
They're functioning as if they were in North Korea. And
yet the discussion is what's wrong with the Democratic Party. Yeah,
that's a good point, like how did we get here

(02:14):
that I don't know, like the party that they lost
the race. Okay, that happens. But the person that was
the nominee would have made a good president. She certainly
is in the mainstream of American politics. You know. It
reminds me of the night when I was working for Romney.
We lost, we went to bed, we retired, were disappointed,
but we didn't fear for the country, right, And that's

(02:36):
the same way it would have been with Harris. You
may not agree with her on this and that, but
you know she's a serious person with serious intent. So
they lost, Okay, that happens. But I don't understand why
there's any fumbling around with Democrats of what is the
message they should wake up every day and attack? And
this idea in politics that there's one golden message I

(02:58):
think is one of the great downfalls. I mean, how
many campaigns I'd work in somebody who would always say, well,
you know, if only we had this spot or this,
you know, there is no perfect message. I mean, yeah,
a lot of it comes down to the you know,
who's a messenger. But you know, particularly now when you
have such a diverse media, for which you're a great example.
You know, we always tried to say, Okay, we're gonna

(03:22):
have an education week, We're gonna have a jobs week.
I mean, you were on all those campaigns you saw
po and as you know, we never really pulled it off,
but we could at least pretend. You know, you can't
have an education hour now or something, and people are
getting information from all these different sources. So I reject
the notion that Democratic Party needs a message. What the
Democratic Party needs is an attitude. It's like comics. Comics

(03:46):
are not the jokes that are attitude, and what their
attitude should be is we're right, they're wrong. There's more
of us than there are of them. Go out and
seize it. This sort of hesitation, you know, I read
they're doing two hundred and fifty focus groups about how
to talk to young men. You just want to like,
you know, drop and nail in your head. No, it's

(04:09):
so true. Focus You can't focus group your way out
of this. You have to do it with passion. And
you know, I've watched Bernie Sanders since I was at
Middlebury and he was running for mayor. I remember riding
my bike down Main Street in Burlington. There's this lunaticularly
about rent control. And that was Bernie when he's running
from mayor and he went by eight votes, and actually

(04:31):
he was a very good mayor. But I think a
lot of people are drones, and them not for the
ideology but by their passion.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
Yeah, when I tell people all the time, when you know,
they get down to the dumps about things, you know,
nobody thought there were very few people that thought Barack
Obama was going to beat Hillary Clinton back in two
thousand and eight, and I was out on the campaign
trail with him and I watched them and I thought,
you know, I don't know, I.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Think this guy could do something.

Speaker 1 (04:55):
This is something different, this is something new and kind
of I'm in a very different way, in a much
more malignant way. I thought that about Donald Trump back
in twenty sixteen. I just thought, this is the way
he has a hold on people. This is bananas, and
people better pay attention to this. And so I think
some of this is driven by if we see good
candidates out there who just have the right stuff. Some

(05:16):
of this is going to take care of itself. But
you know, I think we have to talk about Donald
Trump at Epstein because you know, you're talking about things
that you know, just feel like bizarre world. I don't,
you know, how in the world do we have a
president of the United States right now who is in
the Epstein files.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
That's it. I elect him. Everybody knew this about Donald Trump.
There wasn't There wasn't any surprise about it. Yeah, and look,
you know a lot of people are wrong about Trump
in twenty sixteen, but it's really hard to find anybody
who is more wrong than me. Because I couldn't let
myself believe that this party that I had worked in,
where you know, we said this stuff, yeah, character counts

(05:56):
that the office of the Presidency is more than just
a place that some he goes to work. It represents
some of the soul of the country. And you know,
I felt like the guy who was working for Bernie
Mattoff and actually thought we were beating the market. So like, way,
all of this wasn't That's why I wrote this book.
It was all a lie because I don't know any
other book way to come to any sort of rational,

(06:19):
intellectually honest conclusion. People don't change deeply help polics in
a few years unless there's some extraneous I don't believe
in UFOs. If one lands war, we're talking, I'll change.
But that didn't happen, and it just proved that the
party really didn't believe in anything but power. And you know,
say what you about Donald Trump, he does have this
animal instinct for weakness, and I think he looked at
the Republican Party and saw that we and I was

(06:42):
very much part of it, then really didn't care about
anything with power, and that if he would come in
and say I will give you power, you're going to
elect me a guy. You know, Church in my life
is where I go every you know, ten years or
sort of marry a model that you know, I think
nuclear triad is some sort of like hot thresome that

(07:03):
you know, a guy that has spent his life giving
money to Democrats. Yeah, all of that, none of that
will matter to you if I give you power. And
he was right.

Speaker 1 (07:13):
It's such a stunning indictment. I mean, it's you're absolutely right.
When I read your book, I just thought you know
he do hit the nail on the head. But here's
the thing. Donald Trump seems to me to be freaking
out in a way that I'd never really seen him
freak out before. And I've been up close with him,
and the way he is just flipping his lid over
this Epstein thing is remarkable. And in part it's because

(07:35):
he's run out of his dirty old man bag of
tricks just ain't working anymore, and he's pulling these tricks
out of his bag and they're just not and he's
and he's freaking out. The question, though, is you know,
he's got his personal defense attorney Todd Blanche's disguise as
justice partificial going down to Tallahassee trying to I guess,
negotiate a partner something. You got to wonder where the

(07:55):
Republicans howl over. They're starting to howl a little bit.
And in some of this, I don't know if it's
standing on principle or it's just all the phone calls
coming into their offices.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
Some of them are starting to go a little road. Yeah. Look,
I mean it's sort of a test here. It's like
when Roy Moore ran, you know, and you would say, okay,
what would it take to get white Republicans in Alabama
to vote for a reasonable Democrats? What if the Republican
was a child molestor Nope, sixty plus percent of them

(08:29):
still forty for Roy Moore. You rode that horse and
and everything, and remember he rode that horsem It's what
has always struck me is so bizarre about the rights
obsession with the Epstein files is that the one person
in our party, not my party anymore, but it wasn't
a party that we know is really close to Epstein.

(08:51):
Is Donald Trump? Yes, So, I mean this wasn't a secret.
There aren't any revelations, you know, I mean the Wall
Street Journal or whoever it was CNN, I guess today
released pictures of him and Hillary's and when he went
to Donald Trump's wedding. You know, I mean, this isn't
a secret. These guys were running buddies. There's all kinds

(09:14):
of stuff about them, and yet the party didn't care.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
So I think it's kind of wild that we're just
finding out about a lot of this stuff now. I mean,
it's you know, it took a Wall Street Journal story
yesterday to find out he is, in fact in the
Epstein five.

Speaker 2 (09:28):
I mean, he is. This has been going on for
the better part of twenty years. Yeah, and I mean, look,
if we were in front of a jury, what we
would be looking to do is establish a pattern. We
can say, okay, is what this person's being accused of
consistent with accents this person has taken before, And that's

(09:49):
always some of the most compelling evidence. And with Donald Trump,
a guy talks in public about dating his own daughter,
I mean, and of course it is. Of course it's
consistent with Donald trum the twenty seven some odd women
that have accused him. A guy who a hometown jury
found him liable of sexual assault that the judge called rape, the.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
Escalator thing where the girl's going up the escalator and
he says, I'll be dating you intended.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
I'll be dating. It's the christ I asked.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
I asked that question of Mike Johnson, who says that
that is just grotesque.

Speaker 2 (10:21):
And you know, I mean, look, has it come to this,
Mike Johnson? I mean it really, I mean yeah, I mean,
just a nothing guy and somehow, you know, of course,
they're basically on Craigslist looking for a speaker, and they
ended up with Johnson. But it is the weakest speaker,
I think the weakest. Yeah. Yeah, and he's just a

(10:42):
weak person. Yeah. And you know what really blows my
mind here is all of these people, particularly in the Senate,
who worked really hard, aspired all their lives to become senators.
They're now in this powerful position. I look at Roger
Wicker from Mississippi, somebody I've known you forever. We're pages
in Washington together. A very good person, a guy who

(11:05):
most of his career has been spent a lot of
it focused on building alliances to make America stronger. He's
now Chairman of Armed Services Committee, a dream of his life.
And what is he doing. He's issuing in Pete Heckson
and he could not agree with Donald Trump more on Ukraine,
and yet he won't call Donald Trump out by name. Yeah,

(11:26):
And it's you know, I think it's a really interesting
kind of moral dilimma that, like the Norwegians found themselves
in are you are you going to be in World
War two? Are you going to be a quizzling Probably
if you stay it in, maybe you made things a
little bit better. Maybe they didn't arrest in torture quite
so many people. Or do you fight it, and yeah,
story is just a band in any sort of pretense

(11:47):
that it's a normal American political party. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:50):
And one of my favorite books is Kennedy's Profiles and Courage,
and I just you know, it's a classic. And I
just wonder you've been up close with a lot of politicians.
Is is it just that a lot of these guys
and I guess ladies too, they just they're just more
concerned about winning the next election and staying in power
because they get they get treated like a celebrity. They
get you know, somebody holds their purse or their their

(12:13):
golf bag or whatever and drives them around, and they
just like that life, and so they don't want to
jeopardize it and put it on the line and do
something that's courageous. I just I don't understand it. A
hundred million people in this country and we got a
bunch of people up there, they.

Speaker 2 (12:28):
Just don't have any guts.

Speaker 1 (12:29):
I'll put Ruben GEI go to the side, because I mean,
I thought what he had to say earlier was kind
of interesting, and he did sound like he was gutsy,
But the vast majority of don't sound very gutsy.

Speaker 2 (12:38):
And how the Hellene. I don't think we should redefine
courage as saying who won the twenty twenty election. That's true,
that is what I mean. Look, these are heirs to
the Greatest Generation. I mean, people are like my dad.
You know, he's at f Values and he fought South
Pacific for three years twenty eight dollar landings came back.

(12:59):
That's and he was, just like hundreds of thousands of others,
part of the Greatest Generation. And they handed that legacy
to these generation of politicians. And yet they can't get
their comm shop to put out a statement congratulating the
winner of the twenty twenty election. That's a pretty low bar.
And I don't think really it's about courage. I think
it's about decency. And when you are quiet about something

(13:24):
that is so detrimental and corrosive and toxic to the
greatest democracy, to what it means to be an American,
you are complicit. They are. I mean, you look at
Marco Ruvio and what we're doing the usaid, I mean,

(13:45):
what's happening. If I, you know, a year ago, if
I could cone CNN with you and said, look, dude,
a year from now, there's going to be mass men
running around in a department that will have a larger
budget than any of the militaries in the world. The
shipt for two countries unbelievable. You would have said, I'd
be proud of. You would have said, come on, give

(14:06):
me a break, and yet that's where we are now. No,
you're right, I mean, the ice thing is is unreal.
And Marco Rubio being the son of Cuban immigrants, to me,
I think you have a moral duty to speak out
when we're seeing unspeakable, in humane treatment of migrants in

(14:28):
this country. It's just absolutely one on American treatment of
migrants in this country. There's a story the other day
in the Yard and about migrants having to eat like
animals inside one detention facility in Florida. This is not
who we are, and but for some of these people,
it is who they are, I guess. And that's what
democrats need. That's what democrats need to do. I mean,

(14:49):
they need to go out and say, if you vote
for Pete Hexa, you are not a patriot. Because you're not.
You can't turn over the most powerful military in the
history of the world to some boozy weekend guy at Fox.
He's wearing these in the gap and stuff. It's just
a joke and say that you really care about America.

(15:10):
And I think that there's a timidity about the Democratic
Party that drives me crazy. And they I think they
need to have more swager, more confidence and be out
there and asserting that what is happening here, it's it's wrong.
If you had a list of ways to make the
country poor, less powerful, sicker, less of a force and

(15:33):
for good in the world, It's like Trump has gone
through this, this this laundry list of them.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
They're doing it on every front. It's almost like a
cyborg created in a lab that has every in adequacy
and inconsistency and hypocrisy that you could possibly imagine.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
This is what they're going to be remembered for. You know,
they sit, They've done all these things in their careers.
They pass law, they got this bill, they got this bridge,
they got this airport. None of that is going to matter.
This is like segregation. That's all you're going to be
remembered for. Yeah, you know side which side of the
of the bridge where you own? And that's this is

(16:16):
what this is a Trump Party now, yea. And I
mean I am optimistic though about Democrats. I do think
that Democrats can win, and I think if you asked
me to say who is more likely to win the
twenty eight and thirty two election, I would say Democrats.
The base the contruction is who I mean.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
And that was where I was going to go next
with this news, because I wonder if the Democrats need
their own sort of disruptor or you know, maybe it's
a personality type or somebody, you know, somebody is just
not a governor or a senator who has been waiting
their turn patiently and so on, and just somebody who
just goes for it and just starts blowing through some
of these early contests, and it just sort of throws

(16:57):
the whole board game upside down.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
I mean, I just kind of wonder if it's going
to be something like that. I don't know, Yeah, you know,
I'm a great believer in the theory that countries and
parties invent leaders when they need them. Yeah, And so
I mean, you look at Churchill, this kind of you know,
alcoholic has been you know, who found a moment of
historic greatness. Margaret Thatcher another sort of unlikable harsh back

(17:23):
venture and all of a sudden, the country and conservatives
needed the Iron Lady, so what she had was powerful
Ronald Reagan. I mean he had to run three times,
so I mean, look, I knew Bill Clinton since he
lost his race for Congress. I didn't look at Bill
Clinton to say that's the next president. So I think

(17:43):
you really never know about these people till they get
out there. That's true. And they have they have to
go out and to prove themselves.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
But and I don't buy this stuff that Pete buodha
Jete can't do it. I know we were oh, because
he's gay, he can't.

Speaker 2 (17:56):
I don't think that's true.

Speaker 1 (17:57):
People said that about Obama because he was black, and
you just don't know.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
We don't know. We don't know when they get out there.
You're right, yeah, I mean, you know it's it's like
a friend of mine who left unsaid that he's a
well known actor interested in politics, and he said, well,
I always thought this girl friend thing would be a problem,
but I guess it's not. Maybe I should think about running,
you know.

Speaker 1 (18:18):
I think that the Churchill thing, though, is so is
so beautiful. He's one of my heroes, and you know,
I I you know, talk about John McCain sometimes he
was one of my heroes, and I know he's a
flawed person, and people say, oh, John mcain did this,
or that he was one of my heroes, and I
just think he you know, he just I like that
kind of a Maverick style of politician. Always been sort

(18:40):
of into that sort of thing. But the Churchill thing
is so important. And if you look at what happened
to Churchill, I mean, he every it was like every
political force was out to get him, and he could
he you know, but it was that moment and he
rose to that moment, and I just kind of wonder,
maybe we just don't know who that person is going
to be.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
Moral clarity in this moment. I mean, you know, more
than I think the majority of people realized how close
they came to coming to some appeasement with the Germans.
And you know, that's really what the Republican Party has done.
You know, it used to be a thing that we said,
don't negotiate with terrorists, and that's what the party's done.

(19:22):
And they've appeased with Donald Trump. And you know, this
idea you can't talk about nineteen thirties Germany, I think
is wrong. We're not going to end up the same way.
We're not going to have another World War, We're not
gonna have another Holocaust. But what happened in nineteen thirties Germany.
You had these Prussian aristocrats who are very much like
those leaders in the Publican Party, who like Friends on Pathen.

(19:43):
They realized that they had lost touch with the working class,
and the working class was becoming Bolshevik. So they said
to you know, we had to stop this. The greater
good is to ally with Hitler and we'll be able
to control them. And you know, when I was rising
all the light, I went back and I read Friends

(20:03):
On Pappin's memoirs. You know, he was a Prussian aristocrat.
It really did more than anybody else to usher and Hitler.
He wrote his memoirs in nineteen fifty three. To him, right,
you can see things are gone a little sideways. World
War two, you know, one hundred million people did it
and he still was trying to justify it. Yeah, and
there will be people like that. And that's when when
people say to me about the Republican Party, where would

(20:25):
the line be. Maybe it will be on Epstein. But
if you think about it, you know this guy who
they now do everything, he says, inspired a mob that
came into their workplace and tried to kill them. And
once you accept that, you think they're going to be
some like policy. Well, he's his issue on the law
to see threaties too much. I'm not gonna have.

Speaker 1 (20:46):
Well, and they're busy rewriting that, you know, the history
of that day. Now they're trying to rewrite the history
of the twenty sixteen campaign and whether Russia interfered in
the election. And the thing that worries me the most
to do right now is we have a polarized societ that
has a media landscape that is completely broken. And I've
talked about this on my show a number of times.

(21:06):
I mean, our news and information system in this country
is completely broken. You have corporate media companies that are
cow toowing and bending the NITA Trump. You have a
right wing juggernaut with Fox and all of the influencers
on the right. And we have this, you know, this
Battlestar Galactica thing that's starting up on substack and independent media.
And that's all well and good, but public broadcasting is
getting kneecapped, and people still live in these silos and

(21:29):
you and I can have this conversation and people can
chime in and say that's at a boy stew at
ata boyd Jim. But there are huge parts of this
country where the information is not getting through and the
truth is not getting through. And it makes me worry
that people will excuse Donald Trump being in the Epstein
files because they'll cook up some bullshit. Excuse on Fox
where they'll cook up some bulls, you know, Laura lum

(21:51):
will cook up some bullshit on on.

Speaker 2 (21:53):
X and it.

Speaker 1 (21:54):
That's what terrifies me, is that you and I aren't
even in the twenty twelve.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
World that you and I operated in thirteen years ago.
I mean twenty twelve was like the crimean Wars. I
mean I called the Golden Age.

Speaker 1 (22:05):
I tell my friends all the time, like I got
to ride on the campaign playing with Mitt Rodney, and
he was actually nice to us. He was a very
good and decent man. Yeah, and that shits out the window.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
You know, I mean it. He had great respect for
the office. He had great respect for President Obama. I mean,
I think that was even true. I worked for Bush
in two thousand and that horrible recount period. I know
because I was around Bush. If glory had won, he
would have been done what he could to support him.

(22:37):
And just as a side note, I don't think we
talk enough about what an American hero was. Al Gore
was the night that Supreme Court decision came down. Because
if ever there was a moment you could tear the
country apart, it was then. And as I understand it
from I've gotten to know some of his aides that
when that came down, one of the first things he
told his staff was, don't trust the Supreme Court, that

(23:01):
it is more important than this moment, which is a
tremendous act of patriotism and sacrifice. Look, I go back to,
you know, the core of MAGA and of the Republican
Party now is non college educated white voters. That's the

(23:23):
fastest declining demographic in America. In two thousand, in the
Bush campaign it was sixty percent. Now it's thirty nine percent.
So I think the coalition that Trump put together that
enabled him to win. I always thought this was unsustainable
because either MAGA was going to demand that you have
mass men chasing gardeners through Brentwood, or if they did that,

(23:47):
you know, descending on these people who you know, just
leaching off the system, which is why we always go
to their workplace to find them that it was going
to shatter the you're able to get up the four
Hispanic vote, which is what we got in Bush by
the Way in two thousand and four, and then it
dropped to thirty one percent from the Cane and Romney.

(24:07):
So I think that that coalition is is shattering. Just
Democrats need to go out and have that moral clarity
and not be afraid to say you are wrong, this
is evil, and don't.

Speaker 1 (24:23):
Shy and standing with someone who is evil makes you evil,
makes you listen.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
It's absolutely yeah. I mean every one of those Republican
office holders who did not speak up when Donald Trump
pardoned cop beaters, they are people who support pardoning cop beaters.
It's that simple. You know, it's these aren't I mean
think about it. You know, I talk about this with
Joe Trippy now, you know, it's great democratic consultant, our studies,

(24:52):
the best of his generation, and we laugh about what
we used to fight about. It was like, was the
capital against It's going to be twenty eight percent or
thirty four percent? I mean it's quinet. Yeah, you know
those days yet exactly, and we need a center right
party in America, but we don't have one. Now, we

(25:12):
have an extremist movement. And the history of extremist movements
is they only become more extreme and the purity tests
become more and more demeaning and demanding. Yeah, and well,
the reason now, I think, like the reason Trump appoints
somebody like Pete Hex said. He knows Pete Hext's an idiot,
but he wants to prove that he can make these

(25:33):
Republican senators debase themselves, that they will get down on
their knees and vote for somebody to be Defense Secretary
who's an idiot, and I can do it.

Speaker 1 (25:47):
This is power and it's his way of showing control
over other men. Yeah, yeah, there's no question.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
Yeah no.

Speaker 1 (25:57):
And I think you hit on something that I think
is at the heart of this. And it's about having guts,
you know, it's about having courage, and it's an intangible
and it sounds a little quaint and it sounds a
little hokey, but that's kind of what it's all about here.

Speaker 2 (26:11):
And listen, a whole lot of it losing there's no
shame in losing your race. And I really don't know.
I go back to Roger wickerd His next primary is
in six years and he's gonna be nearly eighty, So
I mean, give me a break. This isn't about being
worried about losing your primary. And so what if you

(26:31):
lost your primary? You know one of the things that
just baffles museums. You've been around a lot of politicians
and they tend to have big egos, which is fun,
nothing wrong. So do writers, So do great athletes, so
do great musicians. You know, so shortge here, we haven't
shot anybody all day for that, but you would think
that that part of them that has that ego would
understand how they are viewed and will be viewed. And

(26:54):
we're not talking fifty years from now. You know, what
their children are going to study about January sixth, it's
not going to be that these people should have been pardoned.
And what they're going to study. They're going to ask,
you know, when there were masked men disappearing American citizens,
what did you do? And that's not going to go away.

(27:19):
And I just don't understand why they said, well, I'm
the person who stood up. You know, I lost, but
I stood up, And why don't you want to be
that person. It's really fascinating to me. It's incredibly disappointing.

Speaker 1 (27:38):
It's at the heart of where we are right now. Honestly,
I couldn't agree with him more.

Speaker 2 (27:43):
But you know, I just gotta said, there was something
about what we did in the Republican Party gym that
valued winning over anything else. And I was guilty of that.
All I cared about was winning, you know, I didn't
worry about anything else. And that enabled a group of

(28:03):
very superficial weak people to rise to success because they
just had to go along and be there and say
the right things. And all of these things that we said,
like character counts, death said any of this stuff, they
were just marketing slogans and they weren't beliefs. And I think,

(28:25):
you know, look, somebody spent twenty five years plus pointing
out flaws and Democratic Party. But think about it. If
John Kerry on the night of the election in twenty
twenty four had said that he won and George Bush lost,
the Democratic Party would have told him he was insane, exactly,
and the New York Times would have said, like, this
man has lost his mind. And there's not an equivalency there.

(28:49):
There is something about the Republican Party, a sickness that
we enabled, and you know, I was part of that,
and I think we have to be honest about it.
How did we allow this to happen? I think confession
is part of the cures too. I think that that
goes a long way.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
And I know you've been, you know, a solid guy
and being upfront about all this, and you've written about
it extensively, and I hope.

Speaker 2 (29:11):
People take it to heart.

Speaker 1 (29:12):
And you know, I hope every once in a while
that somebody from magnet World says, you know, I just
want to see what that GiB Acosta is saying over there,
and he's got stew On and god damn it, what
are those guys saying?

Speaker 2 (29:21):
And maybe they'll listen to some of this you are,
and they're taking it to you are a truth teller
all the way. No, I mean absolutely true. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:31):
Well, my my attitude is is that and it's sort
of I think it's the same as yours, which is
the stakes are too high. I don't want to see
this country going down the tubes.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
You know, you talked about World War Two. My my
mom's dad, you know, he died when she was just
two years old.

Speaker 1 (29:45):
I never got to know him, but he's buried at
Arlington National Cemetery. My dad is a Cuban refugee, came
over in sixty two, right before the Cuban missile crisis.
You know, that's what makes this country a special place.
I'm not putting myself on a pednosaur and say, oh,
look at my biography. I'm just saying, like, I feel
like that's a pretty goddamn special thing.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
Is I don't want that to Jim. What is extraordinary
is the ordinariness of your story exactly. That is what
makes America great. And you know, I think about Ronald Reagan.
He announced in front of the Statue of Liberty to
send a signal that he signed to build and made
everyone in the country legal before nineteen eighty four, and

(30:23):
his last speech was in olle to immigrants. That's right,
and we should not kid ourselves at What is happening
with Ice in the Republican Party is a saying that
we're just against illegal immigrants, and Trump is pretty much
ripped the band aid off of that. He said, if
we just we're going to deport bad people, it doesn't
matter if they're Americans or not.

Speaker 1 (30:45):
We want his cruelty to become everybody else's cruelty. And
that's the scary thing about what we're in the middle.
And that's what makes this fight so important in my view,
and why we have.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yeah and listen, it's another whole conversation. But I don't
think we talk enough about race in this And you know,
if you take a list of the very competent, you know,
African Americans, that Trump is taken out of powerful positions
and put incompetent or not more competent white people. Unreal.
And you know, in eighty five and twenty Trump's coalition

(31:18):
was eighty five percent white. Okay, he did a little
better in twenty four it was eighty four percent white.
But at the heart of all of this rage is
the fact that America is becoming a minority majority country
and all this, okay, and all the Steven Millers in
the world are not going to change that. They're not
going to change it. And when you really, in a

(31:41):
very simple sense, you look at everything that Trump is doing,
and it's hard to credit him with any organized stought,
but there are people around him that are very organized thoughts.
And when your base of support of lower educated, white people.
What do you do. You try to get more white people.
You curate the election, sure, which is what they're trying
to do with ice and all this stuff that they're

(32:03):
doing with voting laws, and you try to make people
less educated. You attack education great replacement theory when you
think that, yeah, exactly, I mean this idea that higher
education has become like an own ramp to socialism. You know,
I think about that every time I go to the
Olmoss Alabama game, like, really, really, we're socialists now because

(32:25):
you know, we're going to college. Unreal and yeah, and
it's in many ways very transparent and very simple, in
the same way that the Russians wanted to elect Donald
Trump and they elected him, and what did they get.
They got a lot more than they ever could have imagined.

Speaker 1 (32:42):
And that's exactly right. And and you know, and it
could not have gone better for them. I mean, you know,
talk about a low cost, you know, low budget.

Speaker 2 (32:55):
The greatest covered up in the history of the world, undoubtedly,
no question, you know, I mean, if you just think
about it. The core of the anti Soviet Union, anti
communists and questionable doubting Russia, Gouding Putin was the most
conservative element of the poking party and that now has

(33:16):
become the beating heart of the pro putine element of
American politics. Yeah, and that is to go back to church.
So it's like Church will decided that Nazis are good,
and you know they surrounded it's just extraordinary. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:30):
Well, I tell you, Stu, I mean, I think we
have to do this on a regular basis because we
didn't even get to some of the stuff that I
wanted to talk about, which is, you know, how do
we get through to young men and you know, hit
them upside the side of the head and say, you know,
stop worshiping this guy who's been he was just mocked
on South Park for certain things that you know, maybe
I shouldn't say, but maybe I will say as I

(33:52):
closed out the show. But you know, I mean, honestly,
the stakes are really high right now. It's a tall
order that we're up against. But I'm glad that you're
on the case to I've always been glad that you're
on the case because you're a truth teller. And I
really appreciate the time. Let's do this again.

Speaker 2 (34:07):
I'd love to let's make that have it all right.

Speaker 1 (34:09):
Good to see you, man, You too, take care, all right,
that's the great Stuart Stevens. And you know we didn't
get to reminisce about the twenty twelve campaign. We would
see each other out on the campaign trail, and I
always just thought Stu was a character but also kind
of a sage with lots of wisdom to impart upon
young reporters and journalists like myself. Anyway, really interesting guy,

(34:31):
and hoping keep these conversations going. I noticed that the
Lincoln Square folks were chiming in Steve's with Lincoln Square.
I don't even know if I mentioned that as we
were getting going, but obviously you know, when you're on
the substack machine and you want to give them a subscribe,
I would say, go ahead and give them a subscribe,
because you get to hear from the wit and wisdom
of Stuart Stevens, who always a treat to talk to him,
really appreciate his time.