About the Author

STUART STEVENS is the author of seven previous books, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, and Outside, among other publications. He has written extensively for television shows, including Northern Exposure, Commander in Chief, and K Street. For twenty-five years, he was the lead strategist and media consultant for some of the nation's toughest political campaigns. He attended Colorado College; Pembroke College, Oxford; Middlebury College; and UCLA film school. He is a former fellow of the American Film Institute.

Reviews

Stevens stands out among Trump's conservative critics because of his candor about the deeper rot at the core of the GOP... He offers a grand mea culpa for his own role in paving the way for Trumpism.
--Sean Illing, Vox It Was All a Lie is unlike anything published in the Trump era: a photo negative of the genre of self-justifying apparatchiks... He's written a history of the modern GOP from an insider's perspective, as well as something deeply personal.
--Benjamin Wofford, Washingtonian A stunning indictment.
--David Corn, Mother Jones

This book is going to become an important reference volume for future historians trying to explain what happened to the Republican Party in the second half of the 20th century and the Trump era. It takes someone with Stuart Stevens' insights as a writer to be able to see this story and deliver it to us the way he has.
--Lawrence O'Donnell "A sustained attack... Refreshingly frank."
--John S. Gardner, The Guardian Washington in 2020 often beggars belief: an American President answering a deadly pandemic with ignorance, inflaming racial unrest with racism, stoking violent confrontations while his fearful party stands mute... What if the accounting comes from one of the Republican Party's most accomplished political strategists, an insider provoked by Trump to reconsider his life's work? In fact, it has. Stevens dissects several categories of deception. Though he could not have anticipated it -- the book, completed last September, does not include the words coronavirus or George Floyd -- events of recent days keep offering improbably-vivid evidence for his assessments.
--CNN A blistering attack on the modern Republican Party and its wholesale surrender to Donald Trump... His willingness to tell the truth should serve as a model for the mea culpas that Republicans who enabled Trump's corruption, norm-shattering, and immorality owe us.
--Michael A. Cohen, The Boston Globe

An epitaph, of interest to all politics junkies, for a formerly venerable party by a champion-turned-gravedigger.
--Kirkus