The come to Jesus moment for Republicans is an interesting to watch unfold.
Stuart Stevens outlines his trip and finding that Jesus wasn't behind the couch after all.
"Yeah. The idea that you should vote for Donald Trump to stop what’s happening under Donald Trump is sort of illogical.
You have this confluence of long-term factors that are playing out here. There’s an anti-science element that’s developed in the Republican Party, an anti-expert element, an anti-truth element. And they have combined in this toxic brew that is killing tens of thousands of Americans. It’s extraordinary, it’s tragic, but you’re reaching a point now where everybody in the country either knows someone or is one or two degrees separated from someone who has been affected by COVID."
"I think Trump looked at the Republican Party with sort of an animal instinct and realized that this is a group of weak people who don’t really believe in anything, except winning, except power. And if I can give them power, they will allow me to be whatever I want to be. And I think he was right."
"Trump ran on the pretense that to be born in America is to be a victim, that you’re a sucker, that there are these powerful forces out there that are taking advantage of you. It’s a complete reversal of “to be born in the Reagan era was to win life’s lottery—you’re the luckiest person in the world. You’re an American.” For Trump, you’re a chump. And [he’s] going to go out and even the score for you, buddy. It’s a weaponization of white grievance."
"In [1993], Bill Clinton proposes a tax increase. It passes by one vote. At the time, every Republican predicted economic Armageddon. This was a time when Dr. Kevorkian was a popular cultural figure, the assisted suicide doctor, and they refer to it as a Kevorkian tax increase. So, I made a million ads about that. And we won every race in 1994 on that message. Guess what? We were wrong. It helped launch one of the greatest periods of economic expansion and growth in the history of the country. And Clinton was the last president to wrestle the deficit to some sort of standstill. So, I think you have to learn from facts. I think that there’s been a deeply flawed economic theory at the heart of a lot of Republican economics."
"Yeah, I’ll be a Democrat. I have a lot of friends, people I respect, that say, “Well, I can’t vote for Trump, but I can’t vote for [Joe] Biden.” I get that. I never argue with anybody, by the way, about politics. I never cared what my friends [thought] about politics. I have a whole group of friends in my sports world that I think if you ask them who is president, they’d be hard-pressed to answer. But I’m not going to make that choice. I think we live in a two-party system. It’s either Biden or Trump. I spent most of my life criticizing the Democratic Party—I don’t think it’s perfect. But I think the Democratic Party has responded to this moment in a much more legitimate, defensible way than the Republican Party has. So, yeah, I’ll work for Democrats and that’s who I’ll vote for.
It’s a party that hasn’t disqualified itself."