Stuart Stevens, a Republican political strategist who served as a top adviser on the 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, excoriated his fellow Republicans for what he called a lack of courage, describing the party as a “sewer,” in an op-ed article published this week. As noted by The Washington Post , Stevens now works for former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, who is challenging Trump in the Republican primary.
The 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, when the United States and allied troops stormed the beaches of Nazi-occupied France — leading to the defeat of Germany in World War II, as Army.mil describes — will fall on Thursday, June 6. Stevens used the occasion to unfavorably compare today’s Republicans to the Americans who fought to defeat Adolf Hitler.
The United States of America, Stevens wrote in his article for The Daily Beast , “was born of the courage of a few who made the impossible appear inevitable.”
Stevens went on to diagnose a lack of moral fortitude in the Republicans who, he wrote, “don’t seem capable of summoning some mix of courage and decency to put country over their next primary.”
Stevens himself has found himself on the receiving end of Trump’s anger. In 2015, after Stevens predicted — wrongly — that Trump would fail in the Republican 2016 primaries, Trump blasted Stevens as having “terrible political instincts,” according to Politico .
In his op-ed titled “Trump-Drunk Republicans Are Choosing Russia Over the Constitution,” Stevens recalled that three decades ago, the Republican party reached the “moral heights” of former president Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down [the Berlin Wall],” as History.com recounts.
But today’s “Trump-drunk” party has become, according to Stevens, a “sewer filled with the weak trying to reassure the weaker that weakness is a virtue.”
“The beating heart of America is courage,” Stevens wrote. “That’s the legacy these Republicans are squandering and it should be called out for what it is: shameful.”
But not all Trump critics were pleased with Stevens’ scathing attack on the Republicans for their continued support of Trump, at least not on Twitter. One Twitter user noted that Stevens also worked in 2008 for the presidential campaign of John McCain, “and helped to bring us (Sarah) Palin?”
“This s*** didn’t just start with Trump.”
Another claimed on Twitter that when Romney was running for president and Trump, then a private citizen, become the most public proponent of the false “birther” conspiracy theory that former president Barack Obama was not born in the United States, Stevens saw that this benefited Romney and therefore “sealed his lips tighter than a frog’s a**.” The user added the allegation that Stevens helped “usher” the current version of the Republican party “in the front door.”
