Hi, this is Jen Rubin, and this is Jen Rubin's Green Room. We are at the start of another week,

and we have a new speaker of the House who can only be described as a white

Christian nationalist who thinks the Bible, not the Constitution, is his guide to governance.

This is dangerous. This is anti-constitutional. This is un-American. But that is what the Republican

Party is these days.

And our guest today is going to talk about this.

It's interesting that at a time that our attention is very much in foreign policy

because of events in Ukraine, events in Israel, that we still are in a crisis here at home, a crisis of democracy.

And in 20-some-odd days, the spending is going to run out. We're going to be faced with another

government shutdown. The Republicans, who for reasons that really are inexplicable other than in their attachment to authoritarian thugs,

want to separate aid from Israel from aid to Ukraine so they can dump the latter.

And we maintain a position in which every election in America is now a matter of do or die. Every election is,

are we going to have democracy or are we going to have a bunch of authoritarian thugs running the show?

And until the Republican Party fundamentally changes, every election is going to be this way.

I would like to think that Democrats will win every election for now, because they are the party of democracy. But of course, that's impossible. And even when they win, of course, Republicans don't necessarily recognize that they've won. So you can't have a governing body. You can't have a Congress. You can't have

an effective executive. If one party is continually agitating for nihilism, for authoritarianism,

you've got to solve this problem. And I would like to think the Republicans are ready to step

away from Trump and Trumpism, but there is no sign,

zero sign. They are ready to do that. And our guests today, Stuart Stevens, is the perfect

person to explain this to us. Stuart, like I was, was Republican for many years. He was a consultant,

the senior strategist, to the Mitt Romney campaign.

But once Donald Trump was elected, the wool was pulled from his eyes, as it was for me.

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