Hey everybody. Welcome to the Muckrake podcast. I'm Jared Y. Sexton here with Nick House, as always.

But we have a special episode, and we've been looking forward to this for the past few days.

We have with us, Stuart Stevens. And for those who don't know, Stuart is the author of eight books and has written for television shows, including Northern Exposure and Commander in Chief.

For 25 years, he served as a strategist, a media consultant for several campaigns and politicians,

including George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney.

What we're going to talk about today is, I think, a really important book that Stewart has

written, and we're going to dive deep into this.

He is the author of the book, It Was All a Lie, How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. Stuart, I want to say,

first of all, that I thought writing this book was really courageous and needed. And we're going

to talk, we're going to get deep in this podcast about the Republican Party,

the history, the experience that you have had. Can you talk a little bit about what it was

within you that felt it necessary to write this book? What was the moment where that light bulb

went off? Well, hey, thanks for asking me to the party.

You know, there are a lot of people who are wrong about Donald Trump in 2016,

but it's really hard to find anybody who was more wrong than me.

You can look around the country.

I didn't think he'd win the primary and I didn't think he'd win the general.

And when he did, I started asking myself, like, how come I didn't see this?

How come this party I'd work in could do this, could produce this.

And, you know, in that way, you're like high school English teacher said, if you can't write it, you don't understand it.

I really just began this as sort of a personal exploration of like, how did I miss this?

So I started reading a lot about the history of the party, which I thought I knew, but I, like, a lot of things I only knew superficially.

...