Ex-GOP strategist Stuart Stevens on the existential battle to save democracy

Will it be three indictments and Trump’s out?Stuart Stevens doesn’t think so. “The indictments will help (former president Donald) Trump in the Republican primary, of which there’s a certain crazy logic,” he said. “The Republican Party now is pretty much officially a white grievance party. And there's no greater way to prove the grievance than to be indicted by the Deep State.”Stevens contends that the Republican Party that he spent his career promoting has morphed into an authoritarian movement. Stevens was a former top adviser on five Republican presidential campaigns and dozens of GOP campaigns for governor, Congress and the U.S. Senate. Today, he has abandoned the Republican Party and is now doing all he can to stop it. He is a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, which is working to defeat Trump in the 2024 election. Stevens grew up in Mississippi but now lives in Stowe.Stevens says that the Trump era “is sort of like a pandemic: Whatever you say in the beginning will sound alarmist, but in the end will prove inadequate.”"I'm working on the assumption that Trump will not be convicted before the election,” he said. “And it'll be sort of a moral test for the country because Trump's basically running — his theme is so I can pardon myself. And by pardoning myself, I'm pardoning you, because you invested in me, and we were right, they were wrong."We've never had an election like that." Stevens has a new book due out in October, “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy.” This follows his 2020 bestseller, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”“It's an existential crisis,” Stevens said of the political precipice on which the U.S. teeters. “I can't really tell you by 2028 if we have an election in America, that it will be a democratic election.”