Audiobooks by Stuart Stevens

It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'In his bare-knuckles account, Stevens confesses to the reader that the entire apparatus of his Republican Party is built on a pack of lies... This reckoning inspired Stevens to publish this blistering, tell-all history... Although this book will be a hard read for any committed conservatives, they would do well to ponder it.' --Julian E. Zelizer, The New York Times From the most successful Republican political operative of his generation, a searing, unflinching, and deeply personal exposé of how his party became what it is today Stuart Stevens spent decades electing Republicans at every level, from presidents to senators to local officials. He knows the GOP as intimately as anyone in America, and in this new book he offers a devastating portrait of a party that has lost its moral and political compass. This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else. Stevens shows how Trump is in fact the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Stevens shows how racism has always lurked in the modern GOP's DNA, from Goldwater's opposition to desegregation to Ronald Reagan's welfare queens and states' rights rhetoric. He gives an insider's account of the rank hypocrisy of the party's claims to embody 'family values,' and shows how the party's vaunted commitment to fiscal responsibility has been a charade since the 1980s. When a party stands for nothing, he argues, it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room. It Was All a Lie is not just an indictment of the Republican Party, but a candid and often lacerating mea culpa. Stevens is not asking for pity or forgiveness; he is simply telling us what he has seen firsthand. He helped to create the modern party that kneels before a morally bankrupt con man and now he wants nothing more than to see what it has become burned to the ground.

Stuart Stevens (Author), Dan John Miller (Narrator)

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The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear: A Novel

"In politics we always like to call each election the most important in generations. This time, it might actually be true." In this dark comedy from a best-selling writer and veteran political insider, a cynical campaign manager finds his family skeletons coming out of the closet on the eve of the Republican convention. New Orleans in July: it's hot and sticky and squalid. J. D. Callahan is in the middle of the political race of his life and displeased to be back in his hometown. His candidate, the sitting vice president, is neck and neck with an anti-immigrant, right-wing populist as the Republicans head into their first brokered convention in decades on the heels of a staggering global economic crisis. Soon after a series of dye bombs set off a mass panic and tilt the convention toward the vice president's law-and-order opponent, J. D.'s estranged brother shows up and asks for an inconvenient favor at a most inconvenient time, threatening to reveal a family secret that would ruin the legacy of their civil rights journalist father and destroy J. D.'s own reputation if he doesn't follow through. As J. D. scrambles to contain the damage on all sides, he finds himself contending with a sexy, gun-toting gossip columnist, an FBI agent convinced that J. D. is devious enough to set the bombs himself, and an old corrupt political friend of his late father with a not-so-hidden agenda. For the first time ever, J. D. is forced to reconcile the political career he's always put first with the past he's tried to leave behind as they careen toward each other on a disastrous collision course he may not be able to stop. Hilarious and remarkably sharp, Stuart Stevens's The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear is an endlessly entertaining whodunit and a brilliant satire of our political culture.

Stuart Stevens (Author), Dan John Miller (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Last Season: A Father, a Son, and a Lifetime of College Football

Fathers, sons, and sports are enduring themes of American literature. Here, in this fresh and moving account, a son returns to his native Mississippi to spend a special autumn with his ninty-five-year-old dad, sharing the unique joys, disappointments, and life lessons of Saturdays with their beloved Ole Miss Rebels. In the fall of 2012, after working on a presidential campaign that suffered a devastating loss, Stuart Stevens realized that he and his ninety-five-year-old father had spent little time together for decades. His solution: a season of attending Ole Miss football games together, as they’d done when college football provided a way for his father to guide him through childhood—and to make sense of the troubled South of the time. Poignant, full of heart, irreverent, and often hilarious, The Last Season is a powerful story of parents and children and the importance of taking a backward glance together while you still can. “Through the lens of college football, Stuart Stevens has produced a poignant tale of fathers, sons, race, and growing up in the South during the late 1960s. Besides being a delightful read, it is a reminder of the joy of relishing what is meaningful in life.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Steve Jobs

Stuart Stevens (Author), Dan John Miller (Narrator)

Audiobook