A short life of the author
Stuart Stevens (born 1953) is an American political consultant, travel writer, and author who spent three decades as one of the Republican Party’s most successful media strategists — working on the campaigns of George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and numerous governors and senators — and who then, in a dramatic act of public repudiation, wrote It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump (2020), in which he argued that the racism, nativism, and authoritarianism of the Trump era were not aberrations but the logical culmination of what the Republican Party had been for decades. The book made Stevens one of the most prominent anti-Trump Republican voices and transformed his reputation from operative to witness.
Life
Stevens grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, during the civil rights era. He attended Colorado College and UCLA film school, and worked in Hollywood before entering Republican politics. He became a partner at the political consulting firm Stevens & Schriefer and was the chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. He was also a competitive cyclist and cross-country skier who competed in age-group events at a high level.
Throughout his political career, Stevens pursued a parallel literary life. His travel books and magazine writing — for Esquire, Outside, and other publications — displayed a talent for comic self-deprecation and narrative set-pieces that his political work did not.
Travel Writing
Night Train to Turkistan (1988) follows Stevens and three friends as they attempt to retrace the 1935 journey of Peter Fleming (brother of Ian Fleming) across Chinese Turkistan. The book is a comedy of misadventure, bureaucratic obstruction, and cultural miscommunication — Stevens and his companions are spectacularly ill-prepared for Central Asian travel, and the gap between their romantic expectations and the absurd reality is the book’s engine.
Malaria Dreams: An African Adventure (1989) recounts Stevens’s attempt to drive across the Sahara from the Central African Republic to Algeria in a Land Rover. Like Night Train to Turkistan, it is a book about the comedy of incompetence in extreme environments — vehicles break down, borders close, diseases appear, and Stevens narrates it all with a gonzo cheerfulness that recalls early Paul Theroux.
Feeding Frenzy (1997) follows Stevens on a road trip across America in which he attempts to eat at every three-star restaurant — a comic exploration of American food culture before the foodie revolution.
Political Books
The Big Enchilada: Campaign Adventures with the Cockeyed Optimists from Texas Who Won the Biggest Prize in Politics (2001) is Stevens’s account of working on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. It is a breezy, insider account that treats politics as a sport — entertaining, occasionally revealing, but not self-critical.
It Was All a Lie (2020) represents a complete reversal. Stevens argues that the Republican Party’s supposed commitment to fiscal conservatism, free trade, and racial equality was always a facade — a marketing campaign that concealed the party’s actual appeal, which was to white racial grievance. He indicts himself as complicit: “I have no one to blame but myself. I was a willing participant in the deception.” The book is raw, angry, and self-lacerating in a way that political memoirs almost never are.
Critical Standing
Stevens is not a major literary figure, but his travel books are well-crafted entertainments in the Paul Theroux tradition, and It Was All a Lie is one of the most significant American political books of the Trump era — significant not for its analysis (which is familiar) but for its provenance: a lifelong Republican operative saying, with specificity and self-knowledge, that the party he served was rotten.
Collecting Stevens
Night Train to Turkistan (1988, Atlantic Monthly Press) in first edition brings $10–$30. It Was All a Lie (2020, Knopf) brings $10–$25. Stevens’s books are widely available and modestly priced.