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Mea Culpa welcomes the Lincoln Project advisor Stuart Stevens. Regarded as one of the Republican Party’s most talented political gurus—a body of work that includes steering Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012—Stevens may also be the GOP’s most prominent defector when he abandoned his party as Trump rose to power. He despises the former president in a way that feels strikingly personal. While the Lincoln Project argues that Trump is perverting the Republican Party, Stevens doesn’t think Trump has perverted anything: Trump is the Republican Party, Stevens believes, and the Republican Party is Trump. Stuart believes there is no reclaiming his former party, it must be burned to the ground. Or to use a Vietnam-era metaphor, the Village must be destroyed in order to save it. Reflecting on a four-decade career in American politics, Stevens is convinced that Trump was not an aberrant zigzag. He was fate. “I saw a lot of this stuff, but I just chose to believe that this kind of dark side was the recessive gene, not the dominant one,” he says. “I was wrong.” Stevens joins Mea Culpa to discuss his fabulous new book “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party Is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy.” The book is part memoir and part Jeremiad as Stevens unpacks how we are moving towards an autocratic end.