'The worst generation': DC insider blasts today's 'morally grotesque' GOP
For many years, conservative consultant/strategist Stuart Stevens was a prominent figure in the GOP. Stevens worked closely with a who's-who of pre-MAGA Republicans, from former Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) to former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge to the late Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona). But in 2024, Stevens aggressively supported Democratic then-Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign. And like many other Never Trumpers, Stevens (who expressed his disdain for Trumpism and the MAGA movement by leaving the GOP in 2020) was bitterly disappointed when she lost to now-President Donald Trump.
In a scathing article published by The New Republic on March 7, Stuart is vehemently not only of Trump, but of 2025 Republicans in general. Today's "morally grotesque" GOP, Stuart laments, is betraying the values of the "Greatest Generation" and should be called the "Worst Generation" instead.
The term "Greatest Generation," used to describe the World War 2 Generation, was coined by NBC News journalist Tom Brokaw —and it caught on among both liberals and conservatives.
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"This is on you, my Republican friends," Stuart argues. "For years, I listened to your passionate commitments to freedom and democracy. I made hundreds of commercials laced with the iconography of the robust patriotism of America as the last, best hope. I watched you tear up to Ronald Reagan demanding, 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall'…. You inherited the legacy of the Greatest Generation only to ally with a mass-murdering tyrant invading a European democracy."
The former GOP consultant/strategist, now in his early seventies, continues, "That was not inevitable. It was unthinkable."
The person Stuart describes as a "mass-murdering tyrant" is Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump and Vice President JD Vance angrily berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a February 28 meeting in the White House Oval Office, but they avoid criticizing Putin.
"What will happen to this Worst Generation of Republican elected officials?" Stevens writes. "I'd like to think they will be around to see the evil of their weakness destroy their careers, just as the German industrialists who grew fat on Hitler's war machine saw their empires in ruins. Alas, most will probably stumble along and, when Trump is gone, plead for heroic status for their behind-the-scenes efforts to blunt the worst of Trump’s madness. 'If it wasn’t for me, the battle for Greenland would have been far more bloody.' But I doubt they can escape history's judgment of their weakness."
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Stuart Stevens' full article for The New Republic is available at this link.
