On Stephanie Ruhle’s MSNBC show, longtime Establishment Republican consultant Stuart Stevens—once a top media strategist for George W. Bush, senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, and a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project who now serves as its senior adviser—called Donald Trump a “criminal.”
Stevens said:
“Look, I think there’s a reason that law enforcement rarely turns to criminals to ask how to do their job. And Donald Trump is a criminal and he’s trying to tell law enforcement how to do their job.”
Stevens wasn’t just another Republican operative. He was one of the architects of George W. Bush’s rise to power. On Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns, Stevens and his firm were paid to shape Bush’s public image. He helped produce campaign ads, craft messaging, and package Bush’s story for voters—including through his partner Russell Schriefer, who served as program director of the 2004 Republican National Convention, where the campaign’s media team rolled out a glossy biographical film that rebranded Bush during his re-election bid. In short, Stevens was a campaign media strategist who sold George W. Bush to the American people—keeping him in power while Bush was president.
And what did that image-selling deliver? A war criminal in the White House. Under George W. Bush, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003—resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions displaced, torture scandals like Abu Ghraib, and a destabilized Middle East. Stevens didn’t direct those wars, but he packaged Bush in ways that kept him in power—and gave him the platform to start catastrophic conflicts.
Yes, Trump has been convicted and branded a “criminal”—but this isn’t about impartial justice. It’s about political lawfare designed to keep him from getting reelected. In New York, prosecutors took a bookkeeping misdemeanor—something almost never prosecuted on its own—and used a rare legal theory to inflate it into 34 felonies. They argued Trump falsified records to conceal “another crime.” But here’s the catch: that “other crime” was never proven in court. Under New York law, prosecutors didn’t have to prove it. It was enough for jurors to believe Trump intended to cover some kind of crime—and they didn’t even have to agree on what that crime was. That’s not justice—it’s politics dressed up as law.
At the end of the clip, Stevens said:
“This is not a law and order presidency. It’s a criminal who has no idea what he’s doing. He’s trying to bluster his way through this. And it’s great to see some strong Democratic governors stand up to him.”
And this is who MSNBC brings on—an establishment George W. Bush RINO and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump advertising machine that poured money into helping Joe Biden and attacking Republicans, making it a de facto pro-Democrat operation. They put him on air to cheer for Democrats and their lawfare against Trump as if it were news.
But what exactly are those Democratic governors “standing up for”? Sky-high crime, illegal immigration, homelessness, collapsing schools, drug and fentanyl crises, out-of-control taxes, failing infrastructure, soaring energy costs, sanctuary-city chaos, violent protests, soft-on-crime prosecutors, demoralized police, businesses shutting down, and people fleeing their states in record numbers.