How did Republicans go from Cold Warriors to Putin apologists? Stuart Stevens knows why

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How did leading Republicans go from being Cold Warriors to apologists for Russian President Vladimir Putin?

For insight, I turned to Stuart Stevens, who knows Republican politics from the inside. He was a top Republican political operative who worked on five presidential campaigns, including the campaigns of Mitt Romney in 2012 and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.

Stevens, who lives in Vermont, now finds himself inside a very different political operation. He is a central player in the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and argues the current Republican Party should be “burned to the ground.” His latest bestselling book is, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”

“I think that there is a large element of the conservative movement that has become a pro-Putin autocratic movement. … Donald Trump did not change the Republican…