Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime Republican political operative who doesn’t mind playing rough, is back in the spotlight. And that’s how he likes it.


Ever since he parted ways with Donald J. Trump, whose presidential campaign he was advising until this month, he has been a much sought-after television guest, having appeared on “Fox & Friends,” “Anderson Cooper 360,” “Morning Joe” and “Today,” among many other programs.






Mr. Stone worked for Ronald Reagan’s victorious presidential campaign in 1980.




“Never miss the opportunity to have sex or be on television, as Gore Vidal said,” Mr. Stone said, sitting in a black leather Corbusier chair in the one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side where he stays when he is in New York.


He split with Mr. Trump in the wake of the Aug. 6 Republican presidential debate, soon after he said he strongly advised Mr. Trump to stop attacking the popular Fox anchor Megyn Kelly, who was a moderator at the Cleveland event.


Mr. Trump said he fired Mr. Stone. Mr. Stone said he quit.


The breakup made for good copy in the political press — here were two gunslingers, facing each other in the news-media glare — and it turned Mr. Stone into something of a hot property rather than just another ho-hum talking head.


Aside from giving him a forum to rail against Mr. Trump’s many political foes, the talk-show rounds have allowed Mr. Stone to display his highly developed sense of style.


“It’s given me a chance to show off an extraordinary wardrobe,” said Mr. Stone, who turned 64 on Thursday. “I’ve worn seersucker twice on CNN!”


Mr. Stone’s suits are custom-made — and built to last. “I don’t think I’ve had a new garment made in 20 years,” he said. “When you have bespoke things made, a good tailor puts enough fabric in the seams, so as you get older and fatter, or as you lose weight, they can be taken in and out. So most of my suits were made by Anderson & Sheppard in London a hundred years ago. I have used Alan Flusser here, who is like my sartorial mentor and the total arbitrator of good taste.”


Asked how his suits have lasted so long, Mr. Stone said: “You need to avoid dry cleaning. Dry cleaning destroys fabric. Use a whisk broom and a little cool water. Air them outside.”


For Mr. Stone, style and substance go together, just as, in his view, politics is as much about theater as it is about policy.


“If life is a stage, then you should always be in costume,” he said. “And if you are trying to connote a certain authority in your business life, I think being well dressed is part of that. I feel good, I feel confident, when I’m properly clad. I feel like a master of the universe, as it were.”


Mr. Stone has continued to cheerlead for Mr. Trump’s candidacy when he appears on the programs in his array of summer finery. He talks about Trump the businessman. Trump the leader. Trump the man who will make America great again. A skeptic may suppose that this master of political stagecraft had planned the whole breakup situation.


Before the split, he said, his consultancy firm brought in $40,000 for the work he did as an adviser to Mr. Trump, the tycoon-turned-Republican-front-runner. Asked if he had spoken with Mr. Trump since they apparently went their separate ways, Mr. Stone said: “I would rather not say. I still consider him a friend, and think he still considers me a friend; let’s just leave it at that. And I’m going to keep beating the drum for him until he is in the White House.”


(In an interview on “Fox & Friends” a few days after Mr. Stone’s departure from the campaign, Mr. Trump said, “Roger Stone is a nice guy, but I let him go because I really wasn’t using him and he liked to get a lot of publicity for himself, which I didn’t want.”)


As a boy in Lewisboro, N.Y., Mr. Stone volunteered at a Republican headquarters to work for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. He cried when Mr. Goldwater, the conservative candidate, lost in a landslide to Lyndon B. Johnson. At around the same time, watching old movies on television, he developed an appreciation for beautiful clothes, especially admiring the film stars George Raft, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Gary Cooper and the actor-turned-Connecticut governor John Davis Lodge, who serve as role models for his own personal style, he said.


At age 19, as The Washington Post reported in 1986 and The New Yorker mentioned in a 2008 profile of Mr. Stone, he donated money in the name of a socialist organization to the presidential campaign of Paul N. McCloskey Jr., a Republican, who was called Pete. He then sent a letter and a receipt from the McCloskey campaign to The New Hampshire Union-Leader in an effort to discredit the candidate and to help his political idol, Richard M. Nixon, who was then running for re-election.


Mr. Stone went on to work for Ronald Reagan’s failed 1976 presidential bid and his victorious 1980 and 1984 campaigns. He has also served as a key player for a number of other Republicans, including Bob Dole, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Prescott Bush and the former New Jersey governor Thomas H. Kean. He worked alongside the political fixer Roy M. Cohn, whom he counts as a mentor, and then with another expert in the art of campaign politics, Lee Atwater, during the 1988 presidential campaign. He also reportedly played a part in the 2000 presidential recount.


Mr. Stone, whose main residence is Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he lives with his wife, Nydia Bertran Stone, has stuffed his New York apartment with images of his heroes, including Reagan and Goldwater. A large photograph of Nixon takes pride of position, hanging over the bed. Mr. Stone often dined with Nixon at his home in Saddle River, N.J., in the years after his resignation from the presidency. Mr. Stone also wears a tattoo of the 37th president’s face on his back.


Other decorative touches suggest Mr. Stone’s fascination with the days of bygone glamour, with framed photographs of Cary Grant, Al Jolson, Rudolph Valentino and William Powell, and ashtrays from Toots Shor’s and the Stork Club. An entire wall is devoted to framed illustrations of the fashion artist Laurence Fellows, who made his reputation at Vanity Fair, Vogue and Esquire in the 1930s.


Hundreds of neckties hang on either side of the Nixon photo, and Mr. Stone joked that he has more shoes than Imelda Marcos — whose husband, the Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, he once advised. There are also artifacts depicting Chairman Mao, whose mass marketing techniques Mr. Stone said he admires. A framed poster from a sex club in Amsterdam, which Mr. Stone said he took from a wall during a visit there, completes the décor.


Mr. Stone maintains his own fashion blog, Stone on Style, and holds the unlikely seeming title of men’s fashion editor for the conservative political website The Daily Caller. Through both outlets, he expounds on why men should not wear jeans or ascots, and sings the praises of the Madras jacket for the summertime and the velvet blazer for the winter holidays.


For years, he has presented his own best- and worst-dressed lists in the vein of Richard Blackwell, and his “Stone’s Rules,” which he plans to publish this year in book form, includes this bit of sartorial opinion: “Men over 30 who wear synthetic fabrics should get the death penalty.”


As for the style of his favorite candidate in the 2016 race, Mr. Stone said, “He is a Brioni man,” referring to the Rome-based fashion house favored by Mr. Trump, who has lately adorned his Brioni suit jackets with the requisite American flag pin.


Mr. Stone praised Mr. Trump as a trendsetter in the necktie department, saying: “He is a guy who defined the red power tie. He made the red power tie in the ’70s. His style works for him. He is a guy who is comfortable in a suit and tie. He likes wearing them. It’s like his uniform. It becomes part of his brand.”


His bias in favor of Mr. Trump may play a part in his opinion of other candidates’ fashion choices. Concerning Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Stone said: “If she is picking out her clothes, it’s awful. If someone else is picking them out, it’s even worse.”


He feels much the same about Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, with whom Mr. Trump has tangled. “Rand Paul could walk down the street in Manhattan and nobody would know who he was,” Mr. Stone said. “He looks like a guy who went to the gym, jumped in the shower really quick and then ran to the meeting. He looks unkempt. Cowboy boots from Kentucky. O.K., whatever. But you can’t dress like a college student. Someone should get the guy a decent haircut and a good suit.”


He also had stern words for The Daily Caller’s founder and editor in chief, Tucker Carlson, a friend of Mr. Stone’s who regularly wore a bow tie until 2006. “I won’t say he lost his mojo,” Mr. Stone said of Mr. Carlson, “but he lost some of it when he went to a straight tie. I don’t know if some image consultant at Fox told him to do that. Everybody said, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s the guy with the bow tie.’ It was like a trademark. I wouldn’t have given the bow tie up.”


Mr. Stone, the father of two adopted children and grandfather to five, is also no fan of the rolled-up shirt-sleeve look of so many male candidates on the stump. “You want to be president?” he said. “Dress like a president. I think we have an ideal in mind, and maybe John Kennedy has contributed to that ideal, as well as Reagan. They’re both uncommonly handsome and made for the television age. These guys are larger than life. They are not only handsome, but they are well turned out. I think there is too much of an effort to look like everyone else.


“We don’t want our president to look like everyone else,” he continued. “We want him to dress like a leader, someone you look up to. I think it’s phony.”


Not surprisingly, he is not so impressed with the demeanor of another rival to Mr. Trump, Jeb Bush. “He looks uncomfortable,” Mr. Stone said. “That isn’t going to get him votes. Trump is having the time of his life. He likes hitting the stump.”


He said that Mr. Trump shares an important trait — tenaciousness — with Nixon.


“You kind of picture him going to bed in a suit and tie,” Mr. Stone said of Nixon. “He always wore his jacket, never took the jacket off. Always in a suit and tie, and always somber.”


Aside from his tendency to go after Ms. Kelly, there is something else that Mr. Stone does not like about Mr. Trump: the Donald Trump men’s clothing line that was available at Macy’s for 11 years before the store dropped it in July, soon after the candidate asserted, during his announcement speech, that Mexico was sending rapists to the United States.


When asked what he thought of the Donald Trump ties in particular, Mr. Stone said, “I wouldn’t wear them.”