The Republican Party did not release any policy platform in 2020, but released its official 2024 policy platform last Monday.
NPR Washington editor Megan Platts wrote that the passage “reads like a transcript of a Trump rally speech,” and she’s mostly right.
After all, the platform’s dedication, “To the Forgotten Men and Women of America,” is lifted directly from President Trump’s 2017 inaugural address.
But what the new Republican platform resembles most is a Trump tweet: all the odd capitalized words, all the doom-and-gloom framing, and everything.
Honestly, I recommend taking a look at this new platform; the similarities to Trump’s tweets are staggering. And it’s only 16 pages long, less than 2% of the Project 2025 handbook.
As conservative students I know on campus have noted, adding “Sad!” to the end of their comments, the Republican Party is now beginning to speak in Trump’s voice—and think Trump’s thoughts.
During the Republican primaries (technically, back when people still thought anyone without the last name “Trump” could win), some of my friends were rooting for Nikki Haley.
America needed a calm, rational person in the White House, they argued, and the twice-elected governor and former U.N. ambassador might be just that person. After all, she was happy to tell Republican voters that just because President Trump says something doesn’t make it true.
Haley yesterday called on her delegates to vote for Donald Trump as the Republican nominee at next week’s Republican Convention, another capitulation for the remnants of a healthy Republican Party.
Republicans have had countless opportunities to dump Trump at this point. They have all been squandered.
Now covered up, Mitch McConnell himself said that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the riots on January 6. Republican senators could have just braced themselves and voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial, but they didn’t.
Unlike the Democratic primary, this Republican primary could have actually been a hotly contested one. There were viable alternatives to Trump. Republican politicians could have supported such a candidate, and Republican voters could have voted for such a candidate. But they didn’t.
Even Governor DeSantis, who I consider to be one of the most toxic figures in American politics since David Duke, offered voters a vision of a populist Republican party without the constant chaos that comes with having Trump actually in power, and voters said, “No, we want chaos.”
When Trump was in the White House, the usual refrain was, “Anything but his tweets,” or, “But I wish he’d tweet less.” Republican politicians were forced to ignore reporters if they hadn’t read Trump’s latest tweets every day.
The new platform makes it clear that it was all a farce. There’s nothing hidden. The Republican platform has been a collection of complaints since Trump won the nomination in 2016. And now it’s official.
The Republican “policy platform” has no actual substantive policies anywhere to be found. Inflation? Oh, Trump says he’ll solve it (while also promising tariffs that will make prices rise faster). Manufacturing jobs? More trade wars will solve that problem (labor unions are notably not mentioned).
It’s packed with heartfelt appeals to the American ego that stoke the culture wars: The platform proclaims that Republicans will “launch the largest deportation campaign in American history” and promises to “ban taxpayer funding for sex-reassignment surgery.”
There is no mention of Trump’s support for “televised military tribunals” against political opponents, including disloyal Republicans like Liz Cheney, but that’s probably just to save paperwork.
Actually, this isn’t all that surprising: No one, not even Haley, is trying to tell Republicans that what Trump says doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.
And despite Trump’s populist stance, his only major legislative achievement at the end of his four years as president was a massive tax cut for corporations and the top 1 percent. But it’s still disheartening to see a political party dominated by one man’s neuroses.
The new Republican platform tells all Americans what to expect from a second term of Trump: four more years of tweet politics. four more years of the “Leader of the Free World” praising dictators, trying to rid America of hard-working immigrants he believes are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and using the federal government as a cudgel against the LGBTQ community and anyone he holds a grudge against.
Tom Homan, Trump’s promised nominee to be ICE director, put it nicely at the National Conservative Conference: “They ain’t seen nothing yet. Just wait until 2025.”
