Opinion | Republicans’ 2024 platform: Trump alone – The Washington Post
The 2020 convention stuck with the 2016 platform. But a lot has happened in eight years.
Normally, the internal fights that take place over the drafting of a political party’s platform in the run-up to its presidential convention generate little interest or intrigue, except among activists and insiders.
“I’m not bound by the platform,” 1996 Republican nominee Bob Dole said about the hard-line document his party passed that year. “I probably agree with most everything in it, but I haven’t read it.”
But while candidates often try to distance themselves from unpopular planks, platforms do matter. They reveal which factions really hold power within a party. They are testament to the differences between Democrats and Republicans. They show what a party aspires to get done if voters give it a chance.
Four years ago, having scaled back their convention because of covid-19, the Republicans who nominated Donald Trump to a second term didn’t bother to adopt a platform at all. Instead, the party decided to stick with its 2016 document and “continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.”
A lot has happened in the Republican Party — as well as the country and the world — since 2016. And therein lies an awkward situation for the Republican National Committee as it tries to define a set of principles for which the GOP stands in 2024.
That eight-year-old platform is a fossil of primordial, pre-MAGA conservatism — of a day when abortion rights seemed secure enough that posturing against them carried little political cost; when Republicans could agree that Ukraine’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity” needed to be defended against “a resurgent Russia.”
It declared that only parents should be allowed to “determine the proper medical treatment and therapy for their minor children.” At the time, this stance was understood to mean that parents shouldn’t be stopped from trying to change the sexual orientation of their children with conversion therapy, a harsh, pseudoscientific “gay cure” that has been condemned by major medical and mental health associations. Today, when a growing number of parents support children who want medical measures to change their gender, that same statement is at odds with the 23 Republican-dominated state governments that have banned or drastically limited such treatment for minors.
Amid the political backlash following the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Trump has tried to skirt the abortion issue, saying it should be left to the states and that he would not sign a national ban if he were returned to the White House. That does not square with the current GOP platform, which says: “We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth.”
As my colleague Michael Scherer reported in The Post, antiabortion groups are mobilizing against any effort to eliminate or weaken that plank. “Our expectation is that the GOP platform will continue to unequivocally call for national protections for unborn children, rooted in the 14th Amendment,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. “Watering down the GOP platform’s stance on life would entail an abandonment of its defense of the human dignity of all people. It will also give the Biden administration and Democrats the foothold they need.”
The committee that will write the platform has yet to be assembled; two members, a man and a woman, are to be appointed by each state delegation. But Trump’s campaign understandably wants to influence those selections, and Scherer reported it has circulated slates of its preferred members.
It is hard to imagine, given the increasingly isolationist bent of the party and Trump’s frequent portrayal of NATO as a bunch of deadbeats, that this year’s platform will include the current one’s call for “greater coordination with NATO defense planning.” The former president has said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that does not meet NATO’s spending guidelines on its own defense.
And don’t dream that, with Trump said to be privately musing that he could end Russia’s war in Ukraine by persuading Ukraine to give up territory, the party wants to remain on record that it “will not accept any territorial change in Eastern Europe imposed by force, in Ukraine, Georgia, or elsewhere, and will use all appropriate constitutional measures to bring to justice the practitioners of aggression and assassination.”
So maybe it is time for today’s Republicans to acknowledge the truth. They are no longer a party with any firm principles at all. Enduring and consistent values? Not for them.
Come to think of it, this whole exercise of writing a 2024 platform for the Republican Party could be pretty simple. Why bother with putting together another 60-page document when the truth about today’s GOP can be summed up in a single sentence?
“RESOLVED, That the Republican Party stands for whatever the hell Donald Trump says it does.”