Typically, the internal party infighting over drafting a party platform ahead of a presidential convention generates little interest or concern for anyone other than activists and party insiders.
“I'm not bound by a platform,” 1996 Republican candidate Bob Dole said of the hard-line document his party passed that year. “I would agree with almost everything in it, but I haven't read it.”
But while candidates often try to distance themselves from unpopular policies, platform statements matter. They reveal which factions in a party actually hold power. They establish the difference between Democrats and Republicans. They show what a party is willing to accomplish if voters give it a chance.
The Republican Party, which nominated Donald Trump for a second term four years ago, scaled back its convention because of the coronavirus and didn't bother to adopt a platform at all. Instead, the party stuck to its 2016 platform and decided to “continue to enthusiastically support the president's America First policies.”
A lot has happened since 2016, not just in the Republican Party but in the country and the world, creating a troubling situation for the Republican National Committee as it tries to define a set of principles the Republican Party will stand for in 2024.
That eight-year-old platform is a fossil of primitive pre-MAGA conservatism, from a time when abortion rights were sufficiently well-enforced to mean taking a stance against them carried little political cost, when Republicans could agree on the need to protect Ukraine's “sovereignty and territorial integrity” from a “resurgent Russia.”
The bill declared that only parents should be allowed to “determine appropriate medical treatment or therapy for their minor children.” At the time, this position was understood to mean that the U.S. should not block parents' attempts to change their children's sexual orientation through conversion therapy, a harsh, pseudoscientific “gay cure” that has been condemned by major medical and mental health groups. Today, as a growing number of parents support their children's desire for gender-changing medical procedures, this same statement is at odds with 23 Republican-majority state governments that have banned or significantly restricted such treatment for minors.
Amid the political backlash following the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, Trump has sought to sidestep the issue by saying abortion should be left to the states and that he would not sign a nationwide ban if he were back in the White House. This is at odds with the current Republican platform, which says, “We support the Human Life Amendment of the Constitution and legislation making clear that the protections of the 14th Amendment apply to preborn children.”
As my colleague Michael Scherer reported in The Washington Post, anti-abortion groups have rallied against any effort to repeal or weaken the platform. “We expect the Republican platform will continue to explicitly call for state protection of the unborn, rooted in the 14th Amendment,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life USA. “Weakening the Republican platform's pro-life stance would mean abandoning its defense of the human dignity of all people. It would also give the Biden administration and the Democratic Party a much-needed foothold.”
The committee that will write the platform has not yet been formed — each state delegation will nominate two men and two women — but the Trump campaign will no doubt want to influence the selection, and Scherer reported that the campaign has distributed a list of its recommended members.
Given the party's increasingly isolationist tendencies and Trump's frequent portrayal of NATO as a bunch of slackers, it's hard to imagine this year's platform including the current platform's call for “strengthened alignment with NATO defense planning.” The former president has said he would encourage Russia to “do whatever it wants” if NATO allies don't meet NATO spending guidelines on their own defense spending.
And while Trump reportedly privately believes he could end Russia's war in Ukraine by persuading Ukraine to give up its territory, don't even dream that the party wants to continue to publicly state its stance that it will “not accept any forced territorial changes in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine, Georgia or anywhere else, and will take all appropriate constitutional measures to bring to justice the perpetrators of aggression and assassination.”
So maybe it's time for the Republican Party to admit a truth: They are no longer a party of strong principles. Enduring, coherent values? They don't have any.
If you think about it, this task of writing the Republican 2024 platform might be pretty simple: Why put together a 60-page document when the truth about the Republican Party today can be summed up in one sentence?
“Resolution, Republicans will support it no matter what Donald Trump says.”
