Donald J. Trump’s top advisers plan to dramatically downsize and simplify the Republican Party’s official platform, according to a memo sent to the party’s platform committee and reviewed by The New York Times.
The memo, signed by Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, the former president’s two senior advisers, described their efforts to deplatform “to ensure that our policy commitments to the American people are clear, concise and easy to understand.” Previous platforms have been dismissed as needlessly “textbook-length” documents that are rife with “special interest influence” and have exposed the party and its candidates to attacks from Democrats.
“Publishing an unnecessarily detailed treatise will further fuel the fire of misinformation and misrepresentations from our opponent to voters,” the memo said. “With this recognition, we will present a streamlined platform that is consistent with President Trump’s principled and popular vision for America’s future.”
The memo was sent Thursday ahead of the GOP meeting in Milwaukee next month, where it will first vote on its platform and then hold its national convention to select a presidential candidate.
The decision to sharply reduce the size of the platform – the last one adopted by the party in 2016 was nearly 60 pages long – is likely to lead to skirmishes among some conservatives and party activists who have haggled for years over the wording of the document. A person familiar with the process, who was granted anonymity to discuss the planning, said the new platform could be half the size of the one in 2016.
Anti-abortion activists in particular are preparing for a fight in case the Trump team tries to water down or delete long-standing language to make Mr. Trump appear more moderate on the issue.
Hoping to keep any disagreements out of the public eye, the party plans to have the platform committee meet behind closed doors in Milwaukee a week before the broader convention. That would be a break with decades of precedent. According to C-SPAN archives, the party’s platform committee meetings have been televised since at least 1984.
With the trial concluded, Mr. LaCivita and Ms. Wiles argue that they will “reject any special interest influence that seeks to divert public policy from our clear and distinct goals.”
Mr. Trump had considered downsizing the platform in 2020 but ultimately abandoned the idea.
The memo makes clear that the Trump team sees the Republican National Committee platform almost entirely as a tool to contrast with President Biden in the 2024 campaign, rather than as a way to set longer-term goals for the party.
“If we don’t provide clarity to voters about the binary choice between President Trump’s leadership and the Republicans versus that of Joe Biden and the Democrats, no one will do it for us,” they wrote, calling the platform “a contract with the American people . “Voter who makes it clear what we can and will achieve under President Trump’s administration.”
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives who called his own legislative agenda a “Contract with America,” was among those who pushed for a streamlined platform that he said “should be a Trump document.”
He said voters across the country “should be able to look at it and say, ‘Wow, that’s a good thing.'”
That’s not how many conservative activists see the document. They see this as an ambitious vision for the coming decades.
“The platform is not just about 2024,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, an anti-abortion group. “It’s about 2034 and 2044. It’s a vision of where the party needs to go.”
In 2020, Mr. Trump refrained from engaging in a platform fight at all, simply opting to resume the 2016 platform due to the coronavirus pandemic. The 2016 document covered an extremely broad range of topics. For example, it thanked the Egyptian president for protecting the rights of Coptic Christians and supported legislation to protect Americans “from electromagnetic pulses.”
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
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2024-06-29 09:05:29
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