Trump campaign GOP platform: Donald J. Trump’s top advisers are planning to radically overhaul and simplify the Republican Party’s official platform, according to a memo sent to the party’s platform committee, which was reviewed by The New York Times.
The memo — signed by Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, two of the former president’s top advisers — described his efforts to “remove the platform to ensure that our policy commitments to the American people are clear, concise and easily digestible.” He dismissed past platforms as unnecessarily “textbook-long” documents shaped by “special interest influence” that left the party and its nominees open to attacks from Democrats.
“Publishing an unnecessarily verbose volume will only fuel the fire of our opponents’ misinformation and misrepresentation to voters,” the memo read. “It is with the belief that we will present a well-rounded platform that aligns with President Trump’s principled and populist vision for America’s future.”
The memo was sent Thursday ahead of the GOP’s gathering in Milwaukee next month, where it will first vote on its platform and then hold its national convention to select a presidential nominee.
The decision to drastically reduce the size of the platform – the most recent decision taken by the party in 2016, Runs about 60 pages – Clashes are likely between some conservatives and party activists who have spent years over the language of the document. A person close to the process, who was granted anonymity to discuss planning, said the new platform could be half of what it was in 2016.
Anti-abortion activists, in particular, are bracing for a fight if the Trump team wants to dilute or delete longstanding language to make Mr. Trump appear more moderate on the issue.
Hoping to keep any differences out of public view, the party is planning to hold a platform committee meeting behind closed doors in Milwaukee a week before the general convention. It would be a break from decades of precedent. Party platform committee meetings have been televised since at least 1984, according to C-SPAN archives.
Closing the process, Mr. LaCivita and Ms. Wiles argue that they will “reject any special interest influence that would seek to divert public policy from our clear and straightforward objectives.”
Mr. Trump In 2020 the platform was thought to shrink But finally dropped the idea.
The memo makes clear that the Trump team sees the Republican National Committee platform almost exclusively as a tool to outline a conflict with President Biden in the 2024 race, rather than to set long-term goals for the party.
“If we don’t provide voters with clarity about the binary choice between President Trump and the leadership of the Republicans versus Joe Biden and the Democrats, no one will do it for us,” they wrote, calling the platform “a contract with Americans.” Voters who articulate what we can and will deliver under a President Trump administration.”
Newt Gingrich, a Republican former House speaker who called his legislative agenda a “contract with America,” pushed for a streamlined platform that he said “must be a Trump document.”
He said voters across the country “will be able to look at it and say, ‘Wow, this is a good thing’.”
Not how many conservative activists see the document. They see it as setting an ambitious vision for decades to come.
“The platform is not just about 2024,” said Kristen Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, an anti-abortion group. “It’s about 2034 and 2044. It’s a vision statement about where the party needs to go.”
In 2020, Mr. Trump bypassed the platform fight altogether, opting to re-select the 2016 platform due to the coronavirus pandemic. The 2016 document covered a wide range of issues. He thanked, for example, the president of Egypt for protecting the rights of Coptic Christians and supported legislation to protect Americans “against electromagnetic pulses.”
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