“This has never happened before,” Gayle Ruzicka, a clearly frustrated Republican National Committee member, said about the passage of the GOP’s 2024 draft platform on Monday. “We always had subcommittees where we can go in and work on a section of the platform. We can propose amendments, debate them, add them.” This time, she said, speaking of loyalists to former President Donald Trump, “They didn’t allow any amendments. They didn’t allow any discussion. They rolled us. That’s what they did.”
Ruzicka was apparently oblivious that the old GOP is dead. So is dissent in its ranks. The party of Ronald Reagan was long ago replaced by the party of Donald Trump, but Monday’s debacle over the drafting of the party’s platform, a platform that deletes some of the positions and goals the party has held for decades, is a new low.
The new GOP platform, which is expected to be formally approved at next week’s Republican National Convention, reads like a combination of Trump speeches and social media posts. Gone are long-standing Republican principles such as support for a national abortion ban and support for free trade. That has been replaced by language conveying Trump’s lust for revenge against his political enemies. For example: “We will hold accountable those who have misused the power of Government to unjustly prosecute their Political Opponents.”
Ruzicka was particularly upset that, on the matter of abortion, the platform now says only that the GOP opposes “late-term abortions.” “If you look at it, it has Donald Trump written all over it,” said RNC co-chair Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law. “This is his platform.” And his daughter-in-law’s serving as a party chair is one of several other signs that the GOP is his party.
While it’s true that platforms are not controlling or enforceable, they do proclaim what a political party wants known about its priorities before a presidential election. What this platform proclaims is that the GOP’s positions are whatever a candidate convicted of 34 felony counts thinks are in his best interests.
For starters, while there was no Republican platform drafted in 2020, the GOP’s 66-page 2016 platform read like a salute to Reagan and his values and cited him and his policies more than 10 times. Reagan doesn’t get a single mention in 2024. In his place is a 16-page platform titled “Make America Great Again.” It cites and praises Trump nearly 20 times.
As for policy, the new platform replaces well-established GOP positions on issues like free trade with Trump’s embrace of massive tariffs on imports. The most glaring reversal, though, is on abortion. For more than 40 years, Republican platforms have called for a national abortion ban. The 2024 platform drops that formerly bedrock principle. Why? Trump understands that, in light of Roe v. Wade’s being overturned, a call for a national abortion ban would hurt him politically. Polls show that nearly 80 % of Americans oppose such a ban. Trump wanted it gone, and it is gone.
And the fact that anti-abortion-rights groups that had been critical of the proposed platform have now fallen into line behind it further illustrates Trump’s absolute control of the party. Trump knows that if he declared tomorrow that he’s reversing himself on any of the key issues in the platform, the base would go along with him.
Yale professor Jason Stanley, who wrote the book “How Fascism Works,” explained in 2020 that Trump has forged with his supporters “a fascist connection of total loyalty” and said that “his supporters seem to see the world through a prism. Are you with him or against them?” Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who wrote “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” has warned for years that what she sees with Trump and his base is “an allegiance based on loyalty to a person — not a party and not to a set of principles.” More recently, Ben-Ghiat noted that Trump’s creation of a “personality cult” with blind loyalty from his base is one of the defining characteristics of fascist movements. This a big reason Trump’s fire hose of lies — more than 30,000 “untruths,” per The Washington Post, in his four years as president — doesn’t cause his base to question its loyalty to him. Stanley explained that many of Trump’s supporters view him as “infallible,” adding insightfully, “There’s the denial of reality that is characteristic of fascism, as if reality is just a construction.” Meaning whatever Trump says is the truth is the truth. It’s also why Trump can rewrite the 2024 GOP platform to suit his own interests and his base stays loyal. To the base, the GOP is no longer about policy or principles. It’s only about Trump. And that’s exactly the way Trump wants it. CORRECTION (July 11, 12:15 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misspelled the first name of the RNC member frustrated by the platform drafting process. She is Gayle Ruzicka, not Gail.
