The 2020 presidential race was remarkable for a great many reasons, including the Republican National Committee’s decision to forgo a party platform. Every year since 1856, Republican officials assembled to write a public document capturing the party’s principles, priorities, values, and goals, but four years ago, Republicans decided to go in a different direction.
In 2020, they said, the party would skip the platform-writing process, and instead declare that it simply wanted whatever Donald Trump said he wanted.
(RNC officials later suggested this was partly the result of the pandemic, though Democrats faced the same crisis and nevertheless debated, wrote, and approved a 91-page platform.)
The good news is that Republican officials, for the first time in eight years, have decided that they’ll actually put a platform together as part of the 2024 election cycle. The bad news is that this is proving to be quite a bit messier than it should be.
One of the first signs of trouble came to the fore in early June, when NBC News reported that Ed Martin, a former chair of the Missouri Republican Party, was tapped to help write the platform, despite — or more likely, because of — his role as a prominent “Stop the Steal” advocate and Jan. 6 conspiracy theorist.
A CNN report added that Martin, one of three people chosen to help craft the party’s platform, “has a history of pushing extreme anti-abortion positions, including advocating for a national ban without exceptions for rape or incest. He also entertained the possibility of jailing women who get abortions and the doctors who perform them.”
Complicating matters, Team Trump doesn’t want the newly revised platform to say a whole lot. The New York Times reported last week:
Donald J. Trump’s top advisers are planning to drastically scale back and simplify the official platform of the Republican Party, according to a memo sent to the party’s platform committee that was reviewed by The New York Times. The memo — signed by Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, the former president’s two lead advisers — described their efforts to pare down the platform “to ensure our policy commitments to the American people are clear, concise and easily digestible.”
The 2016 platform was nearly 60 pages. According to the Times’ reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, this year’s blueprint could be half that size.
As for the process itself, Semafor reported this morning that the Republican document “will be written behind closed doors,” adding, “In a break from decades-long precedent, reporters and spectators will not be allowed to watch next week’s party platform committee proceedings in Milwaukee.” The process of negotiating the Democratic platform, meanwhile, will be aired for the public. So to recap, Republican officials agreed to write a platform — a pleasant change of pace after 2020 — but they’ve chosen a conspiratorial far-right co-author; they plan not to go into a lot of detail; and they’ve abandoned the transparency that the party used to embrace. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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