One could argue that this shows today’s Republican Party stands for nothing beyond fealty to Mr. Trump. Actually, the GOP has an ambitious agenda, and much of it is unpopular. That is likely why Mr. Trump doesn’t want it written down in an official document — and why the party’s platform committee also plans to meet behind closed doors, even though sessions have traditionally been televised on C-SPAN.
Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, the presumptive nominee’s top two advisers, wrote in a memo to delegates drafting the platform: “Publishing an unnecessarily verbose treatise will provide more fuel for our opponent’s fire of misinformation and misrepresentation to voters.” The same aides previously sought to distance Mr. Trump from a 920-page blueprint for his second term, released as part of “Project 2025,” an effort among Trump-aligned activists to prepare an agenda for his return to the White House. But Russ Vought, Mr. Trump’s former budget chief and a potential White House chief of staff, wrote a chapter for Project 2025 and is now policy director for the platform committee.
Abortion is the issue Mr. Trump’s team most fears. The GOP’s 2016 platform endorsed a 20-week national ban on the procedure; a “human life amendment” to the Constitution; and federal personhood legislation to provide 14th Amendment protections to fetuses. Mr. Trump privately refers to abortion as the “a-word” and recognizes that his role in overturning Roe v. Wade is a liability in the general election, even though he has boasted about it. So now Mr. Trump says he wants to leave abortion policy to the states, that he won’t try to ban medication abortion and that he supports in vitro fertilization.
But antiabortion groups demand that the party preserve its longtime support for federal limits, and they have many GOP allies. The deputy policy director of the platform committee, Ed Martin, has advocated a national abortion ban without exceptions for rape or incest and expressed openness to jailing women who seek the procedure, CNN reports.
There are other thorny issues. The 2016 platform said Congress and states should be allowed to ban same-sex marriage and supported the rights of parents to force their gay children into conversion therapy. The 2016 document also said Republicans “will not accept any territorial change in Eastern Europe imposed by force,” something Mr. Trump seems poised to force Ukraine to accept if he wins in November.
Sidestepping divisive questions might be politically expedient, limiting attention on the party’s increasingly out-of-step agenda. Keeping their platform fight quiet would also help Republicans maintain focus on Democrats’ intra-party struggles. But voters should expect to know not only whom they would vote for, but also to what ends. By the same token, parties that seek to obscure what they would do should be treated with voter suspicion. Meanwhile, any party that wins despite its lack of candor would have scant claim to a substantive mandate.
To be sure, Mr. Trump is an apparent menace even without detailing every weird plan his far-right administration-in-waiting wants to impose on the nation. In recent days, Mr. Trump has received credit from some pundits for self-discipline, staying out of the way as the Democrats argue about their ticket. In fact, his social media feed has been unrelentingly toxic. He reshared posts that said President Biden should be “arrested for TREASON” and that former GOP representative Liz Cheney is “guilty of treason,” as well as that members of the House Jan. 6 select committee “should be going to jail.”
But Americans who are numb to, or apt to excuse, such behavior as nothing more than big talk should still wonder what Mr. Trump would do in the Oval Office as powerful constituencies prod him to take radical actions. He and his allies are floating ideas that would be disastrous for America, including 10 percent across-the-board tariffs, deporting millions of undocumented immigrants and politicizing the civil service. He has said that he’s running to exact “revenge” and “retribution” against his critics while promising not to be a dictator “other than Day One.” He gets away with such talk in part because he does not let himself get pinned down on specifics.
Voters should demand better than such cynical strategic ambiguity.
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