The Republican Party is gearing up to hash out its official platform ahead of its national convention later this month, with highly unusual plans to shift negotiations behind closed doors firmly in place just as Donald Trump’s campaign advisers push to significantly simplify this year’s document.
The party’s platform committee is set for three days of negotiations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, next week before the convention kicks off on July 15. The choice to bar C-SPAN from televising the proceedings, which breaks with decades of precedent, was first reported last week by The New York Times, which noted that officials are hoping to keep any potential squabbling out of the public eye.
The platform has not been revised since 2016, when the party published a tome of more than 60 pages laying out its stance on everything from the tax code to abortion. It opted not to adopt a new platform in 2020, blaming the chaos brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Trump seemed to approve. “The Republican Party has not yet voted on a Platform,” he tweeted that summer. “No rush. I prefer a new and updated Platform, short form, if possible.”
That still appears to be the former president’s stance. The Times reported that two of his top aides, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, fired off a memo to the party last Thursday criticizing its “textbook-long” platforms and demanding this year’s be “clear, concise, and easily digestible” to voters.
“Publishing an unnecessarily verbose treatise will provide more fuel for our opponent’s fire of misinformation and misrepresentation to voters,” the memo reportedly read. “It is with that recognition that we will present a streamlined platform in line with President Trump’s principled and popular vision for America’s future.”
A person close to the pending negotiations told the newspaper that 2024’s platform could be half the size of 2016’s.
At the heart of the talks will be the matter of abortion, given that this is the first platform to be crafted since the fall of Roe v. Wade. A group of 10 prominent anti-abortion leaders sent Trump a letter last week imploring him not to water down his stance—a sign of their growing concerns as he slowly backs away from supporting a federal ban in an apparent attempt to appear more moderate on the issue.
The Trump camp’s Thursday memo did not mention abortion. The 2016 platform calls on Congress to blanket-ban abortions after 20 weeks and demands a constitutional amendment recognizing what’s known as fetal personhood, a loose legal concept that would grant rights to embryos.
Whether despite or because of the memo, however, the issue of abortion has already penetrated and shaken up the dynamic of the platform committee. Politico reported on Tuesday that two anti-abortion activists from South Carolina previously named as delegates had been bounced from the committee.
A person with knowledge of the matter told the outlet that the pair, party activist LaDonna Ryggs and former state party chair Chad Connelly, had made it clear they had no plans to waver from their hardline stance. The Trump campaign disputed that Ryggs and Connelly had ever been on the platform committee.
At least one vocally anti-abortion crusader remains on the committee, however—Ed Martin, its deputy policy director. Martin, a MAGA diehard and former chair of the Missouri Republican Party, has a history of making extreme pro-life comments, according to CNN.
“The true bane of the pro-life movement is the faction of fake pro-lifers who claim to believe in the sanctity of human life but are only willing to vote that way with a list of exceptions,” he said on his radio show in June 2022, the network reported Tuesday.
Martin’s remarks, which include repeatedly pushing for a federal abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest, put him at loggerheads with the former president. Though his position has shifted many times over the years, Trump has said in recent months that abortion laws should be left up to individual states and that he would not block access to abortion pills as president.
