Donald J. Trump’s top adviser is planning to drastically resize and simplify the official platform of the Republican Party, according to a memo sent to the party’s platform committee seen by The New York Times.
The memo — signed by Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, two of the president’s top advisers — describes efforts to tone down the platform “to ensure our policy commitments to the American people are clear, concise and easy to digest.” It dismissed past platforms as worthless “textbook” documents shaped by “special interest influence” that left the party and its candidates open to attacks from Democrats.
“Publishing irrelevant pamphlets will provide more fuel for misinformation and misrepresentation of the enemy to the electorate,” the memo said. “With that recognition, we will present a platform that seamlessly aligns with President Trump’s principled and popular vision for America’s future.”
The memo was sent Thursday ahead of the GOP’s convention in Milwaukee next month, where they will vote first on the platform and then hold a national convention to choose a presidential candidate.
The decision to sharply cut the size of the platform – the most recent one adopted by the party, in 2016, ran to nearly 60 pages – is likely to cause friction among some conservatives and party activists who have spent years haggling over the document’s language. A person close to the process who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak about the planning said the new platform could be halved in size by 2016.
Anti-abortion activists, in particular, are prepared to fight if the Trump team seeks to water down or remove longstanding language to make Mr. Trump appear more moderate on the issue.
Hoping to avoid any disagreement from public opinion, the party plans to have its platform committee meet behind closed doors in Milwaukee a week before the wider convention. That would be a break from decades of precedent. Party platform committee meetings have been televised since at least 1984, according to C-SPAN archives.
By closing the process, Mr. LaCivita and Ms. Wiles argued that he would resist “the influence of special interests who want to make public policy deviate from its clear and immediate goals.”
Mr Trump had considered scaling back the platform in 2020, but ultimately rejected the idea.
The memo makes it clear that Trump’s team sees the Republican National Committee’s platform almost exclusively as a tool to project contrasts with President Biden in the 2024 race rather than as a way to set long-term goals for the party.
“If we do not give clarity to the voters about the binary choice between the leadership of President Trump and the Republicans with Joe Biden and the Democrats, no one will do it for us,” he wrote, calling the platform “a contract with America. voters who explain what is possible and will be delivered under President Trump’s administration.
Newt Gingrich, a former Republican House speaker who calls his own legislative agenda a “Contract with America,” has been among those pushing a lean platform that he says “must be a Trump document.”
He said voters across the country “should be able to look at it and say, ‘Wow, this is a good thing.'”
It wasn’t many conservative activists who saw the document. He sees it as setting an aspirational vision for the coming decades.
“The platform is not just about 2024,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, an anti-abortion group. “It’s about 2034 and 2044. It’s a vision statement of where the party should go.”
In 2020, Mr. Trump skipped the platform battle, choosing to read the 2016 platform because of the coronavirus pandemic. The 2016 document covers a wide range of issues. It thanks, for example, the president of Egypt for protecting the rights of Coptic Christians and supporting legislation to protect America “against electromagnetic pulses.”
Maggie Haberman contribute reports.
