In one of the more interesting moments of the first night of the Republican National Convention, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina claimed that former President Donald Trump survived Saturday’s assassination attempt. Nothing short of a miracle.
“Our God still saves, and He still redeems. Because the devil came to Pennsylvania with a rifle, but the American lion is back on his feet,” Scott said, following the sermon with a roar into the microphone. The crowd roared with him.
As Scott spoke, you could hear the crowd’s energy rise — because you could basically mention Trump or his life attempts at any time. But as a general rule, the programming devoted to the night’s main theme of economic policy was also its most obscure.
As much as various speakers bemoaned inflation, virtually none of them had much idea what to do about it. The closest thing to a policy rallying cry, “No tax on tips,” remains More of a slogan than an actual policy. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien’s most electrifying speech of the night didn’t actually endorse Trump or the Republican platform — and Divides the audience against itself.
In short, Monday night’s events mostly pointed to a side hyper-fixated on the deification of Donald Trump — and largely disinterested in what he might do in policy terms. But does that mean the Republican Party is nothing in 2024?
Not so fast.
The Republican Party is in the midst of a Trumpian transformation, working to blend elements of its old identity like tax cuts and deregulation with its new populist stance on issues like trade. It’s hard to put it all together into anything like a coherent package, especially at a big public event.
But the GOP has some ideas on how to do it. And if you read the two original documents together — The platform of the RNC and the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 – You can start to see the outlines of a second Trump term.
Where will Trump’s ideas come from?
A party’s convention platform amounts to a promise to voters, and politicians tend to actually keep their policy promises (or at least try to). inside A 2018 paperPolitical scientist EJ Fagan has found that presidential platform issues are more likely to generate legislation and committee hearings (at least when the winning presidential candidate’s party also controls Congress).
That’s why the written GOP platform is so important — it gives us an idea of what the next four years will look like under Trump.
On one level, the document is somewhat farcical. Coming in at just 16 pages, much less than that 50- to 75-page historical average, it’s seemingly designed to mimic Donald Trump’s social media posting style, riddled with eccentric capitalization choices. And many of its purported policies are as vague as on-stage programming.
On foreign policy, for example, the platform declares that “Republicans will strengthen economic, military and diplomatic power to protect the American way of life from the pernicious influence of nations that oppose us around the world.”
Yet at the same time, the document is pretty clear in direction: It tells you what big-aspirations Republicans will try to make a reality while in power.
On immigration, it calls for “the largest deportation program in American history.” On trade, it proposes across-the-board tariffs on all foreign-made goods. On Democracy, it called for punishing “those who have abused the power of government to unfairly prosecute their political opponents” — a thinly veiled threat to open a criminal investigation against both President Joe Biden and the prosecutors indicting Donald Trump.
The platform, in short, endorses Trumpism: making the core of his public rhetoric officially sanctioned Republican Party policy. End free markets and individual freedoms; There is “national conservatism”.
Of course, the thinness of the document means that it’s not always clear how this vision will translate into action. And that’s where outside groups come in — most notably, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 Blueprint for a Second Republican Term.
The now-infamous document puts meat on the platform’s bones: It details a set of proposals for how to take the RNC’s vague Trump policies and turn them into real, concrete policies. In short, it is acting as a policy shop for a party unwilling to do its own homework.
As MSNBC host Chris Hayes puts it, “a big reason for Project 2025 is that the *real* Trump campaign has essentially zero policy instruments, and the ‘platform’ is just Trump Truth social posts, put together. wrote on Twitter/X.
In fact, there is a connection between the two Fairly direct.
Russ Vought, the influential writer A Project 2025 chapter on executive branch staffing, too Served as policy director In the Drafting Committee of the 2024 Platform. The Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025, is The RNC is the main sponsor of the festival — with its banner Hanging from the entrance.
So while it may be difficult to determine an agenda from the Republican National Convention, there is a deep and well-developed policy agenda behind the scenes. It’s a lot more than what Trump brought to the Oval Office in 2016, and this time, there’s a team ready to implement it.
VP Vance
The other big news in the conservative world this week is, of course, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) has been selected as Trump’s running mate. I’ve made my feelings about Vance clear elsewhere; I worry about what his stature is for American democracy.
By senatorial standards, Vance is unusually intellectual and quite plugged into the world of ideas. His reading list, including people like Curtis Irvin and Patrick Deneen, may help understand why Vance has taken such a radical public stance.
I would recommend reading some of Vance’s own writings – in particular, His speech against libertarianism Delivered at the 2019 National Conservatism Conference. As much as I despise Vance’s stance on American democracy, the speech was unusually sharp and thoughtful. It’s worth grappling with to understand where Vance is coming from on social and economic policy.
