President Donald J. Trump's top advisers plan to significantly shrink and simplify the official Republican Party platform, according to a memo sent to the Republican Platform Committee reviewed by The New York Times.
The memo, signed by two of the former president's top advisers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, outlines efforts to pare down the platform “to one that is clear, concise, and easily understandable in its policy commitments to the American people.” It dismisses past platforms as unnecessarily “textbook-length” documents shaped by “special interest influence” and that left the party and its candidates vulnerable to attack from Democrats.
“Recognizing that publishing an unnecessarily lengthy paper would fuel the fires of misinformation and misrepresentation to our opponents' voters,” the memo said, “we intend to offer a concise policy platform that is consistent with President Trump's beliefs about America's future and his vision for the American people.”
The memo was sent Thursday ahead of next month's Republican Party gathering in Milwaukee, where the party will first vote on its platform and then hold a national convention to select a presidential candidate.
The decision to drastically cut the party platform — the party's recently adopted 2016 platform was nearly 60 pages long — is likely to spark skirmishes among conservatives and party activists who have been fighting for years over the platform's wording. A person close to the process, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the plans, said the new platform could be half the size of the 2016 one.
Anti-abortion activists in particular are preparing for a fight if the Trump campaign tries to water down or remove long-standing language to make him appear more moderate on the abortion issue.
The party plans to hold its platform committee meeting behind closed doors in Milwaukee a week before the convention to keep any disagreements from public view, breaking with decades of precedent: Party platform committee meetings have been televised since at least 1984, according to C-SPAN archives.
By ending the process, LaCivita and Wiles argue, they are rejecting “the influence of any special interests that would seek to steer public policy away from our clear and straightforward objectives.”
Trump had considered scaling back his platform in 2020 but ultimately abandoned the idea.
The memo makes clear that the Trump campaign sees the RNC platform solely as a way to differentiate itself from President Biden in the 2024 election, rather than as a way to set long-term goals for the party.
“If we do not clearly explain to voters the choice between President Trump and Republican leadership and Joe Biden and Democratic leadership, no one will do it for us,” they wrote, calling the platform a “contract with the American voter that makes clear what we can and will achieve under a President Trump administration.”
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker who called his legislative agenda a “Contract with America,” has been one of the advocates for a streamlined bill. “It should be the Trump Document,” Gingrich said.
Voters across the country, he said, “should look at this and say, 'Wow, this is a good thing.'”
Many conservative activists don't see the document that way: They see it as setting out an ambitious vision for the coming decades.
“This platform doesn't just talk about 2024,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of the anti-abortion group National Student Life Congress, “it talks about 2034 and 2044. It's a vision statement about where the party wants to go.”
In 2020, Trump used the coronavirus pandemic as a reason to avoid any platform fights and instead opted to simply re-adopt his 2016 platform, which was much broader in issues, thanking the Egyptian president for protecting the rights of Coptic Orthodox Christians and supporting legislation to protect Americans from “electromagnetic pulse” attacks.
Maggie Haberman Contributed report.