By: Maggie Haberman, Shane Goldmacher, and Jonathan Swan – nytimes.com – July 8, 2024
The document reflects the former president’s ideological grip on his party, outlining the same nationalistic priorities that his campaign website does.
Donald J. Trump told officials on Monday that he supports a new Republican Party platform, one that reflects the presumptive nominee’s new position on abortion rights and slims down policy specifics across all areas of government.
The new platform, as described to The New York Times by people briefed on it, cements Mr. Trump’s ideological takeover of the G.O.P. The platform is even more nationalistic, more protectionist and less socially conservative than the 2016 Republican platform that was duplicated in the 2020 election.
Mr. Trump, who has had the draft for several days, called into a meeting of party officials on Monday and said that he supports it. The document overwhelmingly was approved during a vote by the platform committee on Monday, passing 84 to 18, according to a person briefed on the matter.
The abortion section has been softened. There is no longer a reference to “traditional marriage” as between “one man and one woman.” And there is no longer an emphasis on reducing the national debt, only a brief line about “slashing wasteful government spending.”
The rest of the document reflects Mr. Trump’s priorities as outlined on his campaign website: a hard-line immigration policy, including mass deportations; a protectionist trade policy with new tariffs on most imports; and sections on using federal power to remove policies in academia, the military and throughout the U.S. government put in place by what it describes as radical Democrats.
Mr. Trump and his top aides have alienated some activists by shutting them out of the development of the platform. The former president was especially focused on softening the language on abortion — the issue he views as his biggest vulnerability in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment.
The section on protecting human life has been significantly watered down in the 2024 draft platform. In the 2016 and 2020 platform, that section included extensive specific details about what the Republican Party would do to limit abortions, including supporting a federal ban on abortion after 20 weeks. It stated that “the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed.”
The 2024 draft platform, as described to The Times, is called “America First: A Return to Common Sense,” and softens that abortion language and shifts the issue from one of conscience to a matter best handled by the states. “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied life or liberty without due process and that the states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those rights,” the draft platform reads.
The document makes no mention of a federal abortion ban, which Mr. Trump has said he opposes. Instead, the new platform stresses that Republicans oppose “late term abortion” and emphasizes that the party supports “access to birth control, and IVF (fertility treatments).”
Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, who had been concerned about changes to the platform before the committee’s approval, sounded approving of it.
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