GOP offering a blank-check pledge to support Trump
What should Americans expect from another four years of President Donald Trump? Exactly the same, only more so. But also, in some ways, the opposite. Or perhaps nothing at all.
Not 24 hours before its quadrennial confab began, the Republican National Committee formally forbade any effort to articulate party principles or priorities for the next four years. For the first time since its founding more than 160 years ago, the GOP is not announcing a platform for a presidential election, and it has proclaimed that any attempt to adopt a new platform will be “ruled out of order.”
“RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda,” says a one-page resolution. “The 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024” RNC.
No promises, no policy stances, nothing. Just a bootlicking, blank-check pledge to support anything Trump decides to do, no matter how erratic or lawless, and a (re) confirmation that the party is nothing more than a cult of personality. At least the statement is honest. RNC officials could have enumerated a list of objectives they would eventually abandon, just as they have before — balancing the budget, say, or reforming health care, or closing the trade deficit. But anything specific might have risked crossing Trump. Instead, officials punted and “just issued a statement that’s basically an ‘I’m With Stupid’ T-shirt,” as Princeton history professor Kevin M. Kruse put it. Still, maintaining the unamended 2016 GOP platform, as the RNC also resolved, results in some antecedent-driven awkwardness.
Within its 66 pages, that ’16 document contains language condemning “the current Administration” for a “huge increase in the national debt” and having “abandoned America’s friends and rewarded its enemies.” Searingly, it proclaims “The current Administration has exceeded its constitutional authority, brazenly and flagrantly violated the separation of powers, sought to divide America into groups and turn citizen against citizen.”
“The next president must restore the public’s trust in law enforcement and civil order by first adhering to the rule of law himself,” this ’16-turned-’20 platform continues. Again, they’re being honest. If only accidentally.
Trump has been asked at least five times in the past two months what his priorities are for a second term. Most times he has struggled to answer. When he was queried about these priorities by Fox News’s Sean Hannity on June 25, Trump rambled about various grievances and how “the word experience is still good,” while failing to mention a single actual priority. Trump’s ally Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, admonished Hannity for failing to help Dear Leader answer the question.
Over subsequent weeks, friendly media outlets offered Trump a do-over. In an interview with Sinclair Broadcast Group, he said the answer was “very simple. We’re going to make America great again. We are doing things that nobody could have done.”
He took his latest crack at the question Sunday in yet another Fox News interview. This time, Trump puzzlingly declared he “saved the historically Black colleges and universities” and “rebuilt our military,” and concluded he “will strengthen what we’ve done and I will do new things.”
Got that? With Americans contracting COVID-19 at far higher rates than their counterparts abroad, and with unemployment in double digits, Trump pledges more of the same. This might not appeal to the seven in 10 Americans who say in recent polls the country is on the “wrong track,” or the eight in 10 who say they’re “dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time.”
Perhaps observing this, Trump also sometimes seems to be running against his administration. That is, when not boasting about how great the government he helms is, he lambasts how awful it is, ignoring that he’s ostensibly in charge.
He attacks his own appointees at the Food and Drug Administration and the FBI. An incoherent list of second-term agenda items his campaign finally released Sunday pledges to “drain the swamp,” whose ranks he’s multiplied; to “Cover All Pre-Existing Conditions,” coverage of which is at risk only because the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to gut such protections afforded by Obamacare; and to “End Bureaucratic Government Bullying of U.S. Citizens and Small Businesses,” when Trump’s bullying and weaponized bureaucracy have drowned Americans and businesses in administrative bloat and uncertainty.
And what of controlling the coronavirus, revitalizing the economy, or repairing the social and political fabric of this nation? On these, Trump offers no real plan, nor a plan for a plan, nor even a plan for a plan for a plan. On this, if nothing else, the president and his party have been consistent.