The Republicans’ 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.
“The Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda,” reads a onepage RNC resolution. 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. But anything specific might have risked crossing Trump.
Still, maintaining the unamended 2016 GOP platform — as the RNC also resolved — results in some awkwardness. That 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.” It proclaims that “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 2016-turned-2020 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, rambling on about achieving great things without mentioning a single actual priority.
He took his latest crack at the question Sunday on Fox News. This time, Trump puzzlingly declared that he “saved the historically Black colleges and universities” and “rebuilt our military,” and concluded that 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 7 in 10 Americans who say in recent polls the country is on the “wrong track.”
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. His campaign pledges to “drain the swamp,” whose ranks he has multiplied; to “cover all pre-existing conditions,” the coverage of which is at risk only because of the Trump administration’s attacks on Obamacare; and to “end bureaucratic government bullying of U.S. citizens and small businesses,” when it is Trump’s own bullying and weaponized bureaucracy that have drowned Americans and their 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.