The GOP’s pessimistic platform for the future is the worst of our past 

Gathering in Charlotte four years ago to renominate President Donald Trump, Republicans didn’t bother to draft a party platform. Evidently, they figured, “more Trump” was all the public needed to know about their second-term plans.

It probably was, although not in the way Republicans had hoped, as the voters dumped Trump and hired Joe Biden.  

Americans vote for people, not platforms. But these manifestoes, however platitudinous and boring, are like a quadrennial Rorschach test of a party’s state of mind. The GOP’s decision to recycle its 2016 platform seemed calculated to paper over internal ideological rifts as well as their nominee’s frequent lapses into incoherence.  

This time, party leaders plan to write a new platform for next month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. This time, having thoroughly routed traditional conservatives and the GOP’s dwindling band of dissenters from his “stolen election” fantasy, Trump can expect blind obedience from his party.   

The platform writers’ unenviable task will be to distill the essence of Trumpism into something resembling a cogent governing philosophy. Considering the gibberish that gushes from their master’s mouth, that won’t be easy.

But they’ll have plenty of help from right-wing theorists, think tanks and Ivy League populists like Sens. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). Pulling these threads together is the Heritage Foundation, once a lively hub of conservative intellectual ferment and debate, now a drearily predictable organ for MAGA agitprop. 

Heritage’s blueprint for a second Trump presidency, Project 2025, claims lineal descent from “Mandate for Leadership,” the institute’s influential 1980 handbook for the Reagan Revolution. But its new policy tome offers none of Reagan’s genial optimism or civility. Instead, it echoes Trump’s splenetic indictment of America as a decadent and failing nation overrun by immigrants, criminals and treacherous elites.    

The document details plans for a cultural and political counterrevolution to “save” America from a cavalcade of populist boogeymen: the radical left, the administrative state, socialist elites, the Washington establishment, woke cultural warriors, Wilsonian globalists and Big Tech, which it characterizes as a “tool of the Chinese government.”

Writing in 1964 about the “paranoid style in American politics,” the historian Richard Hofstadter surveyed “angry minds” on the fringes of the U.S. political debate. Today the politics of the irrational has spilled into the main arena, courtesy of a Republican Party taken over by election deniers and conspiracy theorists.  

A key figure in the GOP’s attempt to codify Trumpian populism is Russ Vought, who headed the Office of Budget and Management under Trump. He’s the policy director of the 2024 platform committee and a prime candidate for chief of staff if Trump wins.  

Once a protégé of Vice President Mike Pence, Vought now says the 2020 election was stolen — the price of admission into Trump’s inner sanctum. The self-described “Christian nationalist” also stokes panic over an immigrant “invasion” of America, which he sees as diluting the religious underpinnings of our national identity and unity.  

Nativism and a return to Judeo-Christian morality — including abortion bans and traditional gender roles — are core themes of today’s reactionary populism. So is Vought’s claim that we live in a “post-Constitutional” America where federal bureaucrats arrogate to themselves the power to impose secular and left-wing dogmas on an unwilling citizenry.   

His proposed remedy, however, is not to return these allegedly usurped legislative powers to Congress, but to engineer an unprecedented concentration of power in the president’s hands.  

Vought calls for a “radical Constitutionalism” that would bring all executive branch agencies — the Department of Justice, the FBI, the intelligence agencies and the Federal Reserve — under the president’s control. It includes empowering presidents to refuse to spend congressional appropriations on programs they don’t like and to call up the U.S. military to suppress protests and help police round up millions of immigrants for deportation.  

What populists call “returning power to the people” is really a recipe for upending the Constitution’s checks and balances and establishing an imperial presidency. Jefferson and Madison must be spinning in their graves. 

While setting the stage for strongman rule at home, the new GOP platform will endorse Trump’s “America First” push for a U.S. retreat from world leadership. In economic terms, this means a raft of new trade restrictions. Undeterred by the failure of the tariffs he imposed while in office — U.S. trade deficits grew bigger on Trump’s watch — he’s promising a 10 percent tariff on most imported goods. This would send the cost of living through the roof, especially if combined with the abrupt removal of millions of working migrants from the U.S. labor force.  

GOP “conservative nationalists” are leery of U.S. involvement in international efforts to solve global problems, especially climate change. They chafe at the costs and burdens of collective security alliances, though few go as far as Trump by threatening to pull Washington out of NATO. Most seem willing to abandon Ukraine, arguing that Russia is Europe’s problem and that the United States needs to confront China instead.  

In short, we’re witnessing the Republicans’ mass conversion to a reactionary populism that demands that Americans “return” to an allegedly better past — to the sexual mores of the 1950s, the protectionism and isolationism of the 1930s and the xenophobia and religious fundamentalism of the 1920s.  

The emerging platform aims at stoking the resentments of Trump’s hardcore supporters — working-class voters who have a legitimate beef against the political establishments of both parties. As a governing vision, however, it’s backward-looking, fixated on a polarizing hunt for scapegoats rather than solving common problems, contemptuous of the interests and sentiments of blue America and steeped in a paralyzing pessimism about our country’s enduring strengths and ability to overcome its present dilemmas.  

Working Americans deserve better.

Will Marshall is president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute.