The Republican Party’s Platform isn’t Remotely Conservative
The GOP’s 2024 platform isn’t just full of bombast; it’s also a mess economically.
(Originally appeared in the Washington Post)
As a big-tent, small-government conservative who spent decades in the Republican Party, I take no joy in reporting that the new GOP platform for the Republican convention in Milwaukee, littered with verbatim, apocalyptic quotes from Donald Trump’s speeches and Truth Social, hardly reflects the unifying message of his post-assassination-attempt rhetoric. Instead, the platform rants that this is a nation “in SERIOUS DECLINE,” one “rocked by Raging Inflation, Open Borders, Rampant Crime.”
The document is also economically incoherent and not remotely conservative.
Remarkably, the nation’s soaring budget deficit goes unmentioned. Usually Republicans at least pay lip service to fiscal responsibility. Instead, the new platform would push Washington’s $2 trillion deficit even higher with new tax cuts and significant spending expansions for defense, veterans and a border wall. It also pledges opposition to any reforms scaling back Social Security and Medicare’s terrifying projected 30-year cash shortfall of $124 trillion. Washington’s current path to a debt crisis would be accelerated.
Not content with promising merely to slow inflation, the GOP platform promises to “quickly bring down prices” — in other words, with deflation. Such unseriousness is underlined by the platform’s simultaneous endorsement of inflation-driving policies such as tax cuts, spending expansions, mass deportations and “Buy American” requirements for federal purchases. Most egregiously, the platform endorses Trump’s aggressive trade war and tariffs, which would drive up prices at an annual cost of $1,500 for the typical U.S. household.
The contradictions do not stop there. Following a lengthy package of demands for Washington to micromanage America’s 100,000 public schools — regulating teacher tenure, salaries, the school curriculum, school discipline, even sports teams — the GOP platform calls for closing the very Education Department that would implement and manage these invasive federal controls.
The platform also calls for replicating Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system across our entire country. This initiative would surely come in handy if Canada or Mexico were ever to launch a small number of low-flying missiles into the United States. Iron Dome technology is not designed to intercept the long-range nuclear missiles that would come from China, Russia or North Korea. Notably, the GOP platform calls for supporting Israel yet never once mentions Ukraine.
While tighter immigration controls are worthy of debate, the platform’s “Largest Deportation Program in American History” approach of undertaking a door-to-door roundup of up to 20 million illegal immigrants is totally infeasible and would lead only to chaos and cruelty. Old laws meant to vet potential immigrants for anti-American and revolutionary intentions would be resurrected, the platform promises, and twisted into religious and political ideological tests for immigration applicants. The platform accuses Democrats of plotting to “add tens of millions of new illegal immigrants to the rolls of Medicare,” which suggests that all 10 million Medicare-age seniors in Mexico, and possibly all such adults in Central America, would emigrate to the United States, receiving full amnesty and benefits.
Even U.S. citizens are targeted for their political views. The GOP platform calls for using government power to “fire Radical Left accreditors” of colleges and would require the U.S. military to “get woke Leftwing Democrats fired as soon as possible.” This poisonous (and wildly unconstitutional) call to purge liberals from the military doesn’t even bother to exempt personnel who have been injured or disabled in their service to America.
In between these demands for new political tests and ideological purges, the platform — without a hint of self-awareness — pledges to “hold accountable those who have misused the power of Government to unjustly prosecute their Political Opponents.”