on’t be fooled by the Trump GOP platform fight: It’s a ruse. As the Republican platform committee meets this week, its marching orders from the presumptive nominee are precisely what, according to Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a flatfoot must do in Los Angeles’s crime-ridden Chinatown, circa 1937: “As little as possible.”
Committee members chosen by Donald Trump will make radical cuts to the party platform to render it unobjectionable. Don’t be surprised if the upshot is no platform at all, as we saw in 2020.
I can’t condemn the likely elimination of such hard-right planks as a call for a constitutional amendment banning abortion, which has been in every GOP platform since 1976, or opposition voiced in the 2016 platform to the Supreme Court’s twin rulings upholding gay marriage. But neither can I condone the GOP cupping its hands over its eyes while writing Trump a blank check.
People used to complain that the Republican Party was too ideological. You don’t hear that so much anymore, because now the problem (as, yes, I’ve written before) is that the GOP possesses no ideology at all.
You don’t believe me? Consider that FreedomWorks, the extremist libertarian group that successfully championed Tea Party conservatism a decade and a half ago, closed its doors in May. It blamed Trump.
