Party platforms are interesting for historians, activists, reporters, and typically no one else. If a campaign is being asked about them, it’s usually a problem.
If Gaza ceasefire protesters make themselves heard during the Democrats’ platform meetings, we’ll all see it, as we saw the Sanders/Clinton factions fight over details in 2016. If anti-abortion activists want to tell the RNC to keep its “personhood” language, we won’t — and they might not be able to, anyway.
The Trump-era RNC has taken numerous steps, for years, to keep internal party business out of the news. The press has very limited access to regularly-scheduled party meetings, though reporters show up and work sources anyway. The decision to pull curtains around the platform won’t stop coverage of what’s in it, but it will prevent the real-time drama of prior years.
That’s intentional. In a memo distributed on the day of the Trump-Biden CNN debate, Trump campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles urged the RNC to write a “streamlined platform,” not “an unnecessarily verbose treatise” that could be picked apart by pundits.
“For decades, Republicans have published textbook-long platforms that are scrutinized and intentionally misrepresented by our political opponents,” LaCivita and Wiles wrote. “The mainstream media uses their bully pulpit to perpetuate lies and misrepresentations, and the voters are often left believing we stand for something different than we actually do.”
They did not cite examples in the memo, but in 2016, the committee’s tweak to language about defending Ukraine generated bad headlines; well into 2018, it was inspiring questions from a special counsel. In 2020, the decision to punt on the platform inspired some embarrassing coverage, but not too much.
The takeaway, however, was that platforms could be unnecessary distractions — and that the media’s desire for details about a second Trump term should be fed rarely and cautiously. After a string of high-profile New York Times stories looked at Project 2025, a conservative effort to write an agenda for the next administration and to help staff it, Wiles and LaCivita said that “none of these groups or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign.”
That was before the debate, and a news cycle that drowned out all other coverage of Trump and Biden. Democrats will continue to accuse Republicans of risking abortion access and considering a national ban, whatever Trump or the platform says. The activists protesting changes to the platform won’t have a live TV audience. But the iron law of meetings is that anything happening behind closed doors is more interesting, and news-worthy, than anything happening in front of them.
