Republican Party platform adopts Trump’s tough line on immigration

Now that the only thing left to do is to endorse it next week at the national convention in Milwaukee, the Republican Party has put the finishing touches on its platform, which includes carrying out the largest deportation of migrants in the history of the country should its candidate, Donald Trump, win the election on November 5. Hot topics such as the right to abortion, one of the Democrats’ main assets, and same-sex marriage have been pushed down in the brief program, which is committed to “a return to common sense” through an aggressive legislative agenda aimed at turning around immigration, the economy and other issues in the lives of Americans.

Dedicated to the “forgotten men and women of America,” the document, approved on July 8 by the Platform Committee, sounds like a Trump campaign speech, and offers 20 promises that sound more like slogans than concepts. The first two items on the list are to, in capital letters, “seal the border and stop the migrant invasion,” and “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history,” as Trump has promised so many times at his rallies and statements to the media during the hush-money criminal trial in New York. The tenth point of the program returns to the obsession with immigration, equating the arrival of foreigners with organized crime: “Stop the migrant crime epidemic, demolish the foreign drug cartels, crush gang violence, and lock up violent offenders.”

The Trump campaign has reduced the party platform to a basic electoral manual of 20 slogans, which are not explained in depth (point three, “end inflation and make America affordable again,” is as vaguely worded as the rest.) It has clearly distanced itself from the controversial, and more cumbersome – conceptually – Project 2025, an ultra-conservative ideology devised by republican think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation that for many constitutes the backbone of the new conservative revolution.

In an attempt to appeal to undecided and moderate voters, the program mentions abortion only once, in a statement about the party’s determination to protect “the question of life” that says: “We will oppose late-term abortion,” meaning in periods close to 16 weeks of gestation. On the few occasions during the campaign that he has spoken about it, Trump has been in favor of leaving abortion regulation in the hands of the states. The program no longer alludes to “traditional marriage” between a man and a woman, as the Republican platform defined it in the 2016 and 2020 campaigns.

The culture wars have a bigger presence in the document, in parallel to their presence in the classrooms: the platform promises to end left-wing gender insanity, limit federal funding for schools that teach the so-called critical race theory, and keep “[trans] men out of women’s sports.”

The wording includes all the usual nationalist exhortations of Trump’s rallies, including his famous , “America first.” The protectionism that the former president and Republican candidate intends to impose if he is re-elected in November, with new tariffs on most imports, is expressed in manifested in proclamations such as “We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL and we will become Energy Independent, and even Dominant again!” Trump’s particular obsession with electric cars, and the consequent competition from China, also finds accommodation in the document: “Cancel the electric vehicle mandate and cut costly and burdensome regulations.”

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