Former President Donald Trump hasn't just become the uncontested leader of the Republican Party, wrote Philip Bump for The Washington Post — he has changed the way they even write their policy platform.
The release of the new platform, which is loaded with all-caps Trumpisms and caused outrage among some rank-and-file members, comes after Trump forced much of the longstanding leadership of the Republican National Committee out and replaced them with MAGA loyalists, including his own daughter-in-law.
The past GOP platforms in 2012 and even 2016, wrote Bump, were lengthy documents outlining in detail the technical facets of policies the party wanted to adopt. Now, four years after the party barely even had a platform in 2020, the new document is "a product not of the party but of Trump himself" — and it's a very different animal as a result.
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This is apparent in Trump's own policy priorities, with far less space devoted to things like abortion and guns and far more on immigration — but even the way the document was written has stark differences.
"There’s another obvious difference: The new platform mentions the candidate himself nearly 20 times. The 2012 platform mentioned Romney once," wrote Bump. "Another giveaway that the 2024 platform document was created by and for Donald Trump: the idiosyncratic deployment of uppercase letters. Trump’s random capitalization has long been a mark of his writing, from 'People' to 'Deep State' to 'Nation.' Generally, about 2 percent of letters in a written document are capitalized — that was the percentage of capitalized characters in the 2012 and 2016 platforms. In the 2024 platform document, about 12 percent of characters are capitalized."
At the end of the day, Bump concluded, "Party platforms are always centrally electoral documents but generally seek to persuade by offering details. This one, as with Trump’s politicking in general, is unabashed in stripping those details out. It is undeniably the Republican Party platform, in the sense that the Republican Party is undeniably Trump’s."
