The Party of No Content
What does the Republican Party want? Although Donald Trump’s reelection campaign has shifted into full, strange force with an empty 2020 convention, it is a hard question to answer.
In June, the Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Trump to name his top-priority agenda items for his second term at a town hall held in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The commander in chief’s answer: “You know, the word experience is still good. I always say talent is more important than experience. I’ve always said that, but the word experience is a very important word. It’s a very important meaning. I never did this before. I never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington, I think, 17 times. All of a sudden, I’m president of the United States. You know the story. … Now I know everybody, and I have great people in the administration. You make some mistakes. An idiot like [the former National Security Adviser John] Bolton, all he wanted to do is drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to drop bombs on everybody. You don’t have to kill people.”
Trump campaign’s website provides no clearer message. It offers a threadbare recounting of his supposed accomplishments from his first term and a selection of festive collectibles. It contains no detailed forward-facing policy section, no vision of how to recover from the pandemic recession, no projection of a post-coronavirus future. There’s just a list of bullet points that the campaign put out on the eve of the convention. “Partner with Other Nations to Clean Up our Planet’s Oceans,” “Build the World’s Greatest Infrastructure System”: These are not plans so much as slogans, albeit ones that aren’t particularly catchy.
[Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes: Trump is campaigning on a platform of abject failure]
The GOP in general is remarkably quiet on how it would govern and what it seeks to accomplish in the coming years. Breaking with precedent, the party decided against producing an original platform for the 2020 convention. (Put differently: It no-platformed itself.) And Republican leadership has gone dark on a huge swath of issues: balancing the budget, reforming entitlement programs, tackling climate change, improving public education, reducing student-loan debt, and ameliorating racial inequalities—as well as getting the country through
