As the Republican National Convention draws near, movement pro-lifers are becoming concerned that the party will water down its historic commitment to their cause at the behest of the party’s leader and presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump.
Trump ran on a commitment to protect the unborn in 2016 and is considered by many to be the most accomplished pro-life president in history, given his role in nominating the Supreme Court justices who would go on to overturn Roe v. Wade. But since his defeat in 2020, Trump has publicly and privately suggested that abortion has become an electoral liability for Republicans.
In the wake of the Dobbs decision, Trump sought to neutralize that perceived vulnerability by opposing a federal abortion ban and adopting the view that the issue should be left to the states. This federalist approach is a departure from his prior support, during his presidential term, for a 20-week ban, raising questions about how the platform committee may amend the national party’s platform this summer in Milwaukee.
The RNC’s 2016 platform, reaffirmed at the 2020 convention during the pandemic, mentions the word “abortion” 35 times and expresses support for a human-life amendment to the U.S. Constitution as well as “legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth.”
Given Trump’s recent statements on abortion, pro-life groups and some RNC members fear that kind of strongly worded commitment will be absent from this year’s platform when it’s unveiled in July.
State delegations are responsible for picking their committee representatives at the convention, which includes one man and one woman from each state and territory. It’s typical for the presumptive presidential nominee’s campaign to play a role in identifying platform picks who are closely aligned with their candidate. This cycle is no exception. Many RNC members tell NR that in recent weeks, the Trump campaign has sent state parties a slate of their preferred picks for the four convention committees, including the influential platform committee.
Some members who were eager to get a slot on the coveted platform committee are convinced they were sidelined by the Trump campaign because of their staunchly pro-life views.
Vermont RNC committeeman Jay Shepard, for example, “very much wanted” to serve on the platform committee but was disappointed to hear he didn’t make it onto the Trump campaign’s list of preferred picks.
“Apparently, they were not looking for someone like me who is firm in their position on the life issue,” Shepard, a Trump supporter with committed pro-life views, tells NR. As he understands it, the presumptive nominee’s campaign sent Vermont Republicans a number of Republicans “who they thought would be 100 percent loyal to the president, rather than loyal on any particular issue on the platform.”
For his part, the Vermont committeeman agrees with Trump that Republicans should unite behind the view that abortion is a states’ rights issue. “The Supreme Court has ruled on that,” he said. But rallying behind a federalist approach to abortion, he says, should not stop Republicans from including in their 2024 platform language that encourages states “to support life issues in their laws and in their state constitutions.”
It’s likely that this time around, the platform committee will amend the document to reflect the Trump campaign’s stated view that the issue should be left to the states; but it’s still early in the process and nothing has been decided yet. (According to a committee meeting schedule obtained yesterday by National Review, the platform committee is currently slated to hold its first formal pre-convention orientation on July 7.)
“The committee hasn’t met, the platform isn’t being watered down, and anyone who says otherwise is working to disrupt the convention where Donald Trump will make American history,” platform committee executive director Randy Evans said in a statement to NR.
Virginia’s RNC committeewoman Patti Lyman maintains that she was told in April by someone from the Trump team that she would not be allowed to serve on the platform committee. She suspects it’s because of her outspoken pro-life views (though she also suspects her longtime public support of the reelection campaign of Freedom Caucus chairman Bob Good, whose challenger Trump has recently endorsed, didn’t help her case). “My understanding is that in Virginia, the committeewoman has traditionally served on the platform committee,” she said.
“I was never given a reason for why I was not going to be allowed on the platform committee,” Lyman told NR in an interview. “I have heard in other states of pressure, similar efforts were made to keep strongly pro-life people off of the platform committee. I’m not saying that there aren’t going to be any pro-lifers on there, but in many cases, there were specific efforts to keep them off.” Despite this, she is still “10,000 percent supportive of Trump” and calls him the strongest pro-life president in history.
With respect to the platform committee vetting process, the Trump campaign views its role as identifying, to the best of its ability, members whose views are consistent with those expressed by the presumptive nominee — including on the issue of abortion.
“This issue is very important, but it’s not the only issue that will be discussed during the platform committee week,” a senior Trump campaign official tells National Review. “Ultimately, the goal is to have a party platform that reflects the party’s nominee, which ultimately reflects the will of Republican voters who chose President Trump as their nominee in a historic fashion.”
As they approach the convention, some RNC members’ inboxes are being flooded with emails from pro-life groups urging them to preserve the platform as is.
Former vice president Mike Pence’s nonprofit advocacy group, Advancing American Freedom, released a memo earlier this month urging RNC platform committee members not to “water down” platform language on an array of policy planks, including marriage, tax and trade, foreign policy, and abortion.
Students for Life Action president Kristan Hawkins says the group has been in discussions with the RNC for more than six months and recently started making calls to state Republican leaders, “really trying to ensure that our RNC leaders understand what we want.”
And what do they want? “We demand that the RNC continue its legacy of that pro-life platform,” said Hawkins, whose organization is urging RNC members to sign a pledge to “ensure the GOP platform remains pro-life.” The group hopes to prevent “bad things” from being added, like a late term limit, and to seek reassurances that the pro-life cause is something the party is willing to work for.
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America president Marjorie Dannenfelser, a longtime supporter of a federal abortion ban, said in a statement to NR that she expects the GOP platform to “unequivocally call for national protections for unborn children, rooted in the 14th Amendment.” Anything less, she said, “would entail an abandonment of its defense of the human dignity of all people” and would give Democrats an opportunity to “ wipe out every state’s right to protect unborn children and their mothers.”
Unlike in 2016, Trump has the nomination locked up after a landslide primary victory, and his campaign clearly wants to ensure that there are as few hiccups and distractions as possible.
“My memory is far from perfect, but I’ve been part of a number of delegations over the years, and I don’t recall the one who was going to be the presumptive nominee being that aggressively involved in the selection of the delegations’ committee representatives,” Tennessee’s RNC committeeman Oscar Brock said in an interview.
Another way to look at it: The convention is one of the few campaign-related events that the party can control. During an already unprecedented election cycle, many seasoned RNC members say, it’s always in the party’s best interest to prevent intraparty squabbles from bursting into public view during platform committee discussions — including over social issues like abortion.
“The campaigns just generally like to have more control, and they don’t want to have something embarrassing come out of the convention,” Texas RNC committeeman Robin Armstrong said in an interview. “They don’t want to have to go out of the convention, having to answer a bunch of questions that they don’t want to answer.”
Around NR
• Typically, political scientists say, vice-presidential picks don’t really matter much in terms of electoral results. “But for once, owing to the unique circumstances of 2024’s presidential race — may we never live through this again — vice-presidential picks matter,” Jeffrey Blehar argues:
While Trump’s core fanatics would happily band together to break the man out of prison, any national victory scenario for a man whose flaws need no recounting will require significant numbers of reluctant voters to sign on. And Trump’s core fanatics may actually need to break this man out of prison, for all we yet know. His pick as vice president is perhaps the best opportunity he will have in this race to persuade grudging voters off the fence.
• Amid mixed reporting on the remaining candidates on Trump’s list of potential VP picks, Jim Geraghty urges readers to consider the “underrated odds of a Trump-Burgum ticket”:
Burgum is on every list. And at first glance, he’s the figure who you might think would be the first one crossed off the list — he’s fairly old compared to the other options (he’ll turn 68 in August), he’s comparatively unknown, and no one is worried about Trump’s odds of winning North Dakota. And yet, Burgum’s hanging around.
• Polling in the wake of Trump’s hush-money-trial conviction should raise red flags for Biden and his allies, writes Noah Rothman, who questions how Biden plans to overcome his political rival before November:
It is still prudent to avoid drawing conclusions about the outcome of this race five months out from the vote, but the Biden campaign will find it increasingly difficult to calm his disquieted allies. . . . They’ve allowed [Trump] to set the tempo of the campaign in the hopes that he runs straight into a minefield. Trump may yet prove that theory right, but he hasn’t yet.
• Trump, who has never been just a politician, is now a kind of folk hero as a result of his legal woes, says Rich Lowry:
Needless to say, this view of Trump is not universally shared — he remains unpopular with the broader public. And his folk-hero status doesn’t mean he’s going to win again. A more conventional Republican candidate, with less emotive appeal for good or ill, would certainly have a better chance to beat Joe Biden.
• Charles C. W. Cooke asks readers to consider the possibility that nothing will change voter perceptions before November:
Elections are typically too complicated to reduce to a simple equation, but, in this case, it seems possible that the key variables are all already here, and we are just waiting for the voters to run the math in whatever order they see fit. Trump bad. Biden old. Inflation unpopular. Abortion popular. Border disaster. World on fire. On November 5, solve for X.
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