Donald Trump is ludicrously trying to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and its dystopian plans to subvert American democracy. FFRF Action Fund asserts, however, that the Republican Party platform, released just days ahead of the GOP convention this week in Milwaukee, shows that Trump is being less than honest.
Trump disingenuously protests that he knows nothing about the extremist Project 2025, although it was masterminded by his allies, including with help from more than 100 of his former presidential aides, as an explicit blueprint for “the next Republican president.” Not to mention that Trump’s own boast of being a “dictator on day one” lines up perfectly with Project 2025’s scheme to dismantle our civil service system and make all federal agencies kowtow to the White House.
The GOP platform is very short and purposely vague, so naturally it cannot go into the details of Project 2025’s 920-page playbook. Drafters also seemingly realized that an overtly theocratic document would call unwanted attention to controversial or unpopular Christian nationalist goals. For example, the platform only mentions “God” twice, down from the 16 references in its 2016 platform. Similarly, the 2016 platform mentioned abortion more than 50 times, while the current platform uses the word once.
But don’t be fooled.
Even with fewer references to “God” or “abortion,” the party’s commitment to Christian nationalism remains pure. “Today and together,” boasts the platform, “with love for our country, faith in our people, and trust in God’s good grace, we will Make America Great Again!”
Here are some of the disturbing ways the GOP platform calls for undoing the vaunted separation between religion and government, as well as negating of individual rights. It calls for:
• “Universal school choice.” In other words, robbing public schools of tax dollars in order to hand public funds over to families of any income to pay for private (mostly religious) school tuition. “The primary difference” between the platform and Project 2025, avers Education Week, “is that Project 2025 is much more extensive and outlines clear steps a conservative administration could take to achieve the goals it outlines.”
• Conferring fetal personhood. Without explicitly endorsing the anti-abortion goal of declaring fetal personhood, the platform invokes the 14th Amendment about abortion, which is the favored path to a nationwide ban on abortion. The platform doesn’t have to mention banning mifepristone and resurrecting the Comstock Act because we already know that the Republican Party by its decades of prior platforms and actions is committed to banning abortion, whether state-by-state, by the mail, by federal law or a constitutional amendment. Trump and the platform writers are savvy enough to realize that if they sound more moderate before the election they have a better chance of winning and abolishing abortion rights after it.
• Inserting prayer and the bible into public schools. The party is totally in line with rogue Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters. The platform vows to “stand up to those who violate the religious freedoms of American students.”
• “Restoring” parents rights in education. This means unleashing “Moms for Liberty” with even more book bans, tampered curricula and attacks on teaching complete American history as opposed to propaganda.
Instead of outright calling for the repeal of same-sex marriage, the GOP platform says: “Republicans will promote a culture that values the sanctity of marriage, the blessings of childhood, the foundational role of families, and supports working parents.” That’s a dog whistle against LGBTQ-plus rights.
Calling itself “the defenders of the First Amendment right to religious liberty,” the GOP platform claims to protect “the right not only to worship according to the dictates of conscience, but also to act in accordance with those beliefs, not just in places of worship, but in every day life.” Translation: The GOP will work hard to ensure that someone else’s religious beliefs give them favored status and permit them to discriminate against other Americans.
The platform announces Trump’s agenda of creating a new federal task force “on fighting anti-Christian bias that will investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.” Similarly, it promises to reinstate Trump’s dreadful 1776 Commission to teach “patriotic education.”
Just plain scary is the vow: “Republicans will use existing federal law to keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists and Socialists out of America.”
The platform, like Project 2025, says it will undo President Biden’s program to stimulate green technology that mitigates climate change. We’ll leave it to experts in other fields to parse the many other dishonesties in the platform, such as vowing to make the American Dream affordable again while imposing trade tariffs that assuredly will spike the cost of living. Many other political aims of Project 2025 outside FFRF Action Fund’s scope, such as mass rounding-up of undocumented immigrants tinto camps for deportation, are also found in the RNC platform.
“The RNC’s newly unveiled platform is dismaying,” says FFRF Action Fund President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “The platform includes a set of theocratic principles for the party’s candidates to support. We need elected officials who abide by the principles our nation was aspirationally founded upon, and that includes upholding a secular democracy where everyone, of any or no religion, can equally thrive.”
FFRF Action Fund is a 501(c)(4) organization that develops and advocates for legislation, regulations and government programs to preserve the constitutional principle of separation between state and church. It also advocates for the rights and views of nonbelievers, endorses candidates for political office, and publicizes the views of elected officials concerning religious liberty issues.