Right Wing Watch reported this week that members of the Republican Platform Committee were subjected to heavy-handed authoritarian tactics by the Trump RNC, which refused to allow any questioning of the candidate’s wishes. Rather than drafting and debating the platform in public, Trump’s team closed the doors, shut down debate, took away delegates’ phones, and intimidated them into rubber stamping the language wanted by the Trump campaign. Not surprisingly, that hasn’t gone over too well with some platform committee members.
On Thursday, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins used his Washington Watch show to slam the “despicable” and “disgusting” process and criticize the “heavy-handed” platform committee chairperson, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who apparently acted as the Trump team’s enforcer. She was “unbelievable,” said Perkins:
I mean, it was shocking. They allowed for no amendments or discussion before forcing a scripted vote. Now, this process done in secrecy behind closed doors, quite frankly, is unbecoming of a party that champions free speech and due process.
Ironically, the document itself calls for vigorous defense of free speech and the end of government censorship. Well, deprived of the opportunity to actually discuss this so called draft document and strengthen the weak platform that lacked the party’s historical stand for the unborn, there was a group of us delegates that have submitted a minority report to supplement the platform…
The delegates had a gag, basically a gag rule put on them, their phones taken. Media was not allowed in. So most people don’t know what happened in the room. But fortunately, I have a microphone, and I can tell you. It was despicable. It was disgusting. It was not befitting of a party that claims to be a defender of law and order, due process, and the freedom of speech—and certainly not a party that claims to protect the unborn.
A July 11 action alert from FRC criticized the “highly choreographed” and “unprecedented, tightly scripted process that allowed for no amendments or substantive debate before the vote.”
Perkins and his FRC colleagues aren’t the only ones angry about the process. “They rolled us,” outraged platform committee member Gail Ruzicka told Milwaukee’s WISN12News.
The language rammed through the platform committee is purposefully vague on issues like abortion and marriage. That way, the Trump campaign can send two different messages. Religious-right leaders loyal to the campaign can put the strongest anti-abortion spin on the language, while the campaign encourages headlines about a new “moderate” position to appeal to the majority of voters who don’t share the religious right’s anti-choice and anti-equality obsessions.
Still, the abandonment of more explicit language calling for constitutional bans on abortion and laws defining marriage as one man and one woman is rankling some religious-right leaders.
Perkins called the platform “woefully inadequate in communicating a definitive position on the protection of human life.” He complained that the last GOP platform recognized God 15 times, while the Trump version has just two “passing references” to God. And he noted that the platform contains no reference at all to the Second Amendment—“none, zero.”
Religious right activist Michael Brown complained this week that the platform language was so “watered down” that the GOP can no longer be viewed as “the party of life.” Brown warned that “allowing the platform to be weakened in the name of electoral pragmatism might signal a whole new wave of GOP candidates who are less committed to the pro-life cause but who are allegedly better than the Democrats.” He added, “It might also embolden current GOP congressmen to soften their own stances in the name of electability, thereby continuing to erode the GOP’s stance for life. In the end, there might be little to distinguish the two parties when it comes to abortion.” Brown continued:
My counsel would be that we do not take this new platform lying down, but do our best to work for a change until the last minute possible. If, in the end, we cannot bring change about, then we still work with the GOP for the moment while making it clear behind the scenes that the next GOP candidate will have to embrace our pro-life position — otherwise, they will not make it through the primaries.
Among other religious-right figures unhappy about the platform include former VP Mike Pence, Jason Rapert of the Christian nationalist National Association of Christian Lawmakers, and former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, who went dramatically for a maximalist position, posting, “You cannot be a faithful Christian and a faithful Republican after today.” Brent Leatherwood, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission called it “political malpractice.” Ryan Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, called the platform changes an example of “cowardice.”
Anderson and his mentor Robert George—who has urged the Supreme Court to require all states to treat abortion as homicide—were among a group of anti-abortion activists who released a letter to GOP delegates Friday urging them to “vote down any platform that weakens the party’s pro-life stance.”
At the right-wing Christian outlet The Stream, John Zmirak slammed MAGA politicians and anti-abortion activists who have gone along with Trump:
It’s sickening to see previously pro-life politicians like Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance sell their souls for pennies on the dollar, then watch pro-life groups pretend the miserable half of a moldy loaf tossed to them by the Trump campaign is a wedding cake. It’s both morally repulsive and deeply humiliating.
As Right Wing Watch noted earlier this week, Trump’s team clearly calculated that religious-right activists have nowhere else to go. At The Stream, Zmirak demonstrated the thinking that Trump’s team is counting on. “We must yell our heads off now, try to bluff Trump and his lowbrow cronies into thinking we might sit the election out,” Zmirak wrote, but in the end religious-right voters would have to “quietly go ahead and vote in our own self-defense.”
Other religious-right activists who have worked hard to cement the relationship between conservative evangelicals and the Republican Party warn that even if very few of their constituents would ever vote for a Democratic candidate or sit the election out, many who feel betrayed may feel less motivated to make phone calls and knock on doors to turn out voters.
And maybe some of them, perhaps those who learn how Trump’s team treated his close allies on the platform committee, may be more open to warnings about Trump’s dictatorial tendencies, the authoritarian agenda of Project 2025, and the consequences of giving Trump power after the right-wing Supreme Court ruled that he is virtually immune from accountability for any crimes he commits as president.
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