Welcome to our weekly “Trumptastrophe” series that serves to remind us of the destructive policies, decisions, and actions we encountered during the Trump presidency and the threats that he and others in the MAGA movement still pose – and to keep those moments clear in our memory as we fight to defeat Republican extremists during the upcoming elections.
Our weekly “Trumptastrophe” series usually starts with a reminder of one of the destructive policies, decisions, and actions we encountered during the Trump presidency. The threats that Trump and others in the MAGA movement pose were amplified by the Republican National Convention, so this week we’re doing something a little different. We’re focusing on some of the ways the recent Republican National Convention amplified the need to defeat MAGA extremists in the upcoming elections.
We start with the party’s new platform—actually, with the authoritarian process by which Trump’s campaign forced the delegates elected to the platform committee to accept his preferred language.
Normally the GOP platform process is quite democratic and transparent. Each state party elects two representatives, subcommittees draft language for various sections, and the committee hashes out final language over days of debate in open meetings that are broadcast on C-SPAN. Not this year.
This time Trump dictated the language. His henchmen at the RNC closed the meeting, took delegates’ phones from them, and bullied them into going along by taking pictures of the committee members as they voted. It was the clearest evidence yet of the dictatorial way Trump will rule if he gets power. If that’s how he treats his strongest allies, what will he do to the rest of us?
Well, we have a pretty good idea, thanks to Project 2025, the agenda for a new administration written by Trump aides and allies. It calls for giving him unchecked power to fire tens of thousands of professional civil servants, replace them with his loyalists, impose his will on independent agencies, turn the FBI and Justice Department into weapons of his desired “retribution,” and purge anyone who questions him.
The new GOP platform, while much shorter than in the past, is filled with divisive Trump rhetoric. It complains about “very corrupt elections.” It promotes Moms for Liberty’s efforts to restrict teaching students about race, sexuality, and gender. It calls for mass deportations. It vows to reimpose his travel ban and keep “foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists out of America.” It promotes Christian nationalists’ agenda, promising to create a new federal task force to deal with supposed “discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.”
A major theme of the convention was gaslighting—a way of manipulating people by distorting reality to make them question what they are seeing and feeling. Trump’s brazen lying is a form of that. At the RNC, Trump and the MAGA Republicans tried to gaslight Americans over and over again:
- Project 2025? What Project 2025? Trump’s closest aides and allies, led by Kevin Roberts, the MAGA president of the Heritage Foundation, have created an agenda for a new Trump administration and a detailed authoritarian plan to carry it out—including mass firings of federal employees. As news coverage has exposed the many ways the plan would harm Americans, Trump pretended to know nothing about it, even though his closest advisers were behind it.
Virtually no one at the RNC mentioned this detailed plan for how the right-wing movement would “take the reins of government” under a new Trump administration. But the Heritage Foundation was a major sponsor of the convention. Heritage President Kevin Roberts, architect of Project 2025, was everywhere. And Heritage held a day-long “policy fest” to promote the ideas in the agenda.
- The anti-freedom “party of freedom.” RNC speakers claimed that the MAGA Republican Party is a party dedicated to freedom and free speech. They wouldn’t even let their own platform committee engage in free speech, as the delegates themselves complained!
The supposed party of freedom wants to eliminate access to abortion. They want to reverse progress toward equality for LGBTQ people and criminalize health care for trans youth. They want to ban “pornography”—which they define in a way that would let them clear classrooms and libraries of books. At a Moms for Liberty town hall meeting at the RNC, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis bragged that his state was not only dictating to K-12 schools what they could teach, but was doing the same to public universities.
Project 2025 let the cat out of the bag in its policy agenda, saying that freedom doesn’t mean the right to live as you want—how most people would define it—but only the right to live as you ought to—as defined by Project 2025’s Christian nationalist authors. In his speech, Trump lauded Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban, who is praised by far-right activists for crushing dissent, taking control of media and the judiciary, and imposing ideological control over arts and education.
- Masking intentions to ban abortion. As much as Trump brags about his Supreme Court justices overturning Roe v. Wade, his campaign operatives know that most Americans oppose the abortion bans Republicans are putting in place. So Trump’s team made the platform language on abortion deliberately vague and contradictory. That way they could get headlines talking about a more “moderate” stance to gaslight pro-choice voters, while at the same time expressing support for one of the most extreme claims of the no-exceptions abortion-ban movement, which is that fertilized eggs have constitutional rights as persons from the moment of conception, an idea that would require criminalization of all abortion in every state.
- Talk of unity from the great dividers. During the convention, Trump’s campaign repeatedly sent the message that Trump’s focus would be on unifying Americans—as if division and gleeful cruelty were not the hallmarks of Trump’s political persona and the MAGA movement in general. On Thursday night, just minutes after a speaker praised Trump as a promoter of unity, the RNC showed a video of Trump promising to purge a long list of “villains,” including “globalists” and the “sick political class.” At the convention and related events, speaker after speaker described the election in terms of spiritual warfare, as a battle between good and evil. Tucker Carlson told attendees at the Heritage Foundation’s policy fest that they were in a “spiritual battle” against people who wanted to “eliminate Christians.” Moms for Liberty leaders warned that “radical Marxists are trying to steal our children’s future” and that “the enemy wants to come between us and our children.”
Even as Trump took the stage for his acceptance speech, any attempts at unity were quickly overshadowed by vitriolic rhetoric, angry rebuttals, and attacks on Democrats for standing in the way of their extreme and dangerous agenda.
The Republicans exuded confidence and tried to send the signal that the election is over. But it’s not. Far from it. People For remains committed to fighting with everything we have over the next several months to make sure that the dangerous Donald Trump does not become our president, and the brutally harmful Project 2025 agenda does not become our future.
Join us by signing our pledge to oppose MAGA Republicans and their extreme agenda and rush a donation to empower our proven campaigns to defeat Trump and his extremist allies this November.
These are just some of the reasons we need YOU in this fight. So, find your favorite way to unwind after reading through this week’s recap, and then make a plan for how you will fight back this week, this month, this election cycle.
