I Read Trump's Platform Because My Dumb Job Requires It

I should have gone into plastics

Photo by Justin Sullivan via Getty.

Last week, I reviewed Kamala Harris’ platform. My takeaway was that she was trying to distance herself from the left-wing stuff that she supported in her first presidential run; if 2019 was her Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch phase, she is now trying to be Mark Robert Wahlberg, Serious Actor. Maybe you’re buying Kamala’s transition, maybe you’re not, but either way: Her intent was clear.

I have now read Trump’s platform, and his intent is also clear: He wants to supplant Project 2025 with a vague, shape-shifting facsimile of a platform that contains few proposals that could be analyzed in any real way. Really: How the hell am I supposed to evaluate a “proposal” like “Republicans will end the global chaos and restore Peace through Strength”? Trump’s platform — called “Agenda 47” — is a hodgepodge of vague promises probably written by Trump himself, and by “written”, I mean “screamed at a staffer while on the toilet.”

Still, I’ll try to do for Trump what I did for Harris: I’ll try to determine what the platform signals. I’m skipping the dog-bites-man stuff — you don’t need me to tell you that Trump still wants to Build 👏 The 👏 Wall. But surely something can be learned even from a sometimes-all-caps screed that traffics in unmeasurable outcomes and out-of-the-blue weirdness (e.g. “create a robust Manufacturing Industry in Near Earth Orbit”). So, I’m rating Trump’s plan according to three metrics that I think tell us something about how he’ll govern.

Is the platform highly professional or amateurish and weird?

Here is the first page of Agenda 47:

That’s it — the cover is a blank white page with an all-caps Arial heading that doesn’t include the document’s title. Doesn’t the Trump campaign have Microsoft Publisher? It is so easy to make a whatever-the-fuck stock photo title page — I threw the graphic below together in exactly six minutes and 18 seconds, and that includes writing the “stronger families, brighter futures” tagline, which really sounds like it means something (though it doesn’t).

Built from photos by Harrison Haines and Karolina Kaboompics.

Agenda 47 starts with a two-page preamble that is all Trump. It features the haphazard capitalization (e.g. “we are a Nation in SERIOUS DECLINE”) and absurd hyperbole (e.g. “America is now rocked by Raging Inflation, Open Borders, Rampant Crime, Attacks on our Children, and Global Conflict, Chaos, and Instability”) that are Trump’s signature moves. The document then segues to twenty “promises” — rendered in all caps — the first of which is “SEAL THE BORDER, AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION”. The twenty promises are followed by ten chapters filled with bullets that overlap with but don’t directly correspond to the promises. So…have you got that? The promises and chapters are the same but different and related except not related and redundant but also contradictory. If I may engage in some wild speculation about what definitely, definitely happened here: I think Trump’s staff wrote the ten chapters, and Trump said “this sucks” and wrote the 20 promises, but the staff didn’t want to throw away their work, plus Trump’s promises sound like a child wrote them, so his staff bolted the two lists together and called it a day.

This focus on the document’s presentation might seem nit-picky, but I’d argue that it matters. Unenthusiastic Trump supporters often concede that, sure, Trump is dumber than a bag of lard, but he’ll surround himself with competent people — Richard Hanania made this argument on my podcast. So, I’d like to point out that these theorized competent people have not yet made their presence known. This document is Trump through-and-through, from the crass jingoism to the title page so lazy that it makes the guy from the SNL “Papyrus” sketch look like an exacting perfectionist. Phrased more bluntly: This shit is amateur hour. Why should we assume that Trump will produce sound, well-considered policy when his platform looks like an e-mail your great uncle typed up while drunk?

Does this plan speak to mainstream concerns or Fox News concerns?

Harris’ platform tries to appeal to centrist voters. Trump’s platform attempts no such thing — this platform is for people who mainline Fox News on a daily basis. The preamble, especially, seems like it was written by an AI bot trained on Sean Hannity episodes, and “an AI bot trained on Sean Hannity episodes” seems like a decent description of Trump’s brain.

Immigration is front-and-center — it features in four of the twenty promises and four of the ten chapters. One thing that’s consistent between the promises and chapters is the vow to carry out the “LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY”. Meaning…what, exactly? Increasing ICE’s budget a bit (which Biden did, by the way)? Sending the Army house-to-house recreating the opening scene from Inglourious Basterds? Agenda 47 doesn’t say, and, incredibly, we still don’t know even though Trump made this same promise before his first term.

Trump’s plan promises to right wrongs that only exist in the Fox News Cinematic Universe. He says he will “[terminate] the Socialist Green New Deal”, but, of course, the Green New Deal never came close to becoming law. Trump promises to “MAKE AMERICA THE DOMINANT ENERGY PRODUCER IN THE WORLD, BY FAR!” by ending “crippling restrictions on American Energy Production”, but the U.S. currently produces more oil than any country in history. Trump vows to “CANCEL THE ELECTRIC VEHICLE MANDATE”, but there’s no mandate — there’s a goal to have half of all cars sold by 2030 be electric, and there are emission standards that will push automakers to build more electric cars — but “mandate” is the scary word that Fox News uses, so Trump uses it, too. “KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS” is deemed worthy of its own promise; for comparison, the deficit, health care, and housing are not. Another promise is devoted to the 2022 song of the summer: critical race theory in schools. Seemingly every prominent Fox News narrative is addressed in this platform; if Kamala produced a platform that pandered to the ideologues in her party this much, it would include promises like “REPLACE ALL PRISONS WITH LEARNING-THROUGH-MUSIC PROGRAMS” and “GIVE PALESTINIANS A STATE, AND HAVE THAT STATE BE FLORIDA”. Agenda 47 contains Texas steakhouse-sized portions of red meat.

There is some overlap with normie concerns, though. Inflation, especially, gets attention, and housing and education costs are discussed in the chapters. Unfortunately, that discussion is mostly gibberish. Under “housing affordability”, Trump says he will “reduce mortgage rates by slashing Inflation”, but that doesn’t really make sense: The main way¹ the government (though not the president) would “slash inflation” would be for the Fed to raise interest rates, and that increases mortgage rates. The “Accessible Higher Education” bullet includes something truly bizarre: It says that “Republicans will support the creation of additional, drastically more affordable alternatives to a traditional four-year College degree.” What the hell is that? Are they bringing back Trump University? Do they plan to turn Girls Gone Wild into a degree-granting institution? They can’t mean junior colleges and trade schools — those already exist. When Agenda 47 addresses everyday concerns, it typically does so in Boomhauer-style indecipherable gibberish.

Is this a conservative plan, or a MAGA-ish plan?

I don’t want to get into a big discussion of what “conservatism” is, so I’ll go with the definition I learned in Poly Sci 101: Conservatism means free market economics, religious values in the social sphere, and a “realist” foreign policy based on hating Russia with the passion of a billion burning suns.

Agenda 47 contains a few things that you might call “Reaganite”. Trump promises a “LARGE TAX CUT FOR WORKERS”, and the chapters call for making the Trump tax cut permanent, though it’s not clear if those two items refer to the same thing. Trump also incessantly calls for slashing regulations — Trump treats “slash regulations” as a magical incantation whose utterance can thwart all manner of problems. Of course, if Trump had a deep commitment to slashing regulations, it seems fair to ask why he didn’t do it when he was president the first time.

Other parts of the plan are definitely not conservative. Trump is fervently anti-trade — protectionism is a recurring theme — but, keeping with his commitment to never say anything that’s an actual policy proposal, Trump opts not to spell out his ten percent across-the-board tariff plan. Trump also swears to “not cut one penny from Medicare or Social Security”, and even vows to “strengthen” Medicare, which could mean that he wants to expand it.² Trump’s platform reminds me of what some people used to call “Santa Claus liberalism” — he’s promising to bring something to everyone. And that’s probably why Trump’s proposals would increase the deficit by somewhere around $5 trillion (the deficit is currently $1.9 trillion, and that’s bad). But don’t worry: Trump will make it all work by “BRINGING [OUR COUNTRY] TO NEW AND RECORD LEVELS OF SUCCESS” (promise #20).

The 20 promises don’t mention abortion. Abortion is finally referenced in Chapter 9, long after most people will have stopped reading. Even then, the reference is oblique: Trumps says that he opposes “Late Term Abortion” and tries to say that states can now pass laws outlawing abortion, though — because this document is written by incompetent morons — he doesn’t succeed in actually saying that.³ Trump throws a few scraps to social conservatives in Chapter 9, including a “Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias”, which, hilariously, is mentioned right next to a section on protecting free speech.

Maybe the most telling part of the Agenda 47 is what is left unsaid: The words “Ukraine”, “NATO”, and “Russia” don’t appear in the document. The war in Ukraine is obliquely referenced twice: Promise #8 begins “PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE, RESTORE PEACE IN EUROPE,” and Chapter 10 calls for “restoring Peace to Europe”. Translation: Trump wants Ukraine to back down. “Prevent World War Three” means “don’t piss off Russia”, and the Chapter 10 reference to peace comes after a call to “[ensure] that our Allies must meet their obligations to invest in our Common Defense” — it’s the “our NATO allies aren’t paying their dues” canard again. I cannot think of a better marker to signify the end of the Reagan Era than a Republican presidential candidate proposing that we meekly accede to Russian aggression.

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So, there: I read Trump’s goddamned platform. It was painful — I think I lost five IQ points just by clicking on the link. As dumb as this document was, Trump probably deserves credit for realizing that policies create liabilities, so the smart play might be to have no policies at all. Instead, you can just scream vague promises at America in all caps despite having no method for making those promises real. The achilles heel of that strategy should be that people won’t fall for your bullshit, but if the past is any indication, there’s a decent chance that they will.

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1. To be fair, there is sometimes a positive relationship between inflation and mortgage rates (which appears to show up in the data, though it’s hard to disambiguate that effect from the effect of Fed base rate cuts). If people expect inflation in the future, that can increase borrowing, which places upward pressure on interest rates. It’s worth noting, though, that expectations of future inflation never really took off in 2022 or ‘23 — the high mortgage rates we have now are caused by high Fed base rates.

2. I can’t let this pass: Trump thinks that the reason Medicare is headed towards insolvency is because of “the Democrat plan to add tens of millions of new illegal immigrants to the rolls of Medicare.” The man is a lunatic.

3. The document says: “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.” Of course, if you believe that a fetus’ rights are constitutionally protected, then you don’t need statutory laws — the constitutional law would supercede states’ statutory laws. It would be coherent to say “the Supreme Court ruled that there is no constitutional right to abortion, so states can pass laws making abortion illegal,” but Trump is actually asserting that the Constitution prohibits abortion.