On June 16, 2025, Republicans will celebrate the 10th anniversary of a speech that changed the course of the party, American politics and perhaps human history.
It was the day Donald Trump descended the escalators of Manhattan’s Trump Tower and delivered a speech that shook the Republican Party to its core. The limping elephant with its blind commitment to outdated policies of free trade, mass immigration and endless war was shaken from its complacency by the efforts of the greatest living statesman in the Western world.
Trump’s policy platform promotes affordable education, housing, health care, energy and an end to the inflation that is choking American prosperity.
Today, the Republican Party’s policy platform — the document that guides the party’s policy agenda — reflects the movement Trump started and the party he now leads.
Previous platforms have been laborious mantras reciting the petty preferences of party leaders and corporate lobbyists. The 2024 platform is concise, clear, and literally dedicated to America’s forgotten men and women.
The conservative movement is often tempted to treat platform writing as a bucket list filled with every niche policy obsession in the world. This is shortsighted and antithetical to President Trump’s vision of the Republican Party.
Trump’s strength has always been his ability to speak frankly to ordinary people, who have repeatedly chosen him as their public champion. Instead of going into 12 paragraphs about the exact structure of a flat tax that will never come to pass, the platform simply calls for “no tax on tips.” Instead of detailing six new wars that must be started in small, far-away countries, the platform says, “We must prevent World War III.” And while previous platforms had expressed support for ending the betrayal of immigrants by bipartisan elites, this one says the top priority of the party of Lincoln, Reagan and Trump is “closing our borders and stopping immigrants from coming in.”
Woven into every page of this agenda are the values that have animated the fight against Donald Trump’s one-party dictatorship — a platform to end mass immigration, to end corporations’ stranglehold on the economy, to end wars that have spilled so much American blood and treasure.
This is an innovative platform that embraces the pioneering spirit of the economic frontier while avoiding the Silicon Valley temptation to ignore the national interest. With an economy transformed by this platform, we will build things in America and in space, do business with a strong dollar and legitimate Bitcoin, and play a leading role in artificial intelligence while thwarting the left’s infiltration of this vital industry.
This is a policy that takes the concerns of young people seriously and promises to fight the impossibility of economic prosperity in the modern economy. Trump’s policies advocate for affordable education, housing, health care, energy, and an end to the inflation that is suffocating American prosperity.
These big ideas are clearly communicated to the Republican base, not to elites who will enrich themselves at their expense. There is no political advantage to complicating our goals. Republican elected officials, conservative think tanks, and local activists should follow the lead of this platform to advance our agenda.
This policy energizes President Trump, and for those who love his instincts but feel betrayed by the Republican base he has surrounded himself with, it’s cause for optimism. We have a candidate who is more ready to fight than ever before, an America First platform, and a campaign staffed with the best talent to win the November election.
