The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report with Ed Martin.
Welcome, Welcome, welcome. It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Great to be together. Thank you for tuning in. Hey, visit Proamericareport.com sign up there and that’s on Substack. You’ll see it kicks through and you can subscribe. You may be a paid subscriber, which is nice, but you can subscribe for no cost and we send out regular emails you may know them. It’s the WYNK, WYNK what you need to know. Updates a few facts, a few details, and what you need to know. So go to proamericareport.com proamericareport.com also over on X at @EagleEdMartin. Alright.
Hey, so I’m in Milwaukee. I’m in Milwaukee and have been for a few days. Very interesting to be here in the run up to the Republican National Convention, which begins about oh, I guess it’s Sunday night. Technically. Maybe they bring it in, or maybe it’s on Monday. I’m sorry to admit that I don’t even know for sure, but. It will be. It will be the 14th or the 15th it will start in July, of July and ultimately on Thursday of that week, the nomination of the president will happen.
But one thing that will happen there is that the National committee will take up a platform and the platform has been around since the Republican Party started. The Republican Party of 1856 which had Abraham Lincoln as the presidential candidate, had a platform very short platform, a number of resolutions. It used to be that the committee was called the Committee on resolutions that did this. Now they called the platform committee, I think technically it is still that name. So the 1856 platform of the Republican Party, if you go to read it, it has Be it resolved, Be it resolved, Be it resolved, a bunch of them. The interesting historical detail is 1856. The man who was heavily involved in editing and writing and drafting that document was Abraham Lincoln, who of course became the president, and he was heavily involved in every aspect of it. And I know this because when I was working a few days ago on the platform Committee on on the platform, one of the speakers said not since 1856 has a presidential candidate been as active in creating and editing and paying attention to the platform as is happening now, and I saw that first hand over the weekend before the platform committee met. I was inside the sort of circle because we were working on the platform and we were putting together the platform, the details of how we got to that point and and I’ll talk more about that in a minute.
But Donald Trump, Donald J Trump, former President Trump was receiving the drafts and editing them and saying what about this? What about that? Have you thought about this even down to making a comment about punctuation and how it was structured. It was very edifying because the process to get to the platform committee, which was 112 members of the Republican Party, one woman and one man from all 56 States and territories. The process to get to that meeting included 10s of thousands of interactions with Republicans: myself, Russ Vought, Ambassador Randy Evans, staff from the RNC, just over and over and over again we heard from people who said, hey, what about this? What about that? Have you thought about this issue? Can you make it this way? Can you do that? Think about this topic, some disagreements where people say I really want to see X and and the Republican Party right now is more about Y and two, two observations.
One, in those 10s of thousands of interactions. And we kept the sort of running a database I have. I can’t say it was totally ever totally up to kind of 100%. We were constantly adding to it and then realizing we had skipped a couple of things and there was a couple meetings that were big and we’re trying to figure out how to count and and to maintain the the interest in certain issues when we got dozens of emails about it. Anyway it was, it was the process was extraordinary.
But two things came to mind in this.
Number one, the reality of the Republican Party, it’s a great big party. When people say ohh, you know, there’s the conservatives, now, it is a conservative party, but there’s a lot of people that call themselves Republican and believe in the Republican Party and the platform. But they may differ on one or two issues.
And I was reminded of this because there’s a audio recording. Excuse me. A recording versus audio. Phyllis Schlafly did a daily commentary for decades, ran on over 460 stations across the country daily, 3 minute radio commentary. If you go to phyllisschlafly.com, you can listen to them. And in 2016, she had recorded her September commentaries. Early in August, and unfortunately, she passed away in the middle. Excuse me early and she had recorded her September commentaries in August and they were running in September and she died in September, September of 2016 and her first days of of September. And they kept running because she had recorded them a few weeks before.
So in September, about two weeks after she had passed away, you could hear you could hear her voice on nearly 500 radio stations across the country in the three minute radio commentary, the Phyllis Schlafly Report it’s called, which I still continue to do today. Like I’m recording commentaries later this week, which will run. This is this is July. They’ll run in August. It’s this interesting process to sort of predict what will be important.
But in September of 2016, her commentary that ran a few weeks after she died was about the platform. And in 2016 she was very proud of the platform that Donald Trump and she had built in Cleveland and is a long platform, 60 something, pages 65, 66 pages. But it had been basically accumulated since Ronald Reagan, and it had accumulated all this great stuff. Now some stuff was a bit outdated, especially by today, 2024. But anyway, Phyllis recorded this commentary and she said it’s a great platform. Some are saying it’s the best platform we’ve ever had. And she said.
And it doesn’t have everything. It doesn’t have everything. There’s some things that are missing. I’m not going to dwell on that, but it does have the things that matter. It does have the right things. It’s the right, and it’s a document that can convey what the Republican Party’s about, how it will govern and and be a part of holding the the people who run as Republicans accountable. And, so she didn’t say it was perfect.
Which brings me down to the 2024 platform, which passed out of the platform committee and is not 66 or 67 pages but is 16 pages. It is not 34,000 words, it’s about 5,000 words. And this was the hope and interest. Ohh, excuse me, my second point.
My first point was the variety of people who are interested.
My second point was Donald Trump’s leadership on this. We never had a president who had a successful term as successful as he did. Obviously we’ve never had him running for president or in in our time, you know. Grover Cleveland notwithstanding, I don’t know what it was like to go back then, but Donald Trump has obvious clear policy successes in office that he can point to and so when you’re developing a platform and you’re, you’re saying this is what the Republican Party stands for, you, you have a standard bearer and that’s going to put an imprint on it. And that was a lot of the reason why when we went to 2024, the imprint’s got to be the candidate and the party where it stands now, it’s nominated him three times. And what his positions are. And that’s that, that sort of was the driving force of of the relationship between the platform committee, the platform, leadership staff and others and the and the Trump campaign.
And so when you got this thing down to 16 pages, first of all, a lot of words had to disappear.
But some things had to change. Roe V Wade is gone. So you can’t say we’ll oppose Roe V. Wade and appoint justices who will overturn Roe V Wade. That doesn’t. That doesn’t make sense. So some things are are and I think on on things like tariffs on things like on trade on some of the the the commentary on on war and encouraging military how to say intervention not that’s the wrong word. But military activism, those all those, all that needed to change after the Trump successes.
So it was a new document. It was a new day. It’s a a turning of the page.
And so the platform that was developed and it again it had input from 10s of thousands of people, groups, it did not have the usual influence of special interest lobbyists, men and women, that get paid by businesses or by industries to go in and say, Oh yeah, you know, insert a paragraph that helps us promote chip makers or insert a paragraph that says we need more submarines. We may need those things, but that wasn’t the purpose of a of a of smaller, leaner, more of a sales document that describes what the principles are and the policies are and, as importantly, how the politics fits the moment.
And so if you look at this and I encourage you to do it, look at the RNC 2020 platform. Now this is just what the committee sent out to the to the Floor of the RNC, the Republican National Convention next week. They’ll they’ll take this up. When you look at it, you’ll see an extraordinary document. It’s an extraordinary document. Is it perfect, oh, no. Phyllis said the 2016 wasn’t perfect,
But it’s got protections for pro-life. Don’t let anybody tell you there’s not protections for pro-life. There’s not as many words describing it, but there’s protection under the Constitution. That life is protected and and although there is a call to the states to take up the arguments, because the states can readily pass laws now that Roe V Wade is limited. The invocation of the 14th amendment of the Constitution and the opposition to to a late term abortion, however you define that, by the way I call a late term abortion any, any abortion, that is done after the baby is conceived myself, in part because the the term late term abortion and some of the distinction of trimesters and all that was Roe V Wade construct, it was made-up. It was a made-up way to make us think past the sale, that there’s something that’s not a baby, not a baby, not a baby. You get to the third trimester now. It’s a baby. That’s nonsense. Anyway, the the pro-life stuff is great. It’s strong.
On the issues of parental rights on The issues of. Trade on the issues of America first on the issues of jobs. It is an extraordinary document. Again. Is it perfect? No. But it’s an extraordinary document at an extraordinary moment and I’ll finish with this to say.
The open, it opens with a preamble and 20 promises that Donald Trump worked on himself. And if you want to go to your neighbors and your friends and say this is what this group is about, this is what the guy wants to do. Don’t believe the lying press. This is what it’s about. Take that. Take that. 20 promises and the preamble. And I think you can have people take a look in a way they haven’t before. So I’m proud to have been a part of it. Congratulations to the platform committee and onward we go.
We gotta take a break, it’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Back in a moment.
