Because of the sensory overload of sensational news stories surrounding this year’s electoral cycle — the lawfare, the assassination attempts, the defenestration of Candidate Biden, the cynical Harris boosterism in the legacy news media — scant attention is being paid to the details of the two candidates’ platforms. In the case of Kamala Harris, our ignorance is excusable because, until very recently, her campaign website listed no platform or policy positions. (The latter has changed lately, with every Harris policy mendaciously compared with “Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda,” despite the fact that the agenda was not put out by either the GOP or the Trump campaign.)

But Trump, the bane of Haitian immigrants and pettifogging prosecutors, is nothing if not an open book. His well-conceived campaign website not only incorporates the totality of the GOP platform (nicknamed “Agenda 47”), but also lays out Trump’s “20 Core Promises to Make America Great Again!” for those lacking the fortitude to read the platform in its lavish entirety. Forthwith, then, is a lurid-headline-free overview of what Candidate Donald Trump, courtroom commando and grizzled veteran of the Battle of Wounded Ear, actually proposes to do should he be elected to a second term as president.

First, a look at some of the “20 core promises.” To no one’s surprise, “seal the border and stop the migrant invasion,” and “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history,” are first and second on the list. Trump’s 2016 promise to build a wall and get Mexico to pay for it was probably the issue that propelled him to his first presidential term, and the illegal immigration issue has only gained in prominence — thanks to the calculated bungling of Biden, Harris, et al. — since then. Given the immense societal, legal, financial, and political damage that the Biden wave of 10-20 million illegal immigrants has occasioned, Trump rightly continues to prioritize this issue. Indeed, number 10 on the list contemplates stopping the migrant crime epidemic and “demolishing” the foreign drug cartels. It is difficult to imagine how America can continue to withstand such an unchecked and even invited onslaught of crime and illegal immigration for much longer without suffering irreversible damage to the body politic. But then again, for the inhabitants of America-hating Radical Left-istan, that’s precisely the point.

Out of control: Illegal immigrants wait to be processed near Yuma, Arizona, in 2022. At least 10 million have been ushered into the United States during the Biden-Harris administration. (AP Images)

Number three on Trump’s list is “end inflation, and make America affordable again.” While this is a laudable goal, inflation will remain a fact of life so long as our unconstitutional system of fiat currency, anchored by the Federal Reserve with its illicit writ of absolute monetary authority, is allowed to continue. Only by restoring the gold and silver standard required by our Constitution, and by enacting some long-overdue banking reforms into the bargain, will inflation ever truly be tamed. We are skeptical, however, that Candidate Trump truly understands this, since he, like all of America’s wealthy, has been a direct beneficiary of the inflationary monetary system, favoring as it does the elite few with assets parked near the money spigots in money-center banks and hedge funds, while disadvantaging the rest of us.

Promises four and five, to “make America the dominant energy producer in the world, by far!” and “stop outsourcing, and turn the United States into a manufacturing superpower,” respectively, are both commendable and long past due. During his first term in office, Trump succeeded in transforming America into an energy-independent nation for the first time in decades — a transformation that was promptly undone by Biden and his League of Extraordinary Incompetents. Less than four years after the first Trump energy transformation, America is once again forced to go hat in hand to the likes of Venezuela and Iran to ensure the global oil spigots upon which we once more depend remain open. 

And for all the cant about cracking down on China, the Chinese continue to make most of our stuff, and to convert the profits into gunboats, aircraft, missiles, and nukes which will one day be deployed against us. Meanwhile, Chinese-made fentanyl is still a thing, in case anyone was wondering, made possible by China, Inc., which has been putting American manufacturers out of business for decades.

Trump also wants “large tax cuts for workers, and no tax on tips!” — number six. As with so many GOP bromides, the pledge to cut taxes always rings hollow in the absence of any robust commitment to cut funding for the illegitimate Leviathan state that current levels of taxation sustain. Taxes (which include inflation, by the way) are just the price we pay for government, and until tax cuts are accompanied by meaningful proposals and actions to cut government, these will remain sops to the masses with little long-term effect. And (spoiler alert!) Trump’s “20 core promises” contemplate no such sweeping spending cuts.

Number seven on the list goes to the heart of the matter, and is the real reason Trump is so viscerally detested by America’s illegitimate ruling elites: “Defend our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and our fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms.” Make it so, Orange Man.

Number eight proposes to prevent World War III, restore peace in Europe and the Middle East, and build an Iron Dome-style missile defense shield for America. This is also commendable and absolutely within the legitimate constitutional purview of the president as America’s diplomat-in-chief and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. This recommendation, alongside number 12, which proposes to rebuild America’s military forces, would return us to a posture of peace through strength — a posture that makes eminent sense as long as “strength” is held to be primarily defensive, and does not require the continued forward deployment of U.S. troops to enforce globalist peacekeeping and balance-of-power mandates.

Trump understandably wants to end the weaponization of government against the American people, though how he proposes to do so is left unsaid in item nine. 

Some of the items on the second half of the list reflect more bully-pulpit wishful thinking than legitimate executive duties. Items such as number 11 (“rebuild our cities, including Washington, DC, making them safe, clean, and beautiful again”), number 17 (“keep men out of women’s sports”), and number 18 (“deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again”), laudable though they are in spirit, all smack of rhetorical overreach. It is not in the constitutional purview of the presidency to be involved in such things, and even if it were, the Democrat-run urban wastelands masquerading as “alabaster cities” are a long-standing national reproach that will only be solved when local and state governments — and their constituencies — decide to repudiate radical-left policymaking.

Item 13, “keep the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency,” is problematic on several counts. First, the United States does not have the ultimate say over whether other countries or trading blocs will continue to favor the U.S. dollar. Second, the entire reason for having a “world reserve currency” in the first place is that the entire world has abandoned gold and silver currency standards. There was no such thing as a “world reserve currency” when America, and the rest of the world, used gold and silver as reserves. Under the fiat-currency status quo, of course, the maintenance of dollar supremacy is advantageous to us, at least in the short run, while forcing the rest of the world into monetary vassalage utterly dependent on the inflationary whims of the Fed’s and the U.S. Treasury’s money mandarins. A better plank would be something like, “maintain the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, while working to restore a full gold and silver-backed monetary system that would make any such reserve currency obsolete.”

Another item with deceptive appeal is number 14, “Fight for and protect Social Security and Medicare with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age.” Reassuring as this might sound for those of us nearing retirement age and eventual decrepitude, the hard fact remains that not only are Social Security and Medicare grotesquely unconstitutional, they are careering inexorably toward insolvency. The U.S. Constitution grants no writ of authority to any branch of the federal government to compel Americans to save for retirement, nor to provide medical benefits for senior citizens. Absent the heavy and forcible exactions of FICA taxation, Americans and their employers would have a lot more money to spend, save, or invest as they see fit — and would be incentivized to be more frugal and more provident in taking personal responsibility for their golden years. Accordingly, both Social Security and Medicare should be judiciously phased out, not kept in place indefinitely.

Items 15 and 16, “Cancel the electric vehicle mandate and cut costly and burdensome regulations” and “Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children,” respectively, represent current pet peeves of MAGA and the GOP. Both of them would be worthwhile, although item 16 is far too restrictive. In point of fact, all federal funding for schools, for whatever reason, is unconstitutional. While cutting off federal funding for schools involved in the most egregious forms of radical-left indoctrination is a praiseworthy objective, it is only a very small first step in the long-overdue complete withdrawal of the federal government from the education sector.

Number 19 promises to “Secure our elections, including same day voting, voter identification, paper ballots, and proof of citizenship.” Whether such federally imposed standards on elections (for which the Constitutions assigns the states primary, though not exclusive, authority) ultimately pass constitutional muster has yet to be completely worked out. No rational observer can deny the importance of election integrity in a government purporting to belong to the people. Yet the major battles over electoral integrity today — as with so many contests upon which the fate of the Republic may hinge — are being fought more effectively at the state level. The best way to ensure no repeat of the 2020 electoral heist (which nearly everyone at the federal level pooh-poohs in any event) is to litigate these concerns at the state and local level.

This, then, is a distillate of what Trump intends, no doubt sincerely, should he be reelected president. But the devil, as they say, is often in the details, so to the details we now turn. The full 2024 GOP platform is fittingly dedicated to the “forgotten men and women of America,” borrowing on William Graham Sumner’s timeless phraseology. This is followed by a Thomas Paine-esque preamble entitled “America First: A return to common sense.” In the preamble, we are asked to consider how the abandonment of commonsense principles of foreign, domestic, and economic policy by the Biden administration have pushed this country to the breaking point after four years of much-needed Trump reforms:

In 2016, President Donald J. Trump was elected as an unapologetic Champion of the American People. He reignited the American Spirit and called on us to renew our National Pride. His Policies spurred Historic Economic Growth, Job Creation, and a Resurgence of American Manufacturing. President Trump and the Republican Party led America out of the pessimism induced by decades of failed leadership, showing us that the American People want Greatness for our Country again. Yet after nearly four years of the Biden administration, America is now rocked by Raging Inflation, Open Borders, Rampant Crime, Attacks on our Children, and Global Conflict, Chaos, and Instability.

The evident antidote, besides making capital letters great again, would give Superman pause for thought: 

We will restore our Nation of, by, and for the People. We will Make America Great Again. We will be a Nation based on Truth, Justice, and Common Sense.

But how, concretely, is this to be accomplished? The platform turns first to inflation, noting correctly that “inflation is a crushing tax on American families. History shows that Inflation will not magically disappear while policies remain the same.” So far so good, but what would Trump do about it? Halt the Fed’s open-market operations? Require the Fed to sell off its vast portfolio of government debt? Or even, wonder of wonders, lay out a program to phase out the Fed altogether and restore sound money? Well, no, the plan proposes none of these things (though they are mentioned, interestingly, in the much-maligned Agenda 2025, which Trump seems so eager to disavow). Instead, the platform proposes utterly irrelevant measures, such as unleashing American energy, cutting burdensome and costly regulations, and stopping illegal immigration, as though these have anything whatsoever to do with inflation — a purely monetary phenomenon, and a deliberately contrived one at that.

Will drill: Trump has promised to re-open petroleum exploration, extraction, and pipelines. (imaginima/Getty Images Plus)

In contrast with the vacuous treatment of inflation, the platform’s proposals on immigration are well thought out and will likely achieve the intended result, if allowed to take effect. Trump proposes to complete the border wall and bring in state-of-the-art surveillance technology, and also to impose a naval blockade on fentanyl traffickers. In addition to the widely touted “Great Deportation,” Trump intends to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to “remove all known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members from the United States, ending the scourge of Illegal Alien gang violence once and for all,” to reinstate the travel ban, and even — in a throwback to a bygone and more enlightened era — to “use existing Federal Law to keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists out of America.” 

Trump’s plan is heavy on proposals to improve the economy, or, in typical MAGA hyperbole, to “build the greatest economy in history.” These include cutting regulations, keeping Trump’s tax cuts in place, doing away with taxes on tips, pushing for reliable and low-cost energy, and championing innovation, including in cryptocurrencies and in AI development. Trump’s recent visit to New York City’s only Bitcoin bar underscored his interest in such technology. And his platform explicitly disavows central bank digital currencies. In a new wrinkle, the platform also pledges to industrialize outer space:

Under Republican Leadership, the United States will create a robust Manufacturing Industry in Near Earth Orbit, send American Astronauts back to the Moon, and onward to Mars, and enhance partnerships with the rapidly expanding Commercial Space sector to revolutionize our ability to access, live in, and develop assets in Space.

As with the problem of inflation, the matter of overall economic growth — even if extended to outer space — is crucially dependent on less and not more federal government interference in the workings of the free market, and that includes in the money and financial markets. America has tried for generations to combine a free-market manufacturing and trade sector with a Marxist monetary and fiscal sector (recall that both a central bank with a monetary monopoly, such as the Federal Reserve system, and a heavy, graduated income tax — the bases for our financial and fiscal systems, respectively — are key planks from Marx’s Communist Manifesto). The result of this unequal yoking together of capitalism and Marxism has been the slow death of American prosperity and innovation, with manufacturing, savings, and tech slowly having the life squeezed out of them by the constricting coils of communist controls. The American economy bears far more resemblance now to a Marxist planned economy than to the free-market capitalism that once propelled it to greatness. Trump appears to recognize this in principle, but in refusing to address the monetary and fiscal roots of the problem, his prescriptions will prove at best temporary palliatives that will be reversed the moment the radical Left regains power.

Chapter Four of his platform (“Bring Back the American Dream and Make It Affordable Again”) only serves to italicize Trump’s unfortunate ambivalence on the proper role of government. Under the heading of “Affordable Healthcare,” the platform promises:

Republicans will increase Transparency, promote Choice and Competition, and expand access to new Affordable Healthcare and prescription drug options. We will protect Medicare, and ensure Seniors receive the care they need without being burdened by excessive costs.

In other words: Our failed healthcare system, a casualty of decades of government interference dating to President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, needs yet more government tinkering and fine tuning, rather than privatization. This, amid encouraging promises to slash inflation and government regulation, is a discordant note in an otherwise reassuring symphony of free-market psalms.

Although so-called protectionism is often criticized by free-market purists, robust tariffs and other restraints on international trade have long been one of Trump’s priorities. For all of our own pro-free-market predilections, we find the Trumpian case for commonsense restraints on international trade compelling. For one thing, unconditional free trade with hostile powers bent on our own destruction — Communist China is exhibit A, of course — is irrational through and through. This is a seemingly self-evident fact that Trump was the first president to acknowledge, with his usual dogged indifference to stale-dated received wisdom about free trade bringing about the demise of communist despots. That clearly hasn’t happened; instead, America’s apparent indifference to China’s military buildup and constant efforts to subvert and otherwise diminish the United States has led to the appearance of a new and potentially deadly anti-superpower, one whose malign intentions only became evident to naïve American leadership as a result of the Covid pandemic. 

With the pandemic and its devastating political and economic fallout one of the most tragic and egregious I-told-you-so’s in modern history, Trump’s China and trade policies quickly became the new normal. Now Trump intends to tighten the noose further on China, with his new platform vowing to “revoke China’s Most Favored Nation status, phase out imports of essential goods, and stop China from buying American Real Estate and Industries.” And lest any of this seems a bridge too far for free-trade absolutists, bear in mind that Americans (and other foreigners) are barred from buying Chinese real estate, securities, and industries, or from owning any assets in China. Likewise, American social media, news, and virtually all other online concerns are completely blocked from operating in China — even as the Chinese scream self-righteously about freedom of speech every time there is a threat to correspondingly ban Chinese social media from access to lucrative American markets. The asymmetry in trade and profit-making opportunities between China and the United States is enormous, and it is well past time that our political leadership did something about it.

Moreover, the Trump/GOP platform supports restoring manufacturing and critical supply chains to American shores. The urgency of this was underscored not only by our ludicrous dependence on Chinese manufacturers for medical supplies during the pandemic, but also by our increasing vulnerability to an array of determined and well-armed new enemies, from China and North Korea to a recrudescent Russian power, rising up to fill the adversarial vacuum left by the former Soviet Union.

Vulnerabilities unmasked: During the Covid pandemic, the United States was at the mercy of Chinese manufacturers of masks and other medical supplies. Trump promises to return manufacturing, including of medical supplies, to the United States. (AP Images)

Chapter Six, dedicated to the protection of seniors, assures us that Trump will do everything he can to protect — and perpetuate — both Social Security and Medicare. Rightly decrying politicians who use Social Security funds for their “pet projects” and who want to make tens of millions of illegals eligible for Medicare benefits, the platform fails to address the core problem, which is: Given the perverse incentives to overspend and under-deliver inherent in these and any other unconstitutional social-welfare programs, what commonsense measures should be taken to wind down Social Security and Medicare over a reasonable interval, and restore the saner workings of the free marketplace both to medical care and to long-term investment and savings?

A similar problem is posed by federal interference in education. The Department of Education and federal subsidies of education at every level have come to be generally accepted, yet both are unconstitutional and corrosive to actual education in every detail. It is not “the radical Left” taking over our educational system that has brought about this state of affairs; it is the fact that centralized, government-sponsored education unavoidably incentivizes such in half-baked indoctrination campaigns that has led us to such a pass. The Trump campaign appears to understand this, since the final item in Chapter Seven, which deals with the education crisis, proposes to return education to the states and to close the Department of Education. To be sure, we’ve heard promises like this from previous Republican administrations, but perhaps this time something will come of it.

The remaining three chapters in the platform deal mostly in generalities promising to “bring common sense to government,” “renew the pillars of American civilization,” deliver government “of, by, and for the people,” and “return to peace through strength.” Under these headings, we note a few vague but undeniably praiseworthy aims that stand in stark contrast to the avowed goals of the radical Left-driven Democratic agenda: overcome the crisis in liberal arts education, take care of our veterans, rebuild our cities and restore law and order, stop woke and weaponized government, defend religious liberty, end left-wing gender insanity, modernize the military, and defend America’s borders.

Needless to say, much of this ambitious program will likely go unrealized, given the inevitable ferocity with which the Democrats and their well-programmed mobs will rise up in violent opposition should Trump be reelected. Unlike the often-feckless Republican leadership, the Democrats will unite unwavering under the pretended banners of anti-fascism and wage partisan warfare, by both fair means and foul, to prevent any part of the Trump agenda from coming to fruition. They recognize, correctly, that the Trump platform is a declaration of war against all of their long-held conceits, and we anticipate they will go to any lengths — as the lawfare and assassination attempts richly attest — to hold on to their ill-gotten political gains. And while the Trump program has its flaws, it is a sincere attempt to restore some semblance of sanity and limited government to American politics at this critical juncture. That, in balance, is a good thing.