A Republican insider told RedState what it was like inside the room when the Republican National Convention’s Platform Committee executed the first major overhaul of its platform since 1980, with delegates loyal to President Donald J. Trump dominating the platform committee and producing a 16-page document consistent with Trump’s political agenda. 

The Republican National Convention opens in Milwaukee on July 14 with delegate check-ins and events sponsored by outside groups. The convention officially opens July 15 at 12:45 p.m. Central.

According to the insider, opposition to the platform was vocal but ineffective because it lacked the votes. 

One religious leader at the Platform Committee meeting stood up and said the Trump campaign was abandoning the pro-life movement, but it did not break the Trump campaign's momentum:

“When the question is called to vote for the platform, he got 18 votes out of, I think, 122 or something. Now, I think he said he would produce a minority report, but he doesn't have a minority report. He's beyond a minority. He doesn't qualify as a minority. He's under the number by 10 or more—I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Some pro-life groups lauded the platform's passage.

“The platform allows us to provide the winning message to 10 million voters, with four million visits at the door in key battleground states." - @MarjorieSBAhttps://t.co/1r7FkKUuv2

— SBA Pro-Life America (@sbaprolife) July 8, 2024

He said the success of the Trump platform rewrite is due to the co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita, a long-time Virginia political consultant who leads the campaign with his co-campaign manager Susie Wiles:

“LaCivita had worked with the delegations for weeks and weeks to make sure that new delegates came on, that they weren't the old school delegates who were generational members of the platform committee, the place was at least 60 percent new delegates."

The operative said LaCivita had a whip team of 30 staffers who had been working with committee delegates and were in the room Monday for the deliberations:

“All of them with marching orders that were never executed because they didn't have to. They didn't have to whip anybody because everybody, we knew we had to vote before lunch. It's outrageous.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) congratulated LaCivita, tweeting:

Thank you, @LaCivitaC, for your leadership as we finalized the @GOP 2024 Platform.

Republicans are united and ready for the @GOPconvention next week! pic.twitter.com/oKazG8sS86

— Marsha Blackburn (@VoteMarsha) July 8, 2024

For LaCivita, it was the culmination of all of the state conventions he and his team have worked on in the past:

“He is uniquely qualified because of his specialty. He's been dominating conventions around the country, especially in Virginia, for decades, so he has a team of guys that know how to run the Robert’s Rules, not just the gavel, but the shoe leather.”

Another way LaCivita’s team kept control of the room was in the seating and the microphone placement:

“All the people we knew were anti-Trump or anti-platform were surrounded by people by delegates who supported the president. The microphones were moved to the outside of the seating—if it wasn't clear to the delegates, it was very clear to anybody watching.”

Delegates opposed to the platform were seated in the center, and they had to walk out and all the way around to get to the microphones, which had an effect, he said. 

Trump: Project 2025 Is Not My Platform

Trump’s commitment to the platform being his platform was behind his July 5 disavowal of the 2025 Project, the presidential transition project begun by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, he said.

“The Democrats can talk about Project 2025 all they want,” he said. “The president has a link to a shorter document. I’m tired of hearing about Project 2025.”

The operative said Heritage has been putting up proposals for new administrations for years, but Trump and his team have been working on this platform reboot for months, which is an accessible and digestible document:

“It is ultimately readable, and the average American can go through it and understand what he's going to do: ‘Here's my agenda.’”

GOP Platform Needed a Rewrite After Years of Horsetrading

“The expectation going into it was that the campaign was going to try to make a break, was trying to do something significant because the platform had been virtually unchanged since 1980,” said the operative.

“We wanted to, A, reflect the priorities of the modern Republican Party, and B, to cut off the grift,” he said. “In order to do that, it required a steady hand.”

The operative said that over the years, the GOP platform went from a concise political document to a bloated parade of favors and horse trades.

“The president decided in late last year that he was going to write an America First platform. He was advised about everything that went down in 1980 when Reagan decided to do that.”

The break from Reagan’s chassis was not a knock against Reagan but a reflection of how the conservative agenda has evolved and how the platform has evolved:

“In 1980, Reagan [was] the presumptive nominee, but by no means the party favored him. It was not a very happy primary. They parachuted in and rewrote the entire platform. It became known as the Reagan platform—and we called it the Reagan platform for 44 years.”

The Trump campaign took some lessons from that and aimed for unity and effectiveness, according to the operative, and that's the real story:

“The real story is the unity behind the president and how effectively his campaign has handled the convention so far. 

“The platform was an expertly written document that the president decided was way too freaking long, principally because of the grift. They wrote it long first, long — it was thousands of tens of thousands of words — and then they distilled it down to whatever the final word count is.”

Now, the new platform has been pruned of the underbrush and overgrowth, he said:

“The reason why this thing became the size of ‘War and Peace’ is because there were very many lobbyists putting war and peace-related language in there. There was language congratulating the president of Egypt that came from the Egypt lobbyists. There was language about ethanol that came from the corn growers.”

Lobbyists had been paying delegates for years, he claims:

“The platform had become a grift where lobbyists from Washington would pay platform committee members to advocate for their amendments.

“It had been going on that way since the late 1980s and early 1990s. I remember in 1988, we were trying to figure out if a delegate had been given a car by a lobbyist because there's no oversight, and it's not illegal. They could do whatever they want, and at times, there are some years when the majority of the delegates were on payroll.”

2016 GOP Platform Was Dragged Into Russian Collusion Hoax

Special interests corrupted the platform and the delegates, culminating in the drama surrounding the 2016 platform, when a Trump campaign foreign policy advisor became the subject of investigations by a congressional committee and Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, he said.

“They tried to put J.D. Gordon in jail,” he said. “It was almost like that Ukraine plank was a setup.”

Gordon, a retired Navy commander and national security advisor to former Arkansas Gov. Michael Huckabee’s 2016 presidential campaign, said the Trump campaign sent him to that year’s Platform Committee deliberations with the instructions to shut down any plank that supported expanding the country’s military commitments overseas:

“The woman who offered it, she was 80 years old, and I think she had been to Ukraine on a boondoggle, and she fancied herself an advocate of Ukraine, so she offered the amendment for lethal aid. Gordon told her the campaign did not want the word ‘lethal’ in the platform, but we could say ‘appropriate aid.' She marched over to Josh Rogan of The Washington Post and told him the Trump people are working for Putin — that was the very first Russiagate story.”

Interestingly, 18 months later, Rogan wrote that Trump approved lethal aid for Ukraine.

The 2020 Republican Party Platform Committee simply carried over virtually the same document approved in 2016.

Republican delegates at the convention vote on the Platform Committee’s draft July 15.