“The Republican Party has no new official platform for 2020. Instead, the Republican National Committee is pledging to “enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda” and “will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention.””
…
“”Trump ran in 2016 and swamped a sprawling Republican field of more conventional conservatives” and “in doing so, he didn’t merely win the nomination and embark on the road to the White House,” suggests Gerald F. Seib in a weekend Wall Street Journal essay.
“He turned Republicans away from four decades of Reagan-style, national-greatness conservatism to a new gospel of populism and nationalism.
In truth, this shift had been building for a while: Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, the Tea Party, an increasingly bitter immigration debate—all were early signs that a new door was opening. Mr. Trump simply charged through it. He understood better than those whom he vanquished in the primaries that the Republican Party has undergone profound socioeconomic changes; it has been washed over by currents of cultural alienation and a feeling that the old conservative economic prescriptions haven’t worked for its new working-class foot soldiers.
Now, as Republicans prepare to nominate Mr. Trump for re-election at their truncated convention this week, there is simply no way to put Trumpism back into the bottle. If the president wins this fall (and even more so if he loses), the question that Republicans in general and conservatives in particular face is simple and stark: How to adapt their gospel so that it fits in the age of Trump?
As it happens, a new and younger breed of conservatives has set out to do precisely that, often by stepping away from strict free-market philosophies.””