Advancing American Freedom (AAF), the nonprofit advocacy group founded by former vice president Mike Pence, is taking a swipe at the Republican National Committee’s new 2024 draft platform document, according to a July 9 memo first shared with National Review.
The group’s public criticism of the party document, adopted by the RNC’s 2024 platform committee on Monday and set to go to a full vote at the GOP convention next week in Milwaukee, represents the latest political break between Pence and his former boss eight years after they ran on the same ticket together in 2016.
Since dropping out of the 2024 GOP presidential primary, the former vice president has continued criticizing the presumptive GOP nominee, whom he believes has betrayed traditional Republican principles on abortion, foreign policy, and free trade — including in this year’s national party platform.
“The new RNC platform maintains and supports many of the accomplishments of the Trump-Pence Administration,” the AAF memo reads. “However, the document retreats on life and global leadership, while neglecting to flesh out the Republican Party’s positions on a number of issues, as opposed to previous iterations.”
Dividing its criticisms into the “good,” the “bad,” and the “ugly,” AAF’s memo first praises the RNC platform for pledging to make “the Trump-Pence Tax Cuts permanent, unleashing American energy, securing the border, ending overregulation,” and promoting a “Reaganesque peace through strength foreign policy approach to ‘end global chaos.’” The group also lauds the new platform for including language that pledges to keep men out of women’s sports, oppose gender transition care for minors, and support universal school choice, among other planks.
Yet the praises mostly end there. At just 16 pages, the 2024 platform is roughly a quarter of the 66-page 2016 platform, which was readopted in 2020. This year’s national party document is light on the details and is riddled with random capitalization in the spirit of Trump’s social-media posts and campaign rallies.
For Pence’s group, the omissions in this year’s draft platform speak volumes. For example, this year’s document makes no mention of Ukraine or Taiwan — which were referenced four and nine times in the previous iteration, respectively — and instead makes vague pledges to “[restore] Peace to Europe” and “champion Strong, Sovereign, and Independent Nations in the Indo-Pacific, thriving in Peace and Commerce with others.”
AAF also excoriates the 2024 draft platform for expressing support for “baseline Tariffs on Foreign-made goods” and making no mention of entitlement reform, instead pledging to protect Social Security “with no cuts” and with “no changes to the retirement age.”
And as expected, AAF criticizes the group for nixing the 2016 platform’s support for traditional marriage between “one man and one woman” and for watering down its pro-life language to reflect Trump’s belief that the issue should now be left to the states after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Unlike the 2016 version, which expressed support for a 20-week federal ban and a human-life amendment, this year’s version adopts a federalist approach to the issue while condemning late-term abortion and “supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).” In its memo, AAF accuses this year’s document of “rewarding abortion extremists for pushing radical ballot initiatives” and “only [condemning] ‘Late Term Abortion,’ meaning that Republicans apparently are as soft as most Democrats on the life issue.”
More than anything, this memo represents just how much the two men — who ran on the same party platform in 2016 — differ on matters of politics and policy these days. “The 2024 platform removed historic pro-life principles that have long been the foundation of the platform,” Pence said in a statement on Tuesday. “I urge delegates attending next week’s Republican Convention to restore language to our party’s platform recognizing the sanctity of human life and affirming that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed,” Pence said.