Mostly absent on GOP convention stage: Abortion, gun rights and Reagan
MILWAUKEE — Eric Trump made somewhat dismissive comments this week about the Republican Party watering down its platform on abortion and same-sex marriage.
“This country has real holes in the roof, and you’ve got to fix those holes, and you’ve got to stop worrying about the little spot on the wall in the basement,” former president Donald Trump’s middle son told NBC News.
Imagine a big-name Republican likening abortion to a “spot on the wall” even four years ago. The backlash would have been swift. They might well have been excommunicated from the party.
But abortion has indeed been little more than a spot on the wall at the 2024 Republican National Convention — or at least the version of it being conveyed to the American public. Despite years of rhetoric likening abortion to mass murder, the party hasn’t seen fit to say much of anything about it.
And it’s got company in other fixtures of the party’s rhetoric.
Through three nights at the GOP convention, the word “abortion” didn’t appear to have been uttered once onstage. That’s compared with 18 times in a single night of the 2020 convention, according to a transcript.
While Trump has hailed the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade and allowing states to decide the issue — an outcome he often falsely claims virtually “everyone” desired — speakers aren’t even promoting that talking point. Roe hasn’t come up.
There have been passing references to the issue. But that comes with a strong emphasis on “passing.”
A Catholic archbishop opened Monday’s events with a prayer citing “the dignity of every life from conception to natural death.” But since then, nothing abortion-related has approached a real point of emphasis. Trump adviser Peter Navarro cited supposed government persecution of “pro-life activists,” while fellow Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway briefly cited “protecting life” in a list of priorities, not even pausing before mentioning the next one.
Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP’s new vice-presidential nominee, are among the most antiabortion members of that chamber. Rubio has said he supports no abortion exceptions, while Vance has said he wants to make abortion illegal nationally, with some exceptions. But neither mentioned the issue.
(Rubio did open by mentioning that the “life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind is in the hands of God,” but it was more a reference to the assassination attempt on Trump this past weekend.)
Another, possibly even more surprising, absence has been any real emphasis or mention of gun rights, in the days since that assassination attempt.
Vance in his speech earned roars from the crowd for mentioning how, upon his grandmother’s death two decades ago, “we found 19 loaded handguns” among her possessions. But despite that crowd-pleaser of a line, almost no speakers have approvingly mentioned guns or even merely protecting the Second Amendment.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) briefly claimed Tuesday night that Democrats want to “eliminate Second Amendment rights” — again, as part of a laundry list of issues — but that’s about it.
When guns have come up, it has more often been in the context of crime, such as Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) mentioning how the “devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle” to shoot at Trump.
A final conspicuous absence has been the name of the man who, before Trump at least, defined the Republican Party more than any other: Ronald Reagan.
Reagan got three mentions Monday, the convention’s first night, but only one identifying the party with Reagan. Scott said, “We are the Republican Party of Frederick Douglass and of Abraham Lincoln, of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.”
Reagan wasn’t mentioned again until Thursday night, when the convention played a brief video featuring his voice.
The video played up not Reagan’s muscular foreign policy or his iconic status in the party, but rather his famous question asking voters whether they were better off now than they were four years ago.