The Republican platform was largely a win for social conservatives, with planks pushing back against abortion and gay marriage. | Getty Social conservatives win on GOP platform

The GOP adopted a platform Monday that takes a hard line on issues like abortion and gay rights, a sign that Donald Trump has ceded the party’s social agenda to evangelical Christians despite his own ambivalence on those matters.



Republicans’ 2016 platform calls out pornography as a national problem “destroying millions of lives,” and declines to even allude to gay or LGBT rights — instead demanding that “traditional marriage” be defended from an activist judiciary. Abortion, on the other hand, gets some three dozen mentions, with the platform accusing Democrats of “almost limitless support” of the practice and President Barack Obama’s healthcare law of promoting “the notion of abortion as healthcare.”

Trump himself hasn’t campaigned much on those kinds of issues, after calling himself “very pro-choice” in the late 1990s and getting praise from the Log Cabin Republicans as perhaps the most pro-gay GOP candidate to ever seek the White House. He now calls himself “pro-life with exceptions” and has slammed the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage, but his generally hands-off approach has ensured that the party’s socially conservative faction was able to control the message.


Some of those advocates now say that the 2016 GOP platform is the most conservative one yet. Marjorie Dannenfelser of Susan B. Anthony List noted that the platform now calls for defunding Planned Parenthood and codifying the Hyde Amendment, which bars the use of certain federal funds for abortion, as part of what the group called the “strongest pro-life platform in the Republican Party’s history.”

“The Republican platform has always been strong when it comes to protecting unborn children, their mothers and the conscience rights of pro-life Americans,” Dannenfelser said in a statement. "The platform ratified today takes that stand from good to great."

It can be easy to read too much into an official platform, which voters largely ignore even though an outline of a party’s stances can tie candidates to positions they don’t want. That’s doubly true when it comes to Trump, who has shown much flexibility even when it comes to standing by many of his own past positions — let alone those of a GOP platform committee.



Still, committee members had no qualms in hailing what they had achieved in pushing so many of the party’s official stances to the right. “It's official! We just adopted the most conservative platform,” tweeted LaDonna Ryggs, a South Carolina delegate who had previously worked for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential campaign.

Outside of social issues, the platform contains more than a few unorthodox nods to Trump’s populist politics and his more isolationist foreign policy. Those planks include a measure calling for the return to Glass-Steagall, a Depression-era law that blocked traditional banks from making risky investments — which the GOP-led Congress repealed with the support of President Bill Clinton — and provisions that call into question the GOP’s traditional staunch support of free trade.



The backing of Glass-Steagall puts the Republicans on the same page as the left wing of the Democratic Party, where figures like Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have also pushed to revive the law. Paul Manafort, a top adviser to Trump, told reporters in Cleveland that the platform plank would allow Trump to cast Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, as too cozy with Wall Street.

But the push to reinstate Glass-Steagall also highlighted the divisions that have erupted between Trump and the GOP’s traditional business allies, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, despite the platform’s agreement with the business lobby in calling to repeal the Dodd-Frank overhaul of financial regulations. Tony Fratto, who served in George W. Bush’s administration and has been a vocal Trump critic, called reviving Glass-Steagall “dumb politics and dumb economics,” and trashed the idea that the law could have prevented the 2008 fiscal crisis.

“There is a lot in this platform to ignore,” said Fratto, now of Hamilton Place Strategies.

The platform also softens the GOP’s support for Ukraine in its showdown with Russia and President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump has frequently praised. The Washington Post described that provision as a concerted effort by the presumptive GOP nominee’s camp to disavow the party’s foreign policy establishment.

And that’s without even getting into the platform’s handling of immigration — ratifying Trump’s proposal for a physical wall on the Mexican border, just three years after party elders were pushing for comprehensive immigration reform. Still elsewhere, the platform brought back long-term GOP fiscal priorities, including some that Trump has supported (like lowering taxes) and others that he has opposed (overhauling health care entitlement programs).

The platform also calls for turning the Environmental Protection Agency into “an independent bipartisan commission” while shifting the “responsibility for environmental regulation” to the states — a far more drastic attack on the agency than Republicans had advocated four years ago. And the Republican Party now officially says that state and local governments should decide minimum wage policy.



But it was the GOP’s focus on social issues that garnered the most attention, especially after a group of platform committee members threatened last week to try to strip language they feared could hurt the Republicans’ effort to reach out to gay voters.

The platform says parents should have the right to “determine the proper medical treatment and therapy for their minor children,” after the committee debated controversial conversion therapy techniques aimed at gay people. It calls the Bible an “indispensable” tool for education, and calls on states to offer its study as “a literature curriculum as an elective in America’s high schools.”

And the platform accuses the White House and Washington bureaucrats of pushing “an ideology alien to America’s history and traditions,” just weeks after states sued the Obama administration over recent guidance on transgender rights and after the furor over North Carolina’s law on public bathrooms.

“Their edict to the states concerning restrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities is at once illegal, dangerous and ignores privacy issues,” the platform says.

Victoria Guida contributed to this report.