The Democratic Party released its official platform on Sunday night, to be voted on at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois — and it calls for reelecting President Joe Biden, who was still the candidate at the time the document was finalized in mid-July.
“President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Democrats are running to finish the job,” it says.
Read the full, 91-page document here.
The platform begins with a “land acknowledgment,” declaring that the convention is being held on lands once belonging to Native Americans. This is a left-wing practice that, the Wall Street Journal noted last weekend, is central to the ideology behind campus anti-Israel protests — the claim that the United States and Israel are guilty of “settler colonialism.” This also “means rejecting the understanding of American history that has been mainstream since the mid-20th century—that it is a story of slow progress toward fulfilling the nation’s founding promise of freedom for all,” the Journal notes.
The Democratic platform claims Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have achieved enormous progress for Americans, and that Donald Trump “is rigging our economy for his Mar-a-Lago friends and billionaire donors, who like him, are only in it for themselves.”
It omits some of Harris’s recent economic proposals, such as a taxpayer-funded $25,000 down payment for first-time home buyers and a $6,000-per-child tax credit. It does, however, include rhetoric claiming, without evidence, that companies are guilty of “price gouging,” a claim central to Harris’s demand for socialist-style price caps to fight inflation.
The platform makes a number of misleading claims, including the claim that the U.S. is “finally rebuilding … broadband” as part of the administration’s investment in infrastructure. Despite a $42.5 billion fund for expanding broadband under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, which Harris was meant to supervise, not one new connection has been built.
Despite focusing on President Biden, the platform omits some of his recent plans to “reform” the Supreme Court by imposing term limits, which Democrats would hope to use to oust conservative justices and replace them with liberals.
Among other highlights, the platform defends surgery and drug treatments for “transgender youth,” without specifying the age at which children should be provided such surgeries. “Democrats will vigorously oppose state and federal bans on gender-affirming health care,” it says. It does not mention the issue of transgender sports, and the question of biological males participating in women’s sporting activities.
The platform repeats the “very fine people” hoax — the false claim that Trump praised neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017, when in fact he said they should be “totally” condemned.
On migration and the border, the platform claims: “President Biden has led with the conviction that we must secure our border and fix a broken immigration system decades in the making.” The platform blames Republicans in Congress for rejecting Biden’s proposed immigration legislation, which would legalize current migrant flows at massive levels.
On foreign policy, the platform pledges to continue opposing Russia’s war in Ukraine. It does not mention a goal for U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine, or the prospect of peace talks. The platform calls for a Palestinian state and offers a counterfactual history of the Middle East — such as claiming credit for deterring the Houthis, after Biden removed them from a list of terrorist organizations on which Trump had placed them, encouraging their aggression.
The platform also boasts that “President Biden ended America’s longest war, bringing our troops home from Afghanistan,” without mentioning the disaster than ensued, including the death of 13 American troops in a terror attack during the haphazard evacuation of Kabul.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
