What actually is former President Donald Trump's platform? Prior to Aug. 7, 2024, Trump's own website featured a section called Agenda47 suggesting, of course, his promised agenda for the 47th presidency. Some media, such as Axios and Counterpunch, have described Agenda47 as Trump's "formal policy plans" -- sort of tantamount to saying Agenda47 is Trump's platform, without committing to the formal term.

Either characterization, platform or formal policy plans, overstates the case. If you peruse the Agenda47 videos (with transcripts) still on Trump's site as individual URLs (see Agenda47's Wikipedia entry for links), you'll see that they're not the detailed policy wonkery that oldtimers associate with the relatively more thoughtful policy platforms of yore. Instead, they consist of typical Trump ramble-rants mixing glances at occasional policy goals (such as leading the world in the manufacture of flying cars or raiding actual university endowments to create the free online American Academy that would somehow be both "non-political" and "no wokeness") with familiar demagogical invective ("The woke left is bad news. They destroy countries"). You get the idea. We all do, by now.

Agenda47's videos are generally just a few short minutes each. If you threw a mini-infomercial video and a dumbed-down policy white paper at the wall like spaghetti, and looked at what sticked, that would be a typical Agenda47 item. So I'm classifying Trump's Agenda47 statements as a "quasi-platform," not a full-fledged one, a little closer to a set of scattershot late-night infomercials than a rigorous platform.

And does Agenda47 simply mesh into Project 2025? In September 2023, a Politico article said "For Trump personally, of course, [Project 2025] is a live-or-die agenda, and Trump campaign officials acknowledge that it aligns well with their own 'Agenda 47' program." Or does Agenda47 simply fade away now that, as of Aug. 7, apparently in another of the recent attempts to distance Trump from Project 2025 -- in this case by saying, No, other stuff's not his platform, this is his platform -- the Agenda47 URL redirects from donaldjtrump.com/agenda47 to donaldjtrump.com/platform which, as of this writing, offers the official Republican Party platform, a 28-page PDF? Is the whole nerd question of Agenda47's poly-sci classification moot? In another twist of this thrilling saga, on Sept. 24, I noticed the URL redirect is no longer in place: donaldjtrump.com/agenda47 once again goes to the Agenda 47 items.

Probably it's madness to try to find any method in the Trump campaign's brandings and rebrandings of his monologued manifesto mishmashes other than whatever was expedient at the time. The bigger point is Trump knows all this, he knows the fascism-friendly anti-intellectualism of the United States is and has been on the rise for decades. On his successful campaign trail in 2015, asked if he'd release policy proposals, like, what he would actually do if elected, Trump answered, almost perfectly monosyllabically, "I don't think the people care. I think they trust me."

Prepared by Douglas Lucas in August and September 2024 as a footnote, ultimately unused, for his Sept. 22, 2024 article at the Daily Dot: "Election 2024: The future of TikTok and tech policy under Trump versus Harris."