Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Once upon a time, American political parties had relatively detailed platforms. Then Jared Kushner came along, and decided he could replace the Republican Party's traditional document with a one-page placard, small enough to fit into people's pockets. A month later, that project was scrapped in favor of just using the party's 2016 platform. Verbatim. Great! Except that document was filled with all sorts of harsh criticisms of the "current" administration (that is, Barack Obama's). Even so, that was the official-ish position for a couple of months. Until … The Republican platform committee met on Sunday and decided that there wouldn't be any platform at all — they were good with whatever President Donald Trump wanted. Which everyone had good fun with for a while, until later Sunday when what Trump wanted turned out to be 50 bullet points.The resulting plan has the feel of something that was slapped together in 20 minutes or so. So Trump is supposedly going to produce 10 million new jobs in 10 months, but there's nothing — really, nothing at all — about how to fulfill that promise. Same with a million new small businesses. The president plans to "Build the World's Greatest Infrastructure System," which sounds nice, but given that he's been promising the same thing for almost four years and hasn't yet sent a bill to Capitol Hill, some might find it hard to take it seriously. "Wipe Out Global Terrorists" also seems ambitious, but the plan contains nothing about how it would be done in practice or how it squares with the promise to "Stop Endless Wars and Bring Our Troops Home." Meanwhile, there are some notable omissions. Nothing about eliminating Obamacare (or, for that matter, about Trump's promised replacement that's always two weeks away). Nothing about supporting U.S. allies — not even Israel. Nothing about abortion. Or guns. Nothing about the payroll-tax holiday Trump has been talking about over the past few weeks, or his efforts to restore full deductibility for dining and entertainment expenses. It's not clear what happens next. One possibility is that the 50 bullet points keep getting revised to appease various party groups until they eventually look like the platform they were supposed to replace. Another is that those groups would be willing to go along with this version since it's not an official statement of the party — but won't be circulating anything like it to their members. Again, the whole thing sounds like a last-minute attempt to avoid being ridiculed for not having any second-term agenda without actually doing the work of coming up with a second-term agenda. Which is pretty much what I'm expecting of the Republican Convention. Maybe they'll surprise me! But everything that's been reported so far suggests that the event is being thrown together at the last minute, with Trump himself constantly changing what he wants and the organizers having to tear up their plans and start over. To be sure: Hardly any voters watch much more than the major speakers (who this year appear to mostly be Trump's family), and those who do are almost all enthusiastic partisans who aren't going to care if the product looks a big ragged. Still, it would be nice to see some evidence that the president and his party actually had some sort of policy agenda. After all, they want to govern. Don't they? 1. Brian F. Schaffner, Jesse H. Rhodes and Raymond J. La Raja on political polarization and the suburbs. 2. Seth Masket on the Democrats and empathy. 3. Sarah Bush and Lauren Prather at the Monkey Cage on public opinion about foreign interference in U.S. elections. 4. Harold Pollack on what the pandemic shows us about public health. 5. Nathaniel Rakich and Meredith Conroy on progressive groups and Democratic primaries. 6. James Fallows on the Democratic convention. 7. Carl Hulse on what virtual conventions leave behind — which is why I expect future conventions to be a combination of the old and the new. 8. And Julian Sanchez on the cruelty of playing along with false conspiracy theories. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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