One of the most extraordinary moments of Donald Trump’s presidency was an hour-long meeting with US senators following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in which he vigorously defended a series of gun safety measures to which the National Association of Rifle (NRA) has long been opposed.
Trump’s support for gun control measures — which he explained on live television from the White House on February 28, 2018 — stunned lawmakers on both parties. But the next day NRA directors met with Trump without cameras or reporters in the room, and he immediately backed off.
This apparent surrender to pressure from the NRA sums up Trump’s record on gun control in the eyes of his critics.
Unbeknownst to the public, however, Trump has again pushed inside the White House for significant new gun control measures after more than a year, after two horrific massacres that took place over the span of 13 hours. These discussions have not been previously reported.
On August 3, 2019, a far-right gunman killed 23 people at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas. Early the next morning, another man shot and killed nine people outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio. Both assassins used semi-automatic rifles.
The next day at the White House, Trump was so shaken by the weekend’s violence that he questioned aides about a possible solution and made it clear he wanted to act, according to three people present during the conversation.
“What are we going to do about the assault rifles?” Trump asked.
“Absolutely nothing,” replied Mick Mulvaney, his acting chief of staff.
“Why?” Trump insisted.
“Because you would,” Mulvaney told him.
Trump never sought a ban on assault weapons, though he called for it in his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” in which he also criticized Republicans for opposing even limited gun restrictions. .
Trump faced the NRA again on Friday in Houston, where he addressed the pro-gun group’s annual conference. The event comes days after a gunman killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. “America needs real solutions and real leadership right now, not politicians and partisanship,” Trump said in a social media post this week after the school shooting, explaining his decision to speak at the event.
Other scheduled speakers, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, chose to skip the meeting.
Trump’s repeated interest in pushing for gun control when he was president ran counter to his public image as a Second Amendment absolutist who staunchly defended his position with the NRA.
In the 2016 campaign, he vowed to abolish gunless schools on his first day in government and claimed he sometimes carried a concealed weapon. “I feel much better armed,” he said on CBS’ Face the Nation during the Republican primaries. In seeking re-election in 2020, Trump told voters he had “saved the Second Amendment”. But the reality was more complex.
After the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting in Florida in 2018, and again in the summer of 2019, Trump has publicly pushed for more background checks before gun sales and spoke of raising the age required to buy them from 18 to 21. years old.
The gunman who carried out the Uvalde massacre was 18 years old, as was the man accused of killing 10 black people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, on May 14. “We have huge support for really simple and important background checks,” Trump told reporters in August 2019.
Trump took office in 2017 largely free from his party’s orthodoxy or any specific political ideology, relying mostly on his own instincts. He bore no scars from the battles of intellectual conservatism, where arguments over the merits of supply-side tax cuts, public health policy and gun rights shaped a generation of Republicans.
He had been both a Democrat and a registered Republican and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to candidates from both parties. For issues beyond trade and immigration, Trump’s initial reaction was often to pass opinion polls and support ideas that no other recent Republican president would have considered.
This occurred many times in matters related to weapons. And it has often been up to Trump’s aides in the administration, including Vice President Mike Pence, to pull him back into positions where Republicans were most comfortable. According to people familiar with the conversations, Pence was especially influential in speaking to Trump after the 2018 and 2019 shootings.
“He has these Democratic speech themes in his head,” a White House policy adviser said of Trump, “because he’s always lived in New York.” On questions about the Second Amendment, Trump’s team has often tired him, burying him in technical details of gun policy.
Indeed, in the conversation in August 2019, when Trump suggested he wanted to find a way to ban assault weapons, Mulvaney asked how he defined them, as people in attendance said. Commonly, the term refers to a class of weapons that includes the AR-15 semi-automatic rifles often used in firefights against the population. “Well, it’s military weapons,” Trump replied.
Legally, AR-15s are civilian versions of a heavily regulated military weapon since the 1930s. “Mr. President,” Mulvaney replied, “military assault weapons are already prohibited by law.”
The president dropped the idea.
