After meeting, Trump, NRA appear reconciled
President faces pressure from lawmakers in both parties to restrict guns
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s staff tried to be reassuring. Stop focusing, they told jittery allies, on the sound bites from the White House Cabinet Room earlier this week when Trump appeared to embrace long-standing conservative taboos like gun confiscation and comprehensive background checks.
“He has an A-plus rating from the NRA because he made specific promises,” Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor and one of those on the president’s staff who has tried to ease the anxiety on the right, said Friday. “He understands the overlap between gun owners and those voters who supported him,” she insisted, adding, “Nobody’s making legislative policy in the Cabinet Room.”
And now, after a brief flirtation with gun control that was more of a freestyle riff than a formal statement of principle, the National Rifle Association and Trump appear to be back on the same page.
Their reconciliation came after an Oval Office meeting Thursday night with Trump, top White House aides and the NRA’s president and chief lobbyist. They spoke “cordially,” said one person with knowledge of the discussion, and left in good spirits, though this person added that Trump said he still could not understand why an 18-year-old could buy an assault rifle but not a handgun.
Conway said no one should expect the president and the NRA to be in lockstep on every issue, but that they remained generally in sync.
“There will be broad agreement absent perfect alignment,” she said. “And that sounds like any relationship.”
Given Trump’s history of abruptly reversing himself, no one can be sure what type of gun legislation he might actually sign if a bill ever makes it to his desk.
His next move on guns will test his relationship with one of the most loyal and powerful elements of his base.
Republican strategists say that movement in polling for tighter restrictions on gun sales has been notable among Republican voters, a shift that the strategists say flows from Trump’s speaking out on it.
But the president’s connection with gun owners and their culture — which is infused with a sense of mistrust and grievance he both feeds on and shares — suggests he will be loath to betray this group of people he has repeatedly promised, “I will never, ever let you down.”
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., who speaks regularly with the president as the leader of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said he believed what is weighing on Trump is “less the NRA than the Trump voter.”
The dilemma for Trump is that those are often the same thing.
He is facing pressure from lawmakers in both parties to go further in restricting weapons. And he seems to appreciate that he has a unique ability to sway skeptical Republicans given that conservatives trust him on the issue in a way they never did with Barack Obama. “There’s one president since I’ve been involved in any of this that can get this done,” said Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., who co-wrote the last major gun control bill to come to a vote in the Senate in 2013. “And it’s him.”
The ties between Trump and the millions of Americans for whom gun ownership is a personal and political consideration are stronger and more natural than many Republicans could have predicted when he first started running for president in 2015.
Trump came to appreciate the potency that gun rights — and the fear of having them stripped away — had with many of his supporters. And it became an extension of the cultural battles he eagerly threw himself into.
In guns, Trump found an issue very similar in its emotional pull to immigration. It appealed to voters who believed that Democrats ignored the concerns of people like them and were hostile to their beliefs and culture. It fed a sense that the government was pursuing policies that would ultimately hurt them. And at its most extreme, it fanned the fear that a seemingly unstoppable force was on the verge of snatching away life as they knew it — their understanding of what it meant to be American.
Aides to Trump say he loved the adoration that NRA crowds shower on him. After speaking at the group’s in Atlanta last year, one person who was with him described him as “levitating” with joy. “You came through for me, and I am going to come through for you,” told the crowd.
Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist who also is an NRA board member, said the speech underscored that Trump had a relationship with gun owners unlike that of any other president. Trump spoke the language, calling the Second Amendment “a sacred right” and reassuring them that “the eight-year assault on your Second Amendment freedoms has come to a crashing end.”
“It was a very bonding moment,” Norquist said, adding that Trump, who had a concealed gun permit when he lived in New York, did not have to fake it. “That was the connection people wanted. They didn’t want to hear you’re a hunter. They wanted to hear you were one of them.”