Trump flip-flops again, supporting background checks
President says Senate is ‘on board’ with gun control measure; NRA will ‘get there’
WASHINGTON — In 2013, Donald Trump said he supported background checks for gun purchases to “weed out the sickos.” Two years later, as he prepared to run for president, he flip-flopped, telling Ammoland magazine that he opposed expanded checks because they don’t work.
It is a recurring pattern.
As president, Trump changed his mind again in 2018 after the high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., insisting that stronger checks would be “fully backed” by the White House. But that position lasted only a few days, until a late-night meeting with the National Rifle Association in the Oval Office, after which he backed off his support and later threatened to veto a background check bill.
On Friday, in the wake of massacres in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, Trump presented himself now as a deal-maker eager to bring Democrats and Republicans together behind tougher background checks.
But the president’s long history on the gun issue raises questions about his real commitment to legislation that would improve the background check system and close loopholes that have allowed firearms to be bought and sold at gun shows without any knowledge of a buyer’s history.
How far the president is willing to go — and whether his support for background checks is just another momentary reversal — is likely to determine whether the country responds to 31 deaths in two mass shootings with the first significant federal gun control measures in years.
Trump said Friday that there was “tremendous” support for “really commonsense, sensible, important background checks” even as the NRA and gun rights supporters vowed to oppose them. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, was “on board,” the president insisted, and the gun lobby, which in the past has been brutally effective in defeating such measures in Congress, would “get there.”
“There’s never been a president like President Trump,” Trump said as he left for a 10-day vacation, bragging that he could overcome years of gridlock on the fiercely contentious issue.
On the way to his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., Trump stopped in the Hamptons, raising $12 million at two fundraisers and telling his donors he was confident that lawmakers would agree to a deal on new gun legislation. He said the Senate doesn’t need to return early because the congressional leadership in both parties would agree on something that members could vote on when they return in the fall.
But Trump’s bravado will be tested once he returns to Washington by the reality of partisan politics in the bitterly divided city, as well as the looming presidential campaign and his own lack of ideological moorings on the issue.
Longtime gun control activists and Democratic lawmakers reacted with guarded optimism about Trump’s comments but said they remained deeply skeptical that the president would follow through on his promise in the face of opposition from the NRA and many of his conservative supporters.
“Trump has more opinions on gun safety than a magic eight ball,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, a leading gun control group. “If he means what he says, he will call Mitch McConnell up and get a pledge from him to bring the Senate back.”
If he doesn’t, Feinblatt said, “it won’t meet the moment, and it’s a clear cave to the NRA.”
It would not be the first time that Trump’s vacillation resulted in inaction. After ending an Obama-era program for young immigrants known as Dreamers, Trump said he wanted to protect them, but he repeatedly shifted his position in negotiations with lawmakers, who failed to pass legislation to give the Dreamers legal status.
Since last weekend’s shootings in El Paso and Dayton, some of Trump’s closest advisers have urged him to support background checks and to try to sway Republicans to join him. He has been in frequent touch with Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, and Eric Ueland, his legislative affairs director. His daughter, Ivanka Trump, also has been involved in discussions with other officials.
The push to get the president to do something took on more urgency after some of his aides conceded that he had been widely seen as failing a key test for a commander in chief by remaining at his private golf club after the El Paso shooting and crashing a wedding there Saturday night, instead of giving a public address seeking to console a grieving nation.
But opponents of new gun laws wasted little time in trying to pull the president back to their side.
Rush Limbaugh on Friday told his radio listeners that Trump risks infuriating his base of gunloving supporters if he makes a deal with Democrats on gun laws, much the way President George H.W. Bush did when he broke his promise not to raise taxes.
“There’s not a single new law that would change anything,” Limbaugh said. “The only thing a new law would do is it would drive a wedge between Trump and his voters and the NRA. Because make no mistake, they want your guns. They want every gun you’ve got as quickly as they can get it.”
Top officials at the NRA have made it clear that they do not intend to change their long-held positions. The association’s chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, said Thursday that additional background check measures being discussed in Washington “would not have prevented the horrific tragedies in El Paso and Dayton.”
Privately, Trump has recently told advisers that he believes the NRA is “going bankrupt” after internal upheaval at the organization, and he thinks they won’t have the financial means to harm him during the reelection campaign.
The president also faces a challenge with members of his own party, many of whom have built their political careers in part on their opposition to the need for more gun laws, including tougher background checks.
Trump’s aides insist that McConnell is more receptive than he has seemed in the past. Asked Friday morning why he thinks this might be the time for gun control legislation, Trump said, “Time goes by.” He added, “I think I have a greater influence now over the Senate and over the House.”
But McConnell’s office made clear that he has not endorsed any legislation, and Senate Republicans appear divided on what, if anything, could pass.
McConnell has signaled that he would at least be open to considering new legislation, including “red flag” laws that could enable authorities to remove guns from people deemed dangerous by a judge. He did not, however, call the Senate back from its August recess to address the issue immediately, and on Friday, Sen. John Barasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican, expressed concern about the red flag approach.
“I want to make sure we protect our constitutional rights and whatever comes up will actually help solve a problem,” the senator told reporters, according to Politico, adding that he has “a lot of concern about the due process component” and does not “want to punish law-abiding citizens.”
Asked about background check legislation, which failed in the Senate in 2013, Barasso said, “I don’t expect things have changed much.”
McConnell has told Trump that he will have to work for the votes. But so far, there is no evidence of the kind of aggressive arm-twisting the president undertook during the fight to pass a tax bill in 2017, aides on Capitol Hill said.
Some Democratic lawmakers who have pushed for gun legislation in the past were hopeful the president was right, and this time was different. But they acknowledged the challenge that Trump would face in upsetting a core group of supporters while he campaigns for a second term in the Oval Office.