A ‘bizarro world’: How Trump’s words have scrambled America’s gun politics
(CNN) — In the wake of a horrific shooting that shocked the nation, President Donald Trump starkly broke with pro-gun groups in off-the-cuff remarks: “Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump said during a televised meeting with lawmakers.
That was nearly eight years ago — after a 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, where a gunman killed 17 people. Trump floated stronger laws for background checks and raising the minimum age to purchase certain firearms. But after the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups objected, he backed down.
Last week, Trump once again put gun groups on the defensive when he said Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti should not have had a gun when he was fatally shot by federal agents.
“You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns. You just can’t,” Trump told reporters outside the White House, seeming to blame Pretti for having a gun on his waistband when he was shot and killed.
Trump, who has called himself “the best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House,” received a swift rebuke from gun-rights advocates, who argued that Pretti had a clear Second Amendment right to protest while carrying a gun. Some groups criticized the president outright, while the NRA, the biggest gun-rights group in the US, didn’t mention the president or his comments directly.
“The NRA unequivocally believes that all law-abiding citizens have a right to keep and bear arms anywhere they have a legal right to be,” the NRA wrote on X last week.
Trump’s comments were all the more notable because they came after pushback from pro-gun groups against top Trump officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who suggested in the immediate aftermath that Pretti was a threat because he had a gun.
It was just the latest instance in which the president’s actions and rhetoric have put him at odds with gun-rights groups — even if his administration’s record is largely on the side of gun rights — scrambling the politics over firearms and sometimes creating strange bedfellows.
“Trump has always been a bit of a moving target when it comes to gun rights,” said Rob Doar, president of the Minnesota Gun Owners Law Center, who has pushed back against Trump officials’ claims that Pretti was violating Minnesota law by carrying a gun.
“I think advocates are always a little bit tepid to trusting Trump as a strong mouthpiece for the Second Amendment. His administration, on the other hand, has done some really strong things,” Doar told CNN.
‘They just don’t have the juice’
Trump’s views on guns have shifted from supporting an assault weapons ban in 2000 to a 2016 presidential campaign in which the NRA spent millions to help him get elected.
But a lot has changed since Trump’s first election. The NRA is no longer the lobbying powerhouse it once was, having been weakened by financial scandals and years of internal conflict that led to the 2024 resignation of President Wayne LaPierre.
A Republican strategist who works directly with multiple lawmakers on Capitol Hill described the NRA’s self-insertion in the conversation around Pretti’s shooting as the organization’s attempt to stay relevant.
“I have not heard of the NRA calling lawmakers to get them to lobby the White House” over Trump’s remarks following the shooting, the strategist said. “They just don’t have the juice they used to.”
A White House official told CNN the NRA’s pushback caught their attention and that the administration has been in direct contact with the group in the aftermath of the shooting.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week that Trump “supports the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding American citizens. Absolutely.”
“While Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms, Americans do not have a constitutional right to impede lawful immigration enforcement operations,” Leavitt said.
‘It feels like we’re in a bizarro world’
Of course, pro-gun groups still have plenty of influence in the Trump administration, which they’ve flexed knocking down several proposals over the past year — including some opposed by liberal groups.
Trump has reversed Biden-era gun regulations and cut funding for gun-violence research over the past year, but the Trump administration also crossed gun-rights groups with a proposal to merge the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives into the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Pro-gun groups feared such a move would empower the agency’s gun-related efforts, not weaken them, and the idea was quietly abandoned. (Gun-control advocates also opposed the move for fear it would sideline the agency.)
Last fall, when CNN and others reported that the Justice Department was considering whether it could restrict the ability of transgender Americans from buying guns, both the NRA and the LGBTQ-rights group Human Rights Campaign opposed the idea.
And while Trump officials and Republicans rushed to cast blame on Pretti — even as video evidence contradicted them — Democrats defended his right to carry a gun at a protest under Minnesota law.
“It feels like we’re in a bizarro world,” said University of California, Los Angeles, law professor Adam Winkler, an expert on constitutional law and the Second Amendment. “Republicans are saying, ‘Don’t bring your guns to protests,’ after 10 years of saying, ‘Of course you can bring guns to protests.’ And many liberals saying, ‘You have a right to bring a gun to protest,’ even though they’ve been saying for years it would be irresponsible to bring a gun to a protest.”
Some Republicans have relished the fact that gun-control advocates like Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom are defending Pretti’s right to protest while carrying a gun. Newsom, who accused the Trump administration of not believing in the Second Amendment, has signed legislation in California restricting where guns can be legally carried (though a federal appellate court ruled against California’s gun control laws last month).
“It’s been great to watch all these Democrats crying out for run rights,” one Republican congressman told CNN with a smirk.
Kris Brown, president of Brady, a gun violence prevention group, acknowledged that the politics of the fatal shooting in Minnesota were “a little bit upside-down.” But she argued Pretti’s killing pierced the NRA’s narrative that guns are a “risk-free value proposition” — and its long-held warnings that Democratic administrations would trample on the rights of gun owners.
“The reality here is the NRA also warned gun owners for years and years about ‘jack-booted thugs’ coming for their guns,” Brown said. “It turns out they were right — it’s just ICE, as currently deployed, is going after the people with the firearms and apparently shooting them for it.”
A weakened NRA
When Trump first ran for president, the NRA was considered one of the strongest lobbying forces in Washington. During the 2016 campaign season — when the balance of the Supreme Court was at stake — the NRA spent $50 million on independent expenditures, including more than $30 million on Trump’s campaign, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
Today, not only does the NRA wield less power, it spends less money. In the 2024 election cycle, the group spent just $10 million on independent expenditures, according to the CRP.
“The NRA is still the largest gun-rights group in the country, but they’re significantly smaller than they used to be,” said Stephen Gutowski, founder and editor of The Reload, a news site focused on firearms. “It’s not clear exactly how much behind-the-scenes influence they have with the White House.”
A MAGA-aligned Republican operative told CNN the NRA is among many “legacy GOP groups” that no longer hold the same sway in Washington.
Another Republican adviser said the NRA had lost power after the scandals and noted there are more organizations in the gun space now. “The National Sportsman Shooting Foundation and Gun Owners of America have filled the void and grown in credibility,” the adviser said.
The NRA did not respond to a request for comment.
While the gun lobby is more diffuse in Washington, the issue still animates Trump’s MAGA base.
“The gun lobby has been weakened because the NRA no longer has the resources to play the dominant role in elections the way it has in recent decades,” Winkler said. “But it’s also the strength of the gun-rights movement that has never been solely or primarily a function of the NRA. It’s a function of a lot of single-issue, pro-gun voters out there.”
‘We did nothing’
In Trump’s first term, he broke with gun-rights advocates several times in response to mass shootings, though he often didn’t follow through with policy changes.
The Trump administration banned bump stocks on semiautomatic weapons after the devices were used by the shooter who killed 58 at a Las Vegas music festival in 2017. (The measure was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2024.)
The year after the Parkland mass shooting, Trump again floated expanded background checks, suggesting the NRA would come around on the issue. Trump and LaPierre spoke several times on the matter, and the NRA warned the president against supporting stronger background checks.
But while campaigning in the 2024 GOP primary, Trump touted the fact that no significant gun laws were changed during his first administration.
“During my four years nothing happened. And there was great pressure on me having to do with guns. We did nothing. We didn’t yield,” Trump said in February 2024 at an NRA expo.
In the second Trump administration, gun-rights advocates say the administration has been quite supportive. They point to his appointees like Harmeet Dhillon at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and provisions in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” to cut fees on some firearms equipment like silencers.
There also has been some friction over steps the Trump administration has taken. Gutowski wrote last August about objections from gun-rights groups over the deployment of dozens of ATF agents in Washington, DC, as part of Trump’s law enforcement crackdown in the city.
But Robert Spitzer, a professor at the State University of New York at Cortland and author of several books on guns and politics, said Trump’s splits with pro-gun groups tend to be short-lived, even if his latest comments about the Minnesota shooting are particularly notable.
“His instincts aren’t necessarily with the gun-rights people, but the people that are running the relevant agencies and departments are the gun people,” Spitzer said. “I think in the long term, he’s not going to really have any problems with the gun-rights side. But this is a pretty disruptive moment.”
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