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As could be easily predicted, Donald Trump's meandering take-all-the-positions meeting on gun safety, in which he opined that he was in favor of not just background checks and new gun restrictions but offered support for gun confiscation—"Take the guns first, go through due process second" was his take—was greeted with alarm, among conservatives.
“Strong leaders do not automatically agree with the last thing that was said to them,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) said. “We’re not ditching constitutional protections simply because the last person the president talked to today doesn’t like them.”
Well thank goodness nobody considers Trump a strong leader in the first place, because those people would have been in for a rude awakening.
But forget that. What we really want to know is what the frothing lunatics that make up the Donald Trump fanbase, the xenophobes and white nationalists and dimwitted conspiracy peddlers, think of Donald's new, if temporary, declaration that he was keen on not letting frothing lunatics keep their guns.
But the reaction was noticeably less diplomatic on the Trump-friendly part of the internet. Breitbart labelled Trump “The Gun Grabber” and accused him of ceding the Democrats’ “Wish List.” The article had nearly 16,000 comments, with the top-rated comment calling the gun control proposals “an outright betrayal by this president of the constitution and everyone of us who elected him to stand up for it.” [...]
The amount of anger made the moderators on r/The_Donald step in and remove a copious amount of comments from the thread, including those from longtime pro-Trump posters. According to Removeddit, nearly 40 percent of the comment thread was removed by the subreddit’s moderators, while four percent was deleted.
In translation: Meltdown. The Donald Trump fan club is in outright meltdown.
If anything, this proves that they are even dumber than we thought. Even sitting Republican senators, not the keenest bunch, know that Donald Trump cannot hold a policy position in his head for longer than a single meeting. Trump will absolutely and unquestionably reverse his stance just as soon as his own staff explains to him why he should think whatever they themselves think, and will pipe up with his new, pro-all-the-guns position as if the original meeting never happened.
But if we were wondering what it would take to shake the faith of people who have steadfastly defended Donald Trump through his brags of sexual assault, his blatant financial self-dealing in office, his efforts to shutter investigations of Russian espionage against America, his demands that the Justice Department act to protect him, over the country, his flagrant, repeated lying to the American public and so forth, we have our answer. It would take Donald Trump suggesting that somebody, somewhere take away their aspirational murder weapons. That would do it.