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Remember two days ago, when Donald Trump supported universal background checks and taking people’s guns without due process and chided Republicans for being afraid of the National Rifle Association? Yeah. After his own meeting with the NRA, it looks like Trump has fallen back in line.
Chris Cox, the executive director of the NRA’s lobbying arm, said on Twitter he had a “great meeting” with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday and reaffirmed neither “want gun control.”
“We all want safe schools, mental health reform and to keep guns away from dangerous people,” Cox said after the meeting. “POTUS & VPOTUS support the Second Amendment, support strong due process and don’t want gun control.”
Trump himself tweeted that the meeting was “Good (Great),” and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders spoke to reporters Friday morning and substantially walked back Trump's Wednesday burst of support for gun laws. The new line is that that Trump is “not necessarily” interested in universal background checks and that “conceptually” he supports an age limit of 21 on gun purchases but “thinks it would probably have more potential in the states than it would at the federal level.”
In other words, what we all knew about Wednesday’s meeting: Trump was blathering and babbling and to the extent that he had a coherent agenda it was to assert his dominance over Republicans who had somehow offended him, and nothing he said at a policy level was either well informed or a position he believes in in any meaningful sense.