Who could possibly have predicted? After swearing up and down that he would take action on guns following the summer’s mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Donald Trump has quietly dropped the idea. He’s dropped the idea so thoroughly the NRA isn’t even bothering to call to lobby him against it anymore, The Washington Post reports.
For one thing, “He was worried about branding” when it came to background checks. He thought the policy needed a different name … because what every policy with more than 80% public support needs is a new Trump-bestowed name.
Was Trump ever serious about gun reform? A senior administration tells The Post that “He could have been if the circumstances all played out just right,” which is to say, what? If there’d been six or eight more high profile mass shootings spaced out so that public outrage was always at a peak for months?
Impeachment is part of Trump’s flight from gun-related courage. “He’s not going to take on things related to his base in the middle of all this,” Trump’s Newsmax buddy Chris Ruddy said. But he’d already started backing away from the issue before an impeachment inquiry became a reality, because Donald Trump is not brave enough to stand up to the NRA and he doesn’t care enough about the people who get killed in stores and schools and houses of worship and on public streets to find that courage.