A group known for deploying steely and dystopian messaging toward its enemies, the NRA saw its tactics fail this month when the Democratic-controlled House approved a revamped Violence Against Women Act that would bar those convicted of abusing, assaulting or stalking a domestic partner from buying guns.
The group has been subject to scrutiny over desperate calls for fundraising. It is embroiled in a rare dirty-laundry lawsuit, accusing one of its closest contractors, which operates its media arm and the NRATV channel, of financial malfeasance. It has also been named in a lawsuit filed against the Federal Election Commission by the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which has accused the group of abusing campaign finance laws to funnel money toward Trump and several other Republicans. (In a statement, the NRA called it a “lawsuit based on a frivolous complaint.”)
“There’s definitely some bad news, and the NRA internally is suffering from some major turmoil,” Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who specializes in the Second Amendment, said in an interview. “But there’s been some major success with Donald Trump.”
Members of the 5-million-strong NRA, gun rights advocates who have supported Trump from his days as a long shot Republican presidential candidate, are looking toward his visit as welcome fuel to continue battling well-funded gun control groups and a Democratic-controlled House — essentially, reassurance that hands in Congress will stay tied as a judiciary remade by the Trump administration moves forward.
“The president is the most enthusiastic supporter of the Second Amendment that has occupied the White House in recent history,” Jennifer Baker, an NRA spokeswoman, said in an interview. “He has embraced the NRA, and the members, and the hundreds of millions of law-abiding gun owners of this country.”
Baker added that NRA members have been fervently pro-Trump since the beginning because they understood what was at risk.
“Our members are pretty politically astute,” Baker said. “The Supreme Court was at stake, and in recent history we haven’t had a presidential nominee that was so unabashed and vocal about their support for the Second Amendment and our organization.”
There’s just one complicating factor: Privately, neither White House officials nor NRA organizers say they are completely sure what the president might say when he takes the stage Friday. It remains to be seen whether attendees will get a campaign, firebrand speech or one that focuses on issues important to gun rights advocates.
In his public comments, the president has not always been the most reliable ally, and at times he has — at least momentarily — embraced the types of gun-control proposals favored by Democrats. In the days after a mass shooting at a Florida high school last year, the president encouraged lawmakers to stand up to the NRA and suggested a policy of “take the guns first, go through due process second” for people thought to be mentally ill.
“They have great power over you people,” Trump told a group of lawmakers who gathered at the White House in February 2018. “They have less power over me.”
Days later, the president retreated from those comments shortly after a private meeting with NRA leaders. He has since pushed for a ban on bump stocks — a modest move considered to be no great loss by the NRA — and suggested that the arming of teachers could make schools safer. The Trump administration has largely decided to blame gun violence on access to mental health care over curbing access to guns, and the president has frequently targeted Democrats as the party most willing to rescind Second Amendment rights.
In his speech to the NRA convention last year, the president declared that the Second Amendment would not be “under siege” as long as he is in office. “I think we’ll hear him talk about the importance of that right and that empowerment” of the Second Amendment, Baker predicted about this year’s speech.
Gun control advocates question how far the president’s message will go.
“At the end of the day, what’s clear is that the NRA certainly isn’t thriving in the Trump years,” Igor Volsky, the executive director of Guns Down America, said in an interview. “What I think has become pretty clear is that the organization now has to talk to a smaller and smaller and smaller proportion of Americans.”
According to a recent Reuters poll, there is some truth to that logic. The majority of Americans support tougher gun control laws, even if they have little faith that lawmakers will be able to pass them. And gun rights advocates say Trump has delivered in an area where many of them say it matters most: reordering the judiciary by appointing two Supreme Court justices, in addition to more than 90 judges in lower courts.
In its next term, in October, the Supreme Court will take up its first Second Amendment case in nearly a decade when it reviews a New York City gun law that limits residents from transporting their guns outside their homes. It will be the first test of a court that has been reoriented with the Trump-era appointments of Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh and Neil M. Gorsuch.
“There was one moment when it looked like maybe the NRA had bet on the wrong horse” when the president began suggesting minor gun control measures, Winkler said. Under Trump, the group has not gotten its complete wish list accomplished, including congressional passage of a national reciprocity law — the right for concealed-carry permit holders from one state to legally carry their guns in any other state.
But the ideological shift occurring in courts across the country is more than enough, Winkler said.
“It’s not perfect,” Winkler said, “but it’s damn near close.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.