Back in April, 2016 when Trump the Shlump showed up at the NRA show to be anointed as the spear-carrier for America’s gun-nut contingent, I thought (and said) that the boys at the Fairfax home office were making a big mistake.  America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ always endorsed the GOP Presidential candidate, but they waited until October to get the word out. By tying the organization to a guy who had never previously run for any political office of any kind, particularly this guy, Wayne-o and his buddies made a deal which bound them to someone over whom they would have no control.

              Whatever else you want to say about him, Trump’s a through-and-through New York guy. Which means that he’s about as connected to guns and gun culture as the man in the moon. For all his bluster and bull  about 2^nd-Amendment ‘rights, he’ll say anything to consolidate his alt-right base. And if it ever suited his political fancy to throw the NRA leadership under a bus, get out the broom and start sweeping the street because that’s exactly what happened last week.

              Of course the minute bullets started flying around the Wal Mart in El Paso and then inside a Dayton bar, Trump yanked out the old ‘thoughts and prayers’ even though he thought the Dayton bar was actually located in Toledo. Not that his putative challenger, Joe Biden, did any better, because he got up and told everyone at a San Diego fundraiser how sorry he was about two mass shootings that occurred in Houston and Michigan. 

              Meanwhile, by the middle of last week it began to appear that we may have hit some kind of critical turning-point in the argument about guns. One of the Fox News anchors, Shepard Smith, delivered an impassioned commentary which could have been written for him by Everytown, and by week’s end Trump was openly promoting the idea of ‘intelligent’ background checks. He also made a point of saying that he had talked to both Pelosi and Schumer about going forward with a background-check bill, those two names being at the top of the most-hated list for Gun-nut Nation, no questions asked.

              Trump may be President but he’s also a 2020 Presidential candidate, and in that respect his support of a background-check bill makes him probably the 20^th candidate to come up with some kind of gun-control scheme.  There’s Booker with his national ID card, Biden wants a national gun buy-back, Buttigieg wants an AR ban, Kamala wants dealers to be regulated more strictly, blah, blah, blah and blah. But the biggest and best plan was just unveiled by Pocahontas, except it’s not really a plan. It’s a pledge to reduce gun violence by 80 percent, although she admits she doesn’t have the faintest idea of how to make this actually work.

              All of this Democratic yapping clearly reflects the degree to which an energized and organized Gun-control Nation may have been an important factor in turning a number of red Congressional districts blue in 2018. And if anything, the public response to California, Texas and Ohio may well presage an even stronger Democratic result built around gun violence next year.

              Except there’s one little problem, a problem named Donald Trump. Because when all is said and done, his quick pivot on gun control and the reaction of Gun-nut Nation to his new-found gun concerns reminds me of what happened when Nixon went to China in 1972. If you were a Congressional Democrat after 1949 and so much as quietly hinted that we couldn’t ignore one-quarter of the world’s population, it was Nixon who stood up and called you a ‘pinko stooge’ or worse. If gun control becomes a political lightning-rod for next year, Trump’s fervent support of gun-nuttery gives him all the protection he needs.

What’s the NRA going to do if Trump signs a background-check bill? Tell their membership to vote for some Socialist who will take away all their guns?