Trump is a Kennedy-era liberal who doesn’t care about guns either way. By Eric S. Raymond.
Trump is a Kennedy-era liberal who has outlasted the time in which his politics was formed. I mean, this was a guy who was semi-ostracized by the New York elites because he liked palling around with Black sports and showbiz figures more than was considered seemly. It’s darkly hilarious to hear him being accused of racism to anybody who remembers those days.
Trump only looks “conservative” because the Democratic party has veered so far to the left. And because when Barack Obama notoriously angered him into running for President, he decided it would be easier to co-opt the entire conservative movement from the populist end than it would be to pry the Democrats loose from the Marxist long-marchers. …
(It’s pretty well established at this point that Trump ran for President as a fuck-you to Obama after Obama mocked him at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner, it’s probably not wise to underestimate how much he’s motivated by getting back at people he thinks have wronged him.) …
Trump, personally, seems to have kept a Kennedy-era liberal’s attitude about 2A [the second amendment, which protests the right of citizens to own guns]. He’s sort of theoretically for it and recognizes the individual-rights case as valid, but it’s nowhere near a core issue for him. Left to himself, he’d probably be susceptible to technocratic pitches for measures like banning Saturday-night specials. He wouldn’t care enough to fight off regulatory creep, or consider pushing for repeal of the NFA.
However, Trump is also a superb practical politician who understands the necessities of holding together a winning Republican coalition. He knows that he needs to keep gun owners on-side, so he’s cheerfully willing to sound a lot more hardcore about this issue than he actually is.
I think he also understands that pro-2A people are far more likely to be effectively single-issue voters than anti-2A people are. What puzzles me is why the Democrats haven’t figured this out, especially since Bill Clinton has been trying to tell them for 30 years that gun control is electoral suicide. Still, they keep stepping on that rake.
