Trump abolishes the Second Amendment

Anyone who has paid the remotest attention to politics over the last decade will have noticed that the adherence of Republican politicians and activists to their deepest principles is emotional, strident and resistant to counterargument – until the very moment when expediency dictates a sharp reversal, followed by total amnesia about their supposed former principles.

One is reminded of the anecdote about a Communist cell in New York in 1939, in which the members were discussing how the vile Hitlerite thugs had to be resisted to the death. Whereupon one party member excused himself to go to the restroom. When he returned, he was confused to see the group toasting the fraternal comradeship of the Third Reich and the USSR. News had just come that the Nazi-Soviet Pact had been signed; the party line had changed. Of Stalin it could truly be said: When Father turns, we all turn.

One by one we have watched Republicans’ cherished shibboleths fall into the scrap heap. Free-market capitalism? The economic religion of Friedrich von Hayek, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and a legion of other GOP savants has been buried under an avalanche of tariffs, the government buying equity in private companies, capital controls, capricious stop orders to privately funded projects, manipulation of mortgage markets, capping credit card interest rates by tweet and on and on. All of it sheer heresy to any actual conservative. Yet they swallowed it with hardly a murmur.

In foreign policy, Republicans have managed a full 360 over the last two decades. Following 9/11, they enthusiastically geared up for what Bush administration functionary Condoleezza Rice called a “generational struggle” all over the world, occupying entire countries indefinitely if need be. They excoriated Barack Obama for withdrawing from Iraq in 2011, and candidate Mitt Romney proposed a get-tough policy with Russia in 2012.

But as soon as Donald Trump clinched the nomination in 2016, it was “America First”: Vladimir Putin was our buddy, Ukraine was unworthy of assistance against aggression and NATO was obsolete. Except that now, under Trump 2.0, we’re not only back in the intervention business, as in Venezuela, but behaving as out-and-out imperialists — threatening to annex countries and steal their resources. And Republicans are all for it, whatever “it” is, as long as it is decreed by a recognized party deity.

And then there are “family values,” a whole range of social issues usually related to sexual behavior and typically expressed in censorious, moralizing terms. But the entire GOP family-values façade collapsed in 2016 at the mere utterance of two words: “Stormy” and “Daniels.” Likewise, the QAnon obsession with an elite, shadowy pedophile ring experienced a now-unsurprising twist when Donald Trump appeared in thousands of pages of the Epstein files. One could expand this list of Republican policy flip-flops almost indefinitely, but one of the more intriguing examples only recently hove into view, and deserves closer examination.

This is the about-face of Donald Trump, the cronies he has placed in office and a large portion of the Republican base on the issue of firearms and the sanctity of Second Amendment rights. By now, everyone knows about the unprovoked killing of demonstrator Alex Pretti by federal agents Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez, and the horrified reaction of the president (“you can’t have guns”) and his flaks that Pretti had a pistol (which he did not draw or threaten the officers with).

Whatever happened to Republicans’ reverence not only for firearms ownership, but legal carry, either concealed or open, as well as their ingrained suspicion of federal law enforcement agencies? This abrupt change for a party that only recently was enamored of “Second Amendment solutions” and the public brandishing of AR-15s can be found in the post-World War II history of conservatives and guns.

The American relationship to firearms has for two centuries been different from that of European nations or even that of other largely white “settler nations” like Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Even in 1842, Charles Dickens noticed the near-ubiquity of guns in America, describing the “grisly assortment of guns and knives” Americans carried and pointing out how quickly fatal disputes developed. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any place outside the tribal areas of Afghanistan or Waziristan where the firearm is such a cultural totem.

While guns had always been a cultural peculiarity of America, until the late 1960s they were not a notably political issue. The National Rifle Association was not overtly partisan, and devoted itself mainly to hunting, target shooting and teaching firearms safety. That began to change. The violent crime rate had already begun a steady climb beginning about 1960, and by 1970 it had more than doubled. Urban unrest in Watts, Newark, Detroit and other cities added the crucial ingredient of racial and political fear to issues of crime, guns and personal safety.

Initially, many Republicans, like New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, favored gun control in the wake of the violent crime upsurge, which should remind us that 60 years ago, the GOP actually had a moderate wing. But counterintuitively, there were some conservative Republicans like California Gov. Ronald Reagan who also opted for gun control. The California legislature, in a bipartisan vote, prohibited the public carrying of firearms without a permit, principally to disarm the Black Panthers. Reagan signed the bill. At that time, even the NRA was in favor of gun control legislation.

This political constellation began to change in the 1970s. While Democrats generally continued to favor restrictions, the GOP and the NRA turned sharply against gun control. Whether popular culture in that period of rising crime shaped contemporary political views or simply reflected them, the 1970s was a pivotal decade. People could see the new zeitgeist emerge at their local movie theaters.

Traditionally, cinematic gunplay had been used as a last resort by reluctant heroes (epitomized by the exhausted, careworn face of Gary Cooper in “High Noon”), the ’70s hero was a gunslinging, vengeance-minded rogue cop or citizen vigilante who shot first and asked questions later. Among the most famous vehicles of the decade were the first three of the “Dirty Harry” quintet, “Death Wish” and “Walking Tall.” All were box-office hits, and all spoke to the revenge fantasies of a public worried about street crime.

The vigilante movie also shaped (or reflected, as the reader prefers) the growing conservatism of the era, which contributed its share of taglines to popular culture, including, by the 1980s, then-President Reagan’s employment of Clint Eastwood’s famous line, “Go ahead, make my day,” when promising to veto any potential tax increase.

(The significance, and the irony, of the vigilante craze was not fully evident till much later; it turns out that the real-life model for the protagonist of “Walking Tall,” who sought violent revenge after his wife was supposedly murdered by a criminal gang, may have actually been her killer, a conclusion based on modern forensics).

By the time I arrived on Capitol Hill in the early 1980s, the pattern on guns had already been established. While there was still a considerable number of mainly Southern pro-gun Democrats (they were replaced over the course of a decade, one-by-one, with Republicans), the driving force on the issue was overwhelmingly the GOP. The NRA had become a power center that Republican candidates heeded like iron filings obeying a magnet — only AIPAC and the American Bankers Association could match it in lobbying muscle. Second Amendment fundamentalism, like tax cuts for the rich, became a key element of the GOP catechism.

That fundamentalism took a turn towards extremism in the 1990s, as Reagan’s smile faded like the Cheshire cat’s, to be replaced with Newt Gingrich’s scowl. Ruby Ridge, Waco and other incidents, fueled by endless exaggeration and fulmination on right-wing radio, ignited a militia movement for which open access to all kinds of firearms became the defining issue. This culminated in 2001, when Bill Cooper, well-known in conservative circles for his hallucinogenic conspiracy theories, was killed in a shootout with police. Then came the 1994 Firearms Act, which banned assault weapons and limited magazines to 10 rounds. It was passed by the Democratic Congress and signed by Bill Clinton, factors that clearly contributed to the Republican sweep in the midterm elections later that year.

The 1990s Republican catechism, as propounded by NRA president Wayne LaPierre, now held that gun possession wasn’t simply an individual right, but a kind of duty for the American sovereign citizen to guard against a tyrannical government. LaPierre described federal law enforcement as “jack-booted government thugs”; more than a decade later, responding to the Sandy Hook school shooting on “Meet the Press,” LaPierre literally appeared to be frothing at the mouth.

His pronouncements, which raised eyebrows in the 1990s, became standard boilerplate in the 2000s and 2010s for Republican politicians eager to prove they were the most right-wing candidate on offer in a GOP primary campaign. This rhetoric included the now-familiar “Second Amendment solution,” a euphemism meaning the right to shoot anyone who gets in the way of a true conservative. This message was emphasized by a series of campaign ads in which various GOP candidates leveled an AR-15 (weapon of choice for gun nuts) at a target depicting the face of his opponent or the tax code or EPA regulations or maybe Joe Biden.

This carefully nurtured ideological bubble around the Second Amendment has now been shattered by the killing in Minneapolis. This is more than just another instance of political flip-flopping or hypocrisy. Just as the Republican obsession with alleged Democratic election fraud masks the GOP’s own election-rigging efforts, the about-face on guns is another example of psychological projection. Hypocrisy is the more-or-less conscious habit of saying one thing and doing another; projection is the mostly unconscious process of displacing one’s own unacceptable intentions onto other people’s presumed desires.

The emergence of guns as a potent political issue in the ‘60s should have told us what ICE’s free rein to shoot protesters is all about: not the rights of the citizen, but the prerogative of a specific faction to dominate when in power, and to lash out with violence when not. Conservatives were not about to concede gun rights to the Black Panthers then, nor to their political opponents now. At other times, as they fantasized that they were groaning under the monstrous tyranny of Clinton or Obama or Biden, they felt they were not merely entitled to carry firearms, but to use them. Inconvenient public safety issues like school shootings were either dismissed as false-flag operations or rationalized, as Charlie Kirk did, as the price “we” (meaning other people’s children) have to pay for “our” (meaning conservatives’) God-given rights.

One abiding characteristic of the right-wing personality is that when he is not dominating others, he feels persecuted. That explains LaPierre’s outbursts in the 1990s just as it explains the lies that Trump, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, et al., require to rationalize their abandonment of a conservative shibboleth now that they are in power.

Sixty years ago, political scientist Richard Hofstadter recognized this syndrome:

For pseudo-conservatism is among other things a disorder in relation to authority, characterized by an inability to find other modes for human relationship than those of more or less complete domination or submission. The pseudo-conservative always imagines himself to be dominated and imposed upon because he feels that he is not dominant and knows of no other way of interpreting his position.

This syndrome reached an apotheosis of sorts when Jeanine Pirro, best known as a reality TV judge and right-wing blowhard, and now (because of course!) appointed by Trump as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, issued this edict: if anyone brings “a gun into the District, you mark my words, you’re going to jail. I don’t care if you have a license in another district and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else.”

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This assertion flatly contradicted the landmark 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller Supreme Court decision, which explicitly declared a constitutional right to own a firearm unconnected with militia service, and the 2014 Palmer v. District of Columbia opinion, which found both an express right to carry a firearm and ruled out a categorical prohibition of firearms to non-residents in the District. Both decisions were widely publicized and universally lauded by conservatives; one might expect even a reality TV judge to have better knowledge of the law.

So what is to be done?

There are no rules in politics anymore, and If Democrats wanted to be anything more than a moribund, fake opposition party, they would eagerly adopt the slogan that Trump has abolished the Second Amendment and spread the news far and wide. Given the opinions of the Democratic base on gun-rights absolutism, it wouldn’t mobilize many of their own voters, although it would continue to remind them of what happened in Minneapolis.

Would it work on Republicans? Nothing is likely to cause them to vote Democratic, but it might depress their turnout (in the same way GOP turnout fell in the 2025 off-year elections) while causing confusion and discomfiture among the GOP hierarchy. More important, it could peel away a reasonable number of Republican-leaning swing voters in battleground states. And who knows, miracle of miracles, the Second Amendment might finally cause John Fetterman to support his own party rather than Trump.