Trump family grift now extends to guns

During Donald Trump’s three presidential campaigns, and throughout his first term in office, he was the darling of the National Rifle Association. On the campaign trail, he would pantomime pulling out a six-gun, telling the crowd he had a concealed carry permit and was willing to use it. Each year, Trump would show up at the NRA’s annual convention to be feted like a god by an ecstatic crowd of jubilant supporters. He even had Lee Greenwood appear with him in 2017 to sing “God Bless the NRA.” There was no organization in America more devoted to him and his political career. 

Oddly, Trump hasn’t bothered to show up during his second term. That doesn’t mean his administration is not hard at work delivering the promises he has long made to the NRA. These include, according to the New York Times, “more than three dozen rules” relating to gun safety it is attempting to “eliminate.” These include provisions to “raise the legal threshold for revoking a dealer’s license; extend gun rights to buyers who had faced restrictions because of mental illness or inability to manage their own finances; and end extra scrutiny of stabilizing braces, gun accessories that have been used in mass shootings to lethal effect.” In other words, they have reversed all the progress made under the Biden administration, loosening regulations even more. 

Following an executive order signed by Trump in February 2025, the entire government has been deployed to ensure that anyone, no matter who they are or what they’ve done, is entitled to pack heat at all times. The president has instructed the Justice Department to investigate “ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens,” which, in practice, means they are going after state and local regulations, challenging state bans on semi-automatic weapons and restrictions on the sales of certain handguns. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms no longer has zero-tolerance for criminal gun dealers, who have basically been given immunity if they are caught illegally selling guns. The Department of Veterans Affairs is allowing veterans who have been declared incompetent to handle their own money to purchase firearms. Health and Human Services is no longer tracking gun deaths or properly funding research into prevention. It’s all hands on deck. 

This is one area in which it cannot be argued that Trump is an extremist. In fact, all of this would have gladly been done in any GOP administration if they thought they could get away with it. Their fealty to the gun lobby, coupled with a fanatical insistence that the Second Amendment guarantees unfettered gun rights, has long been fundamental Republican dogma. 

But there is one new tactic that is pure Trump, and it’s as much about grift as it is about guns. And Don Jr. is right in the middle of it. 

As the Washington Post recently reported, in the course of eliminating more than 34 gun regulations, the ATF has proposed to eliminate the requirement that background checks for gun purchases be done in person. This was part of a 1968 congressional mandate in the wake of Lee Harvey Oswald’s use of a pseudonym to purchase the mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle he used to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. In addition, following a finding from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that a century-old ban on sending handguns through the mail is unconstitutional, the administration is in the process of ordering the Post Office to rescind that regulation. 

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All of this benefits one company in particular: GrabaGun, which sells guns online. The company would like to be able to conduct its own digital background checks and sell directly to buyers, instead of being forced to send their weapons to licensed gun dealers, who then perform the background checks in person. GrabaGun bills itself as the “Amazon of guns.” And who sits on its board, and has a stake in the company? Donald Trump Jr., a well-known gun aficionado who loves to kill endangered species. 

Trump Jr. became involved with GrabAGun in December 2025, just after his father was elected to a second term. As a spokesman and consultant involved in marketing strategy, he was given 300,000 shares in the company and was present at the New York Stock Exchange when GrabaGun went public, even helping to ring the bell. The response from the GOP, which had a fit over Hunter Biden being a board member of a Ukrainian company when his father was vice president, has been crickets — even though Trump Jr.’s affiliation with GrabaGun is a much more obvious conflict of interest.

According to Reuters, industry experts say the changes in these laws are expected to drive huge growth in online gun sales, resulting in big profits for online gun sellers like GrabaGun — and, by extension, for Donald Trump Jr. The company claims that Junior was hired purely because he supported Second Amendment issues, and all parties claim that nobody knew anything about anything. But it’s pretty clear this is just another Trump family grift, and that it will likely have lethal consequences.

While the NRA may have lost its mojo, the right-wing crusade to make America even more of a shooting gallery than it already is goes on. Somebody’s going to make a profit at it, and the Trumps are always first in line to wet their beaks.