VF: Trump Administration Gave the NRA “Veto Power” Over Its Response to the Parkland Massacre
Posted by
mud
Jul 17 '23, 07:57
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Trump was reportedly so worried about losing the gun lobby’s support that he bucked his own administration’s recommendation to explore raising the minimum age for firearm purchases.
BY BESS LEVIN
JULY 17, 2023
In the immediate wake of the 2018 Parkland massacre, in which a 19-year-old walked into a Florida school and murdered 17 people, then president Donald Trump shocked Republicans with a series of statements in which he appeared to actually endorse doing something about gun violence. “You saw the president clearly saying not once, not twice, not three times, but, like, 10 times, that he wanted to see a strong universal background check bill,” Senator Amy Klobuchar said at the time. “He didn’t mince words about it.”
In the end, of course, he did jack shit to get a universal background check bill passed, an about-face that can probably be attributed in part to the fact that Trump was reportedly being advised on gun control by his eldest son, who famously gets his kicks hunting endangered species and posing for photos alongside his victims. Another thing that probably played a part? Trump’s well-known fealty to the National Rifle Association, which spent more than $30 million to help get him elected in 2016. According to a new report, that money effectively bought the organization “veto power” when it came to even the smallest effort to address gun violence.
In his upcoming book, Blowback, Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security official under Trump, recounts the administration’s efforts to produce a report on school safety after the Parkland shooting. Per Taylor, Education Department chief of staff Josh Venable was put in charge of overseeing the creation of the report, with input from the Health and Human Services, Justice, and Homeland Security agencies. Initially, Taylor reports, Venable was assured by West Wing staffers that the work would not be micromanaged, and over a monthslong process, all four departments agreed “to a series of recommendations on how to make U.S. classrooms safer and prevent shooting tragedies like Parkland.” Those recommendations included “a proposal to explore whether to raise the ‘minimum age’ for firearms purchases to twenty-one years of age.” To be clear, they were not actually recommending this, only simply saying the idea merited further study. Any guesses as to what happened next?
Taylor writes:
Donald Trump was terrified of losing the support of the National Rifle Association (NRA), an organization that would object to any discussion of the topic whatsoever. Trump’s staff demanded that the NRA review the draft report before it was issued. What’s more, White House staff told Venable that they didn’t want the report to mention “firearms” at all. He thought this was an absurdity. The whole purpose of the commission was to look at classroom safety in the wake of a mass shooting. It would be like writing a report about flood protection without mentioning rain or hurricanes.
This led to a curt back-and-forth between the Education Department and the White House. Venable objected strenuously. He was uncomfortable with allowing gun lobbyists to have veto power over a supposedly independent report on mass shootings, especially when teachers, chief state school officers, and mental health professionals weren’t being extended the same privilege. And he definitely wasn’t going to avoid the topic of “guns” like they wanted him to. “If you want me to do that, I’m done.” That’s how Venable said he felt. He was already frustrated over Trump’s reluctance to meet with the parents of Parkland shooting victims (the president had shown up late to one of the conversations). Now Trump was suddenly happy to engage on school safety if it was with the NRA. Venable knew this would send a terrible message.
According to Taylor, then secretary of education Betsy DeVos initially supported Venable, before beginning to “waver” under pressure from the White House, and eventually fully caving once Trump “personally got involved to insist the NRA have a say in the report.” Venable would ultimately quit before the report was released, and not surprisingly, the whole thing was devoid of any meaningful recommendations. When it came to age minimums, it read: “Existing research does not demonstrate that laws imposing a minimum age for firearms purchases have a measurable impact on reducing homicides, suicides, or unintentional deaths.” As Taylor notes, “This is the opposite of what experts were recommending internally. Ironically, the school shooting that prompted the report in the first place was perpetrated by a young man under the age of twenty-one, who had obtained the firearm legally.”
Meanwhile, Trump made it extremely clear that he basically did not give a f--k about the gun violence issue. Here’s Taylor again:
The day the report dropped, I was actually in the Oval Office with the president. My job was to brief him on how DHS could help protect school buildings. Trump was uninterested. He used the allotted time to rant about the border wall (“I want it to be a work of art,” he mused), whether it could be painted black to burn the hands of anyone who touched it (“How much would that cost?”), if Congress would fund it (“If they don’t give me the money, we shut the whole fucking border”), and whether there were any ways to put more pressure on America’s southern neighbor (“Let’s stick it to the Mexicans!”). Down the hall, the parents of school-shooting victims waited to meet with the president. He was late, again.
Asked for comment about the NRA’s reported receipt of “veto power,” a spokesman for Trump told Vanity Fair, “Miles Taylor is a loser and a lying sack of shit. His book either belongs in the discount bin of the fiction section or should be repurposed as toilet paper.”
In Blowback, Taylor warns that, should Trump win a second term, “the next MAGA administration won’t welcome more ‘Josh Venables’ into their ranks but will instead enlist” what former administration official Steve Bannon has called “a rising generation of assassins,” who will have to prove they are Trump-y enough in order to get in the door, and will not push back on anything. When it comes to the matter of guns, Taylor told Vanity Fair, “Several ex-officials from the Trump era expect NRA lobbyists will effectively be in charge of school safety in a Trump 2.0 administration.” Which is not at all hard to believe given Trump’s remarks at the group’s annual meeting in April.
“I was proud to be the most progun, pro–Second Amendment president you've ever had in the White House,” Trump told the audience. Mass shootings, he declared, are “not a gun problem.”
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