Four years ago, Wayne LaPierre’s face was plastered across New York’s tabloid covers as a “gun nut” and a “loon”. His refusal to admit gun laws had anything to do with the Sandy Hook school massacre earned him the title of the “craziest man on earth”.
Today, LaPierre sits at the left hand of the president. Trump seems eager to flatter the National Rifle Association’s executive vice-president and CEO, the leader of the group that became one of his most loyal champions and spent more than $30m to back his candidacy.
In his second week as president, Trump called LaPierre to the White House for a special meeting of conservative leaders. Securing a new supreme court nominee who would guard the court’s favorable rulings on gun rights had been the NRA’s highest election priority, and Trump had just delivered it.
The president asked LaPierre to introduce himself. “Wayne, I would say they know you,” said Trump, referring to the group of conservative leaders. “Perhaps they know you better than they know me.”
LaPierre laughed, as did others around the room. “I doubt that,” he said.
The photograph of LaPierre and Trump turned towards each other, the president eagle-eyed and benevolent, LaPierre’s face scrunched in a wide grin, is already being used by gun violence prevention groups as a fundraising tool.
Trump has promised to support a sweeping pro-gun agenda, and the NRA has told its members that it’s finally time for the group “to go on offense”. But LaPierre’s ascendancy marks more than a shift towards ever looser gun laws. It’s a triumph for the political strategy that LaPierre perfected, one that has frequently been derided as extreme and paranoid.
Trump won the White House, and is now governing the country, using the same playbook as LaPierre: always attack, never apologize and treat the news media as the opposition party.
“If you want to understand some of the approach and personality of Donald Trump, I think you look at what Wayne LaPierre has been doing for a long time. He’s a little bit of a test run of what Trump been doing,” said Arkadi Gerney, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and longtime gun control advocate.
Asked what Trump and LaPierre have most in common, Gerney said, simply: “Lying.”
LaPierre’s spokesman, Andrew Arulanandam, declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the president’s relationship with the NRA.
LaPierre and other NRA leaders have long argued, even as the gun control movement has set increasingly modest aims, that Democrats’ real goal is confiscation of Americans’ firearms. LaPierre claimed that a narrow expansion of background check laws after Sandy Hook would be turned into a national registry of gun owners, something that is prohibited by federal law, and that the final background check legislation explicitly said it would not do.
“The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill,” a furious Barack Obama said after the legislation failed to advance in the Senate. “They claimed that it would create some sort of ‘big brother’ gun registry, even though the bill did the opposite. This legislation, in fact, outlawed any registry. Plain and simple, right there in the text. But that didn’t matter.”
LaPierre’s antagonism towards the mainstream media and liberal politicians is rooted in some real failings. News reporting on American gun politics is sometimes marked by condescension of and ignorance towards gun owners.
Democrats have continued to champion some anti-gun measures that have little evidence behind them. The assault weapon ban, for instance, is a symbolic policy that even a senior Obama administration admitted would be unlikely to save many lives.
But for decades, LaPierre has also pushed an apocalyptic view of the United States as besieged by terrorists and violent criminals. Trump and his administration have embraced a similar dark vision of “American carnage”, which runs counter to crime data that show decades of increasing safety and declining violence. Trump has seized on a real recent uptick in murders as a devastating development. His new attorney general suggested this week, to the astonishment of America’s crime experts, that he believes the increase is a “dangerous permanent trend”.
Like Trump, LaPierre has been criticized by liberals as a power-player who rakes in millions by fearmongering and railing against the establishment. Both men have been painted by the left as manipulators who fail to represent the true interests of their base, a view undermined by their continued popularity.
When confronted with the dark side of America’s gun culture, LaPierre has gone on the offensive. Days after the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012, which left 26 students and educators dead, LaPierre’s combative pro-gun press conference was widely derided as tone deaf and out of touch. In response to 20 first-graders being shot to death by a disturbed young man with a military-style rifle, LaPierre denied that guns were the problem. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he told a room packed with reporters.
LaPierre slammed “our nation’s refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill”, and put the blame for the shooting on violent video games and Hollywood films, not the easy access to guns by deeply disturbed young men. To respond to the country’s mass shooting problem, he proposed a program to put armed police officers in every school in America.
LaPierre almost dared the room of reporters to respond to his speech with “shocking headlines”, and they did. One Republican commentator called the speech “very haunting and very disturbing”. Chris Christie, then a potential Republican presidential contender, told a reporter: “I don’t necessarily think having an armed guard outside every classroom is conducive to a positive learning environment.” Billionaire gun control advocate Michael Bloomberg slammed LaPierre for offering a “paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe”.
Despite the political fallout from this speech, the NRA would ultimately win out in the battle to block new federal gun control laws after Sandy Hook – a victory that cemented the group’s political influence, and its status as one of the most hated organizations for the left.
Over the next years, despite a steady drumbeat of mass shootings, Congress refused to pass any new gun control legislation. Obama would continue to call out the NRA for pushing “conspiracy” and “the imaginary fiction in which Obama’s trying to take away your guns”, as he put it in 2016. He told a CNN town hall that year that he had repeatedly invited the NRA to speak with him, “but the conversation has to be based on facts and truth”. The NRA had simply declined to participate in the televised conversation about guns in America.
Under previous Republican presidents, the NRA had been in the good graces of the White House. In 2000, an NRA official claimed that the group was so close with George W Bush that if he won, “we’ll have a president where we work out of their office – unbelievably friendly relations.”
But LaPierre’s fierce anti-government rhetoric has at times alienated some Republican leaders. In 1995 LaPierre sent out a fundraising letter about the threat of “jack-booted government thugs”, a letter that came shortly before anti-government extremists carried out a terror attack in Oklahoma City. In response, former President George HW Bush publicly resigned from the NRA.
“Your broadside against federal agents deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor; and it offends my concept of service to country,” the elder Bush wrote. “It indirectly slanders a wide array of government law enforcement officials, who are out there, day and night, laying their lives on the line for all of us.”
LaPierre later apologized, saying the words were misunderstood.
With Trump, the NRA is once again celebrating the optics of being a key ally of the White House. Trump came to the presidential campaign with little record as a gun rights champion. He once supported a ban on assault weapons. But NRA leaders endorsed him early, and stood with him through a careening candidacy that included his claim that “second amendment people” might be able to stop Hillary Clinton from appointing supreme court judges if she were elected, an offhand comment widely interpreted as a threat of violence or assassination.
“We saw through the media deception, and recognized him for who he was: the most openly pro-second amendment presidential candidate in history,” LaPierre said in a recent video address to members.
“They made a bet on an extreme candidate, and it paid off,” Gerney said.
Gun control advocates are now sharing the photograph of LaPierre in the White House to rally their supporters for the coming fight over more expanded, permissive gun laws. After Sandy Hook, LaPierre “lied to the faces of grieving Americans and tried to convince them that the only thing capable of keeping them safe is a gun”, Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat and one of Congress’s most vocal gun control supporters, said in a statement. “That has never been true and it will never be true.
“When you exaggerate and you mislead people and you fearmonger and you intensify people’s beliefs and divide people,” that strategy “may overwhelm a more disorganized, better-informed majority perspective”, said Gerney, the longtime gun control advocate.
“But, at some point, if the more diverse majority coalition can coalesce, then you may have discredited yourself from being at the table.”