Sunday, 17 May , 2026
By PETER BAKER
WASHINGTON — Looking around the table at the White House one day this week, President Trump chided fellow Republicans for kowtowing to the National Rifle Association. “You’re afraid of the N.R.A., right?” he challenged one senator.
The next evening, Mr. Trump invited the leaders of the N.R.A. to the White House. “Good (Great) meeting in the Oval Office tonight with the NRA!” he wrote afterward. By Friday morning, his aides seemed to soften the president’s support for gun control measures opposed by the association, then denied that they were doing so.
If Mr. Trump and his team have yet to reach perfect coherence in their public messaging, it may stem from the president’s own tendency to veer sharply across the policy landscape. One moment he sounds ready to take on the gun lobby or unfair trading partners, and the next he is shifting gears and heading the opposite direction.
Odysseas Elytis, Greek poet, in a press conference on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize (1979)
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