In February, a week after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting killed 17 students and staff members, President Trump hosted a listening session at the White House with survivors and families of the victims of gun violence, including some from Parkland, Florida. Trump looked at the assembled group, including Nicole Hockley who lost her 6-year-old son, Dylan, in the Newtown, Connecticut, massacre, and vowed to “figure it out,” to “do something about this horrible situation that’s going on.”

Shortly thereafter, Trump doubled down in a bipartisan meeting with members of Congress. “Some of you people are petrified of the NRA,” Trump said. “They have great power over you people, they have less power over me.”

But just two months later, it’s clear the NRA does, in fact, have the president in its pocket. For the first time since the Parkland shooting, the rise of the #NeverAgain movement, the nationwide outcry for gun control, and the March for Our Lives, Trump is expected to head to Dallas on Friday to speak at the NRA’s annual meeting. It will be the fourth consecutive year he has addressed the gun lobby. If Trump really considers himself uniquely immune to the NRA’s influence, he sure has a funny way of showing it.

“No child, no teacher should ever be in danger in an American school,” Trump said after Parkland. “No parent should ever have to fear for their sons and daughters when they kiss them goodbye in the morning.” But grand-poobahing with the organization that vehemently opposes even common sense gun reform, even as a clear majority of Americans support it, isn’t making me or my children any safer.

Given the NRA’s stronghold on the Republican Party, one might assume that addressing the group is a standard bit of GOP glad-handing. On the contrary, there is little presidential precedent for addressing the NRA at its annual meeting. In fact, last year, Trump became the first sitting president to do it in more than 30 years. (In 1995, the former President George H. W. Bush resigned as a Life Member of the NRA, after its then executive vice president Wayne LaPierre besmirched federal agents in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing and the Waco, Texas, standoff.) Even by Republican presidential standards, Trump’s willingness to rendezvous with the NRA is outsize. Not coincidentally, so is the NRA’s financial support of him; he received more from the NRA in 2016 than any presidential candidate in history.

It’s clear that the president’s words at the White House in February were empty ones (we could have guessed as much from his apathy in the weeks that followed). His actions now speak much louder: The support of the NRA, which invested an estimated $30 million in his 2016 campaign, is more valuable to him than the “horrible situation” of Americans being killed at school and at church. Inviting victims’ families to the White House and vowing to “do something”—only to backpedal a mere two months later—is another sad part of his legacy.

At his February listening session, Trump was holding a piece of paper with notes, ostensibly reminding him to express empathy. One bullet point instructed him to say the line “I hear you.” Apparently, that didn’t work out so well.