President Donald Trump is not expected to weigh in on any policy solutions during the trip. | Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo Trump seeking to avoid gun debate during Vegas trip The president will make a trip to Nevada on Wednesday in the aftermath of Sunday's massacre at a country music festival just off the Strip.

The White House is seeking to delay any discussion of gun policy as it plans President Donald Trump’s trip to Las Vegas on Wednesday, following the mass shooting at an outdoor concert there earlier this week.

Trump is expected to meet with victims of the Las Vegas shooting and visit an area hospital, according to a White House official. He is not expected to weigh in on any policy solutions during the trip.


“With this investigation still in its early phases, we should avoid making sweeping policy decisions,” the White House official said.

But the White House may not be able to slow down the renewed debate over gun safety measures now being pushed to the forefront for the first time since Trump assumed the presidency.

On Tuesday, Sen. Chuck Schumer appeared to be setting the stage for another “Chuck and Nancy” moment in which the president could side with Democratic leaders against the interests of his own party—as he did last month on the debt ceiling—by appealing to Trump’s more progressive past on guns.

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“President Trump, before he ran for office, was for certain sane, rational, limited aspects of gun control,” Schumer said in remarks on the Senate floor. “Maybe he can have a bit of a reawakening because of the horror of what happened as he goes to Las Vegas tomorrow.”

Schumer also called on Trump to bring together a group of congressional leaders to discuss gun safety, and to come out against the “absurd law about silencers” and “threaten to veto it if he must.”

Democratic Hill aides also pointed with hope to another time Trump bucked the National Rifle Association, which backed his campaign with $30 million in donations – after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando last year, Trump tweeted that he supported barring people on the terror watch list from purchasing firearms.

When asked specifically about legislation pending in the House that would loosen restrictions on purchasing gun silencers, the president told reporters Tuesday morning, “We’ll talk about that later.”

The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has been an outspoken supporter of the silencer legislation. A Trump Organization spokeswoman declined to comment Tuesday when asked if his position had changed following the shooting.

Internally, White House officials said, there hasn’t been a detailed discussion on any specific bills – although that hasn’t stopped Trump in the past from going off script in the past and surprising his own advisers.

Gun safety activists said Trump was simply following the standard National Rifle Association playbook by trying to delay the politics and policy piece of his response to the shooting.

“I don’t remember not having the facts being a barrier for talking about terrorism, or other crises we’ve experiences as a nation since Trump was elected,” said Shannon Watts, founder of the gun control group Moms Demand Action. “The goal is to not talk about this.”

Watts, however, said she still sees value in the president making the trip to Las Vegas, even if he is there only in a symbolic role.

“I do think it’s important for him to go there and meet the survivors and to understand the real toll of gun violence,” she said. “The devastating impacts of being shot with an automatic weapon are something he should not be able to avoid. I do know lawmakers who have said when they saw the impact of gun violence on the families or on the bodies themselves, they changed their minds.”

