During his speech at the National Rifle Association’s annual conference in Dallas, Texas, President Donald Trump delighted the crowd by making reference to some of his greatest hits of campaign rhetoric, in which he made a bigoted attack on Mexican immigrants.

“These countries send up their worst,” Trump told the crowd. “Remember in my opening speech, I got criticized for it. Remember? Well, guess what. They’re not sending their finest. That I can tell you.”

But the mere fact that Trump made the decision to offer the NRA his unqualified support demonstrates that memory doesn’t always serve him.


In the immediate aftermath of the deadly school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the president assailed lawmakers for their failure to respond, ridiculing them for being “afraid” of the NRA. At the time, Trump offered to consider a range of policy responses, including a ban on bump stocks, and raising the minimum age to purchase assault weapons from 18 to 21.

That these commitments have fallen by the wayside did not escape the attention of Cameron Kasky, one of the Parkland survivors who has been publicly vocal about the need to enact some degree of common sense gun reform legislation. During a Saturday morning appearance on CNN’s “New Day,” Kasky laced into the president for being two-faced on the matter.

“He’s a professional liar who will say anything to appease whatever crowd he’s at,” Kasky said. “If he’s in front of families, he might say something in support of common-sense gun reform, but then when he’s at the NRA, he’ll say something to get a big cheer.

Kasky went on: “This is all spectacle. This is all just Trump trying to appeal to a crowd of people who really, really, really like weapons that shoot bullets fast.”

Parkland school massacre survivor @cameron_kasky calls President Trump a "professional liar" after his NRA speech. https://t.co/3jtNpnNUvc pic.twitter.com/YOzfRxiXvj — New Day (@NewDay) May 5, 2018

Kasky is not alone in pointing out Trump’s apparent falseness on the matter. The president also came in for some sharp criticism at the hands of Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, who used Trump’s appearance at the NRA’s confab to assail the president for “falsely” stating “that Democrats want all guns outlawed.”


Like Kasky, Smith noted that Trump’s public proclamations of support to the NRA membership came not long after he spoke about the way the organization used its “great power” to influence the debate and strike fear into the hearts of lawmakers. Smith also cited Trump’s previous offerings to put reform on the table, only to withdraw his support after the fact.

Elsewhere, the Washington Post’s Dan Balz issued something of a cri du coeur over Trump’s serial duplicity, in the pages of his paper. Per Balz:

Other presidents have lied about events and policies. So this president has some company. But from serial exaggerations to disregard for the facts (his claim that millions of people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton in 2016) to obvious falsehoods, deliberate or unconscious, Trump has a pattern and practice that is often breathtaking in its audacity.

While the proximate cause of Balz’s torsion is Trump’s deceit in the matter of Stormy Daniels, this is perhaps a hopeful sign that the Beltway’s most sage prognosticators are slowly but surely catching up to America’s teenagers in their overall awareness of our national predicament.