At the National Rifle Association’s annual convention last year, in Atlanta, Donald Trump made his third consecutive appearance, but his first one as President of the United States. “You came through for me,” he told the eighty thousand people gathered. “And I’m going to come through for you.” It had been more than three decades since a sitting U.S. President had attended and addressed the group. At the N.R.A.’s 1983 meeting, in Phoenix, Ronald Reagan sought to shore up support for his impending reëlection campaign, telling those gathered that he would “never disarm any American who seeks to protect his or her family from fear and harm.” But Reagan also denounced armor-piercing bullets, which were outlawed later in his Presidency.

At this year’s gathering, in Dallas, Trump was a last-minute addition to a docket of speakers that already included Vice-President Mike Pence and the Texas senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. Since the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day, N.R.A.-backed politicians such as Trump, on whose Presidential campaign the group spent more than thirty million dollars, have sometimes attempted to walk an impossible line: openly considering calls for gun regulation while avoiding the N.R.A.’s wrath. In January, 2016, Trump said, at a rally, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” But after Parkland, under intense pressure, he began to speak differently. The White House held a “listening session” with students from the school and their families. The Parkland parent Cary Gruber went with his son Justin, a sophomore. “Trump said he’s his own man and he doesn’t need the N.R.A.’s money,” Gruber told me earlier this week. “He stood in front of all the other congressmen and talked about changing the age and all that,” Gruber added. “It was incredible. He seemed to be showing his strength to change some things.” At a televised White House meeting on gun legislation, in early March, Trump said, to the members of Congress gathered, “Some of you people are petrified of the N.R.A. You can’t be petrified.” He repeatedly referenced a “comprehensive bill” addressing gun regulation.

“Then, the day after he met with the N.R.A. behind closed doors, everything changed,” Gruber said. “It had just been a charade for TV. It’s very disheartening, how controlling their money is.” Before the convention began, I spoke to two other Parkland parents who said they were “very angry” about Trump’s appearance in Dallas. Michele Barrack, whose daughter Samara is a freshman, told me, “He won’t do anything to help us.” Remembering Trump’s comments to other Parkland parents, she said, “He met us after the shooting and lied to our faces.”

Thousands of spectators filled the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center on Friday morning, most of them white and white-haired and roaring with applause. Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker

On Friday, by midmorning, N.R.A. members began to gather in an arena space at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center. Many wore Trump shirts and MAGA hats. Jesse and Pat, a retired couple from West Texas, stopped to chat. “The N.R.A. is not responsible for what some crazy guy does at a school in Florida,” Jesse said. “We’re just law-abiding citizens.” “I just want to see Trump,” Pat added. There was nothing to do for a few hours but listen to high-decibel music, including a performance by a country band called Joe Nichols, which opened, unexpectedly, with a cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s 1992 rap hit, “Baby Got Back.” Throughout the buildup to Trump’s arrival, N.R.A. promotional bits appeared on huge screens over the stage. The most popular of these was an NRATV video in which a bunch of lemons, representing journalists, are dropped into a blender to make lemonade. The thousands of spectators filling the risers, most of them white and white-haired, roared with applause.

Pence took the stage after the N.R.A.’s Chris Cox had warmed up the crowd. “President Donald Trump and I both stand without apology with the Second Amendment,” he told the attendees. He offered a brief and partisan history of the group and spoke about the pioneers of the West, with their “Springfields, Winchesters, and Colts.” He then listed the Administration’s accomplishments. “Fifteen months of promises made and promises kept,” he said. “And we’re just getting started.” He played many familiar notes: defending Americans from MS-13, constructing a border wall, protecting the sanctity of human life, nominating conservative Supreme Court Justices, celebrating law-enforcement heroes. He also had a message for “the national media,” he said. “Start telling the whole story to the American people.”

Trump followed, looking relaxed. He quickly dismissed “Fake News CNN,” though he said NBC “may be more distorted and worse.” He endorsed the governor of Texas (light applause), praised Cruz (big applause), and mentioned YouTube’s most famous African-American Trump supporters, Diamond & Silk (biggest applause).

“Your Second Amendment rights are under siege,” he said at one point, before adding, somewhat confusingly, “But they will never ever be under siege as long as I am your President.”

Trump boasted of a declining unemployment rate, including, he said, among African-Americans, Hispanics, and women. “Doing well with North Korea,” he noted. Paul Manafort received a lot of time. Trump reminded the audience that he wasn’t the first Presidential candidate to employ Manafort—a “nice guy” whom he employed “for a couple months”—during a campaign.

As for gun laws, Trump suggested that if only a patron at the Bataclan theatre, in Paris, had had a gun when terrorists struck there, in 2015, “it would have been a whole different story.” (The Paris attacks were perpetrated by nine men, in three distinct groups, at six separate locations; they killed a hundred and thirty people and injured more than four hundred others.) Trump mentioned Chicago, which, he said, “has the toughest gun laws in the country, but you know what’s happening.” And then he offered some rather unspecific details about “a once very prestigious hospital” in London. “Right in the middle is like a war zone for horrible stabbing wounds,” he said. “Yes, that’s right,” he went on. “They don’t have guns, they have knives. And it’s said that there’s blood all over the floors at this hospital. They say it’s as bad as a military-war-zone hospital. Knives, knives, knives.”