“Wayne’s listening to that and thinking, Uh, no, Mr. President, we give you cover,” the former senior White House official said in describing the conversation. The president reportedly asked LaPierre whether the NRA was willing to give in at all on background checks. LaPierre’s response, the sources said, was unequivocal: “No.” With that, “the Rose Garden fantasy,” as the NRA official described it to me, was scrapped as quickly as it had been dreamed up.

Earlier this afternoon, according to a person briefed on the call, the president told LaPierre in another phone call that universal background checks were off the table. “He was cementing his stance that we already have background checks and that he’s not waffling on this anymore,” the source told me. “He doesn’t want to pursue it.” In the call, the source added, Trump said he wanted to focus now on “increasing funding” for mental-health care and directing attorneys general across the country to start prosecuting “gun crime” through federal firearms charges from the Justice Department.

Read: Trump’s own aides doubt his latest push on guns

The NRA has been consumed by internal strife in recent months, including attempted coups from within, investigations into questionable spending by top executives, and a messy battle with its former advertising agency—all of which the group’s officials calmly refer to as “family issues.” Accordingly, many have speculated that the gun lobby’s clout is not what it once was, that its so-called family issues have caused the NRA’s grip on the GOP to soften. But as the conversations between Trump and LaPierre show, the NRA continues to influence gun policy, or lack thereof, in the Republican Party. Even with its leadership in disarray, the group has once more ensured that modest gun-control efforts are a nonstarter, turning a president who once boasted that he wasn’t “afraid” of the NRA into one of its most reliable advocates.

Other factors indicate that Trump likely will not pursue the issue of background checks. According to a White House official, while there was some chatter after the El Paso and Dayton shootings that the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel might look into executive action on background checks, nothing ever came of it. The official told me that apart from one Justice Department staffer being brought in to look into federal firearms charges, gun policy remains largely untouched. Added to that is the fact that few, if any, White House staffers have a particular interest or background in gun policy (the official told me the special assistant currently assigned to these issues mainly focuses on education policy).

Nothing with this president is ever certain, but the position Trump communicated in his call to LaPierre—who was once an ardent advocate of universal background checks—mirrors the one he expressed to reporters on Sunday. “People don’t realize, we have very strong background checks right now. You go in to buy a gun, you have to sign up. There are a lot of background checks that have been approved over the years, so I’ll have to see what it is,” Trump said on the tarmac before departing his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, for Washington.