The dilemma for Mr. Trump is that those are often the same thing.

He is facing pressure from lawmakers in both parties to go further in restricting weapons than the N.R.A. would like. And he seems to appreciate that he has a unique ability to sway skeptical Republicans given that conservatives largely trust him on the issue in a way they never did with Barack Obama. “There’s one president since I’ve been involved in any of this that can get this done,” said Senator Joe Manchin III, the West Virginia Democrat who co-wrote the last major gun control bill to come to a vote in the Senate in 2013. “And it’s him.”

The ties between him and the millions of Americans for whom gun ownership is a personal and political consideration are stronger and more natural than many Republicans could have predicted when he first started running for president in 2015.

Mr. Trump had supported an assault weapons ban and at one point appeared to wish that there were no guns at all in the United States. He told CNN’s Larry King in a 1999 interview, “There’s nothing I like better than nobody has them, but that’s not going to happen.”

But by the time of his 2016 campaign, a formal working relationship became a matter of political necessity on both ends — gun activists who were single-mindedly determined to stop four more years of a Democratic president and a candidate who needed the validation and grass-roots muscle that a conservative powerhouse like the N.R.A. could offer.

Mr. Trump came to appreciate the potency that gun rights — and the fear of having them stripped away — had with many of his supporters. And it became an extension of the cultural battles he eagerly threw himself into.

“It was very much a culture thing,” said David Bossie, who was Mr. Trump’s deputy campaign manager. Gun owners tended to be cut from the same blue-collar cloth that held together Mr. Trump’s core constituency. They gravitated toward his tough talk on defending the Second Amendment in the same way they did on other issues like crime, trade and illegal immigration.

“He had this connection to people who felt like he cared about them, their well-being, their family, safety and security,” Mr. Bossie added.