Donald Trump’s initial response to Wednesday’s horrific mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, was to blame the shooter’s neighbors and classmates for failing to heed the warning signs. Then, perhaps realizing that his talking point required some amendment, the president delivered a prepared speech on Thursday that sought to cast the shooting as a mental-health and school-safety issue, not a gun-control one. “We are committed to working with state and local leaders to help secure our schools, and tackle the difficult issue of mental health,” Trump said, promising to meet with elected officials and law enforcement to begin discussing strategies to secure schools. “It is not enough to simply take actions that make us feel like we are making a difference. We must actually make that difference.”

Trump’s comments inspired the typical backlash from critics who accused the president and his Republican cohorts of being in the N.R.A.’s pocket. But they rang particularly hollow in light of the White House’s own actions: just two days before the shooting, the Trump administration submitted a 2019 budget proposal that would cut funding to help schools prevent, and recover from, such tragedies. According to Politico, the request proposed that funds for national school-safety activities be reduced by $25 million, among other things:

President Donald Trump’s budget would eliminate altogether a $400 million grant program that districts can use, for example, to prevent bullying or provide mental health assistance.

Trump’s budget would also zero out the School Emergency Response to Violence program, known as Project SERV—funded at $1 million in 2017—that in years past provided millions in funds used by the district in Newtown . . . [and] would eliminate “project prevention grants” as part of its proposal that would cut $25 million in national school safety activities. Those grants have directed millions to school districts with pervasive violence to help pay for activities like counseling and conflict resolution.

The cuts lay bare what has come to resemble an immutable law of the Trump presidency: “There’s always a tweet”—which is to say that, for every statement that comes out of the White House, Trump has made some comment on Twitter, or his staffers have proposed some legislation, that says or accomplishes the exact opposite. Gun control is no exception. Though in recent days Trump allies in Congress have hewed to the mental-health talking point—“It seems to be common for a lot of these shootings . . . is the mental state of the people, and we have not done a very good job of making sure that people that have mental reasons for not being able to handle a gun getting their name into the F.B.I. files, and we need to concentrate on that,” Senator Chuck Grassley told reporters on Thursday—they voted in the first month of Trump’s presidency to roll back an Obama-era rule designed to make it more difficult for mentally disabled people to purchase firearms. (Grassley, incidentally, vocally supported the rollback at the time.)

While some Republican members did propose concrete measures to understand the link between mental illness and gun violence—Rep. Bob Goodlatte, for instance, recently proposed ending the restrictions that prevented the Centers for Disease Control from studying the matter—the majority, so far, have refrained from going beyond the talking point. In fact, under Trump, the Republican Congress has either loosened gun-control restrictions, or ignored every attempt to fix laws that could prevent mass shootings. To some extent, this sort of hypocrisy is par for the course when it comes to gun-control debates; lawmakers offer “thoughts and prayers” with one hand, and with the other pocket generous donations from the N.R.A. But in the Trump era, such contradictions are not an exception, but a rule.