This is a bad time for Trump to appear before the NRA
By Paul Waldman April 30 at 1:23 PM
The White House has confirmed that President Trump will be addressing the National Rifle Association convention this weekend, as will Vice President Pence, joining conservative video bloggers Diamond and Silk on the already star-studded speaker’s list. While Trump has appeared at NRA conventions before, he comes before them at a moment of greater risk for himself — and for the gun-rights group.
And this time, Trump will probably hurt their cause more than help it.
It is unlikely that Trump’s speech itself will produce something significant, because we’ve seen so many of these before. He arrives with a prepared speech paying tribute to his audience and their issue, then proceeds to ramble on for an hour about his great electoral college victory, the dishonest news media, the phony Russia investigation, and whichever liberal happens to be annoying him that week (look out, Michelle Wolf!). That’s how his speech to the NRA last year went. But the context is different this year. In the wake of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, the politics of guns have shifted in one critical way: Democrats are no longer afraid of the issue. The idea that the NRA wields terrifying power before which every politician of any party must bow has been punctured; more Democratic candidates are talking openly about new gun control measures, and liberal organizing on the issue has increased significantly.
One of the president’s goals in coming to the NRA convention is to convince gun voters — that subset of gun owners for whom gun rights are the most important issue of all — that they must vote in November. The message is not just that if Democrats are elected then Nancy Pelosi will personally come to your house, take away your guns, and then invite marauding gangs of minorities/immigrants/terrorists to kill you and defile your women, because every speaker at the convention will say that (not quite literally, though Wayne LaPierre might). It’s that loyalty to Trump himself demands you vote and work to make sure Republicans win.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/04/30/this-is-a-bad-time-for-trump-to-appear-before-the-nra/?utm_term=.56bf0da8243e&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1
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You'd think this was being held in Colorado, not Texas.
By the way, don't click through on that "speaker's list" hyperlink; the full list doesn't get any better. 
