April 10, 2026 1:38 PM
Trump was headed to the NRA stage as the Texas massacre made the booking look uglier by the hour
Trump’s planned appearance at the NRA’s annual meeting landed in the immediate aftermath of the Uvalde school shooting, turning what might have been a standard rally-style booking into a fresh example of Trump-world tone-deafness. Even before he got to the microphone, the optics were working against him: a former president who had made firearms politics a core identity issue was preparing to headline the gun lobby’s marquee event while the country was reeling. The political screwup was not the speech itself but the decision to keep treating the booking as normal.