America’s 1st Freedom Looks at Trump’s Second First Year

President Donald Trump is in a somewhat unique position. He’s got a second first year in office. It’s not his very first, of course, but it’s his first year because everything had to be set up in order for him to govern. There were no incumbency benefits with an existing staff and infrastructure. Only Grover Cleveland shares that experience, and since he served as president at the end of the 19th Century, we can’t really ask him what it was like. Trump is the only president alive to know that feeling, which is kind of cool, really.

Now that we’re coming to the end of the year, there will be a lot of looking back on the president’s second first-year in office, and one of the first to do that is America’s 1st Freedom.

Promises made, promises kept. It’s the phrase President Donald Trump’s White House uses to emphasize this administration’s commitment to delivering on the agenda the American people endorsed at the ballot box. And unlike the case with so many cheap-talking politicians, the Trump administration has plenty of accomplishments to point to. This is especially true when it comes to President Trump’s promise to protect Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

Speaking at the 2024 NRA Annual Meeting in Dallas, Texas, President Trump told NRA members, “Let there be no doubt, the survival of our Second Amendment is very much on the ballot.” The president went on to explain, “In my second term, we will roll back every Biden attack on the Second Amendment.” President Trump’s Make America Great Again platform made clear that his party would “Defend our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and our fundamental freedoms, including … the right to keep and bear arms.”

Upon taking office on January 20, President Trump got to work on keeping his word.

Reining in the Administrative State
In February, President Trump issued an executive order, “Protecting Second Amendment Rights.” Of chief concern was reorienting the administrative state to protect, rather than infringe, the right to keep and bear arms.

During his inglorious term, President Joe Biden and his handlers had instituted a “whole-of-government” approach to attacking gun owners, the gun industry and Second Amendment rights. This means that they sought to leverage any bit of the sprawling federal bureaucracy they could to wage their anti-gun jihad.

The most formalized representation of this effort was the ill-named, and Kamala Harris-led, White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. The outfit served as a taxpayer-funded gun-control advocacy wing of the federal government, coordinating efforts to undermine the Second Amendment throughout the administrative state. Explaining this far-reaching undertaking, the former deputy director of the White House gun-control office told anti-gun publication The Trace, “Within our first week on the job, there was a cabinet meeting where the president and vice president challenged each agency to do more.”

President Trump shuttered the gun-control project immediately after assuming office.

There’s a whole lot more over there, and you should check it out, but I will say that President Trump’s administration has already solidified itself as the most pro-gun administration of my lifetime, if not for far longer than that. They’ve made major steps in restoring gun rights for millions of Americans, up to and including using the power of the Department of Justice to defend all civil liberties, including gun rights.

But that’s only to a point.

See, while Trump is the clear winner with regard to being the most pro-gun administration ever, it’s not like the bar was all that hard to clear. The DOJ has still held the line on a number of gun control measures being challenged. Attorney General Pam Bondi could just as easily have directed her office to take a pro-gun position on those matters. They didn’t, and that reflects on her and the president.

Then we have Bondi’s suggestion of denying guns to transgender Americans because of mental illness. While that might be popular with some folks, it would open the door for future administrations trying to deny gun rights to other groups. 

A lot of people see that and take it personally. They feel like they’re being betrayed by the president they helped elect, and I totally get that. I’m upset by these positions, too, though I’d still vote the same way if 2024 had to happen all over again. There just wasn’t much of a choice.

And, by and large, that choice has worked out pretty well. We’re better off than we were a year ago, and we will hopefully be even better off this time next year.

I mean, we at least killed the tax stamp on suppressors and short-barreled long guns, and might get them yoinked from the NFA entirely via the courts, and that’s a lot farther along than I ever thought we’d be.

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