In a repeat from the campaign, Trump snubbed gun rights in his written agenda for the next four years.
On Monday, the White House unleashed a flood of Day One executive orders tackling everything from immigration to federal hiring to cryptocurrency. It also launched a new website that spelled out the incoming administration’s priorities. One key issue absent from both was gun policy.
While these are only the earliest days of the Trump Administration, and the lack of major immediate action on policy or personnel directly related to firearms doesn’t necessarily signal any change in Trump’s approach to the issue, it is another sign guns are not one of his top priorities. Leaving them off the administration’s literal priority list may even be the most prominent sign yet.
But the signs have been there for a while. Though Trump has been vocally pro-gun throughout his time as a politician, he was fairly light on detailed promises in his 2024 campaign. Although he promised to roll back Former President Joe Biden’s efforts to restrict access to firearms during a February 2024 speech to the NRA, he made little mention of the issue elsewhere on the campaign trail and canceled on the gun-rights group just days before the election.
Then, he helped strip nearly all of the gun policy promises from the GOP platform during the 2024 Republican National Convention. The only mention of gun rights in that platform came as part of the preamble, where it was bunched together with several other freedoms.
Now, the official priority list for the Trump White House drops even that fleeting mention.
As with Pam Bondi’s nomination for Attorney General and the lack of questioning about her past support for “Red Flag” laws and age restrictions on gun ownership at her confirmation hearing, the literal deprioritization of gun policy in the first days of the second Trump Administration is a bad sign for gun-rights activists.
It is still early, though. Trump may still have some executive gun actions to publish by the end of his first week or even his first hundred days, which is the more traditional marker for judging what a new administration is really focused on.
However, during his first days, Trump clearly tried to make a big push in the areas he values. Guns were not one of those areas—at least not in comparison to the others.
He has three years, eleven months, and 51 weeks or so to impact gun policy. Even if it isn’t a top priority, Trump will inevitably leave his mark on America’s firearms policies. In fact, simply not taking a whole-of-government approach to restricting guns for most Americans will still provide a noticeable contrast to the Biden Administration.
Not instituting new restrictions might be enough to keep many gun voters happy. But gun-rights activists want more than that, and the very early indications are not great on that front.