In this congratulatory video NRA Veep Wayne LaPierre credits NRA members for swinging the presidential election for Donald Trump. The mainstream media has all but completely ignored the idea that the gun vote torpedoed Hillary Clinton’s vision of a kindler, gentler, more inclusive kleptocracy. The liberals’ lamentations are all about disenfranchised working class white voters and apathetic African-Americans. All except for Alex Yablon over at Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun agitprop machine, The Trace. Here’s an excerpt from How the NRA Stoked the Populist Rage That Gave America President Trump:
In the wake of Trump’s gobsmacking victory, the NRA’s headlong support of the controversial Republican candidate no longer looks so rash. One interpretation of an outcome that even Trump’s own campaign didn’t see coming, as suggested by late stage insistence on voter fraud and a “rigged” election, is to conclude that the NRA got lucky. Terrified that Clinton would get elected and make good on her promises of gun reform, the group threw money at the race and drew an inside straight.
But the NRA isn’t known for luck — it’s known for ruthlessly effective political strategy, which for decades has kept candidates it likes in power and universally popular laws it opposes off the books . . . What has gone less noticed is how the group has succeeding [sic] in stoking populist furor that spills well beyond the people on its email list.
“Both the NRA and Trump promote a nostalgia for something that has been lost,” sociologist Scott Melzer, author of the 2012 book Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War, tells The Trace. The gun group and its candidate speak to “this white rural conservative population that feels left behind by economic shifts and cultural shifts. These changes pose a threat to their identity.”
Melzer says the NRA has figured out how to mobilize people by fostering a sense that they are threatened by outsiders. “That makes them the most effective social force in conservatism, and they’ve done so with language that Trump used,” he said. The NRA seized on this rhetoric to fuel its interest group politics.
Trump brought it to the larger arena of mainstream politics, then rode it to the Oval Office.
True story? How big a part did the NRA play in Trump’s victory? Did their $30m ad spend help put their boy over-the-top? If so, will Trump repay the favor by supporting the NRA’s post-election agenda: enacting national concealed carry reciprocity and putting “an end to gun-free zones”?