When it comes to guns, Donald Trump wants to have it both ways.
Days after clinching the National Rifle Association’s endorsement, the presumptive Republican nominee seemed to simultaneously reject and reaffirm his support for arming teachers in classrooms.
“I don’t want to have guns in classrooms, although in some cases teachers should have guns in classrooms, frankly,” Trump said Sunday on Fox News.
Still, he continued: “I’m not advocating guns in classrooms, but remember in some cases — and a lot of people have made this case — teachers should be able to have guns. Trained teachers should be able to have guns in classrooms.”
Gun rights are just one of several policy areas where Trump staked out hard-right policy positions that helped him successfully snag the Republican nomination, but may not fit so neatly with the general electorate in November.
Trump’s apparent waffling on whether to arm teachers once again raises questions about his consistency on key policy issues. And for Republicans who continue to oppose Trump’s candidacy, the billionaire’s latest response on guns reinforces their argument for being part of the “#NeverTrump” movement.
“He’s always got a new position on everything because there’s nothing consistent in his own philosophical nature,” Republican strategist Rick Wilson said. “He says what he thinks people want to hear at the moment. He’s always playing to the crowd.”
Trump’s contradictory comments came after Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton put him on his heels with a strongly-worded rebuttal Saturday night to his address at the NRA a day earlier during which Trump stuck to the hardline positions on gun rights he adopted during the Republican primary.
Speaking at the Trayvon Martin Foundation, Clinton lambasted Trump for opposing expanded background checks and wanting to introduce guns into classrooms across the United States.
“He said that also on his first day in office he’d mandate that every school in America allow guns in classrooms…That idea isn’t just way out there, it’s dangerous,” Clinton said. “Parents, teachers and schools should have the right to keep guns out of classrooms just like Donald Trump does at many of his hotels, by the way.”
Clinton was referring to a campaign pledge Trump made during a January rally where he vowed to “get rid of gun-free zones in schools…and on military bases.”
“My first day, it gets signed, OK? My first day. There’s no more gun free zones,” Trump said at the Burlington, Vermont rally.
“You know what a gun-free zone is to a sicko? That’s bait,” Trump also said at the rally.
And three months earlier in the wake of a shooting at an Oregon community college that claimed 10 lives, Trump argued that “if you had a couple of the teachers or someone with guns in that room, you would have been a hell of a lot better off.”
Trump’s reaction to Clinton’s claim that Trump wants “guns in classrooms” was to reject it out of hand.
“Crooked Hillary said that I want guns brought into the school classroom. Wrong!” Trump tweeted late Saturday night.
Trump’s conflicting responses to Clinton’s attack underscore the deluge of criticism Trump has faced from conservatives since launching his campaign last year: that he’s not truly married to the movement’s ideology.
On a slew of issues at the heart of the conservative cause — including gun rights, abortion and taxes — Trump has neatly toed the Republican Party line despite professing views anathema to the party platform in years before he entered politics.
He previously supported abortion rights and floated the idea of a one-time massive tax hike on the wealthy.
And while he’s likened Clinton’s support of stricter gun control measures to a push to “abolish the 2nd Amendment,” Trump wrote in 2000 that he supported the assault weapons ban and favored longer waiting periods to purchase a firearm.
He even said President Barack Obama “spoke for me and every American” when Obama called for action to combat gun violence in the wake of the Newtown school shooting in 2012.
Trump has already shown signs of wavering on some of his primary positions, saying he would now like to see a higher minimum wage in the U.S. and that the richest Americans wouldn’t see the large-scale tax cuts he had promised.
And while Trump has ridiculed the mountains of scientific evidence pointing to the existence of global warming, Politico reported Monday that Trump is leaning on that same scientific evidence to build a sea wall that would protect one of his golf courses from “global warming and its effects.”
Those who are lining up behind Trump since he became the party’s presumptive nominee aren’t leaning so much on Trump’s record, but instead laying out the dangers of a Clinton administration.
In the lead-up to their endorsement, the NRA’s top officials Wayne LaPierre and Chris Cox spent more time slamming Clinton than talking up Trump’s record on guns.
“If she could, Hillary would ban every gun, destroy every magazine,” LaPierre, the group’s president, said as he warned that Clinton could nominate an anti-gun Supreme Court justice who would reshape the landscape of gun rights in America.
“The 2nd Amendment is on the ballot in November,” Cox said.