I’d be very surprised if Trump doesn’t walk back everything problematic he said at the White House meeting on guns in fairly short order. Here’s a sign:

Tucker Carlson is right about what the reaction would have been if Obama had said the kind of things Trump said:

But Trump has a lot of credibility with the base, and everyone knows he is prone to say things in such meetings that he doesn’t mean (or he does mean, but only in that moment).

His disregard for due process is likely to be re-stated as a simple desire for expeditious due process, and he may well say the decision on the appropriate age for purchase of rifles is best left to the states.

Trump doesn’t have much a realistic alternative to recalibrating. An aggressive gun-control bill would almost certainly be defeated in Congress, even if he threw all his support behind it.