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In 2020, Republicans opened their national convention with a swaggering couple who had become cause célèbre in conservative circles for aiming guns at Black Lives Matter protesters marching through their St. Louis neighborhood. Mark and Patricia McCloskey, who would later plead guilty to misdemeanor charges and surrender their weapons, championed Donald Trump’s re-election and warned that an out-of-control government led by Democrats could come for any and all gun owners if left unchecked.
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A scant six years later, Mark McCloskey expressed a surprisingly similar sentiment. “Say goodbye to the Second Amendment. Once again, the government [is] using crisis to take away your rights,” he posted on Monday.
McCloskey—who rose to national prominence for his advocacy of the Second Amendment and later become an advocate for those prosecuted for their conduct on Jan. 6, 2021—was referring to Trump and his fellow Republicans. On Monday, days after federal officers fatally shot a second protester against immigration raids in Minneapolis, the White House again suggested that 37-year-old Alex Pretti was to blame because he had a registered gun tucked in his waistband while he was filming—not the federal Border Patrol officers who pinned him down, disarmed him, and then shot him.
“Any gun owner knows that when you are carrying a weapon, when you are bearing arms, and you are confronted by law enforcement, you are raising the assumption of risk and the risk of force being used against you,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters during a feisty briefing on Monday.
This he-had-it-coming mentality is one that stems from the top of this administration. After the Saturday killing of Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis—one filmed from just about every possible angle as officers shot him at least 10 times in five seconds—administration officials sought to cast Pretti as the aggressor, an “assassin” aiming to “massacre law enforcement.”
That rhetoric is not sitting comfortably in Washington or even within some corners of the Trump coalition. The MAGAverse, after all, championed folks like the McCloskeys as heroes standing their ground and using guns as tools of intimidation. “That’s what the guns were there for, and I’d do it again anytime the mob approaches me,” Mark McCloskey said after entering his guilty plea in 2021.
It was a similar brand of defiance from—and praise for—Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted on criminal charges after he fatally shot two people during the 2020 civil unrest in Kenosha, Wis. Rittenhouse, who emerged as an avatar of anti-Black Lives Matter discourse, said he traveled to Kenosha to protect businesses and acted in self defense.
It’s almost impossible to square support for Second Amendment rights for the likes of McCloskeys and Rittenhouse alongside a denial of them when employed by Pretti. For decades, guns have been a birthright among conservatives. (To be fair, it’s the top issue for few voters, usually in the 3% to 5% range in polls.) Any challenge to gun rights was immediate heresy, disqualifying in any measure. Yet here is Trump, elected with strong support of those who cited his support for guns, undermining that very orthodoxy in the name of suppressing growing dissent in Minneapolis.
Hence, the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, and Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus have all sought distance from the Trump argument. So, too, did some typical Trump allies. (For an accounting of defections or faltering, see here.)
Minnesota has long allowed pretty wide gun rights. Heck, you can even bring a weapon into the state capitol building with a license. But that has not stopped the Trump posture that has defined so much of his return to power: FAFO.
“I don’t like any shooting. I don’t like it,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal. “But I don’t like it when somebody goes into a protest and he’s got a very powerful, fully loaded gun with two magazines loaded up with bullets also. That doesn’t play good either.”
Many of his Administration’s top officials have backed him up.
“No one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm that is loaded with two full magazines,” FBI Director Kash Patel said.
Added Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino: “We respect that Second Amendment right, but those rights don’t count when you riot and assault, delay, obstruct and impede law enforcement officers and, most especially, when you mean to do that beforehand.”
This all might sound like some of the country’s most prominent Republicans have rethought their views on the Second Amendment. But intellectual consistency is often optional in Trump’s orbit. The President himself has shown an open indifference to absolute truths. If it sounds good, it’s true enough, he likes to say.
Americans have noticed. A paltry 32% of Americans consider the President to be honest and trustworthy, according to an Economist-YouGov poll this month. It’s the admonition from Trump’s first turn in Washington that became a parody of itself: Take him seriously but never literally.
But on the political right, guns are a brand apart. It’s one part lionizing and one part victimhood for those who find their gun rights challenged. Yet Pretti does not seem to be part of the right’s favored tribe, which is why we are seeing fissures—but not fractures—in the GOP base on this.
But it may be the folks like the McCloskeys who register the most serious shake inside the Trump orbit. When they spoke via video to the Republican convention in 2020, they warned of the end of the suburbs and profligation of low-quality apartment complexes, while also wrapping themselves in the victim swaddle: “What you saw happen to us could just as easily happen to any of you who are watching from quiet neighborhoods around our country.”
It was quite the shift by Monday, when Mark McCloskey registered his betrayal about what he was hearing from Washington. “So now Kash Patel, who is supposed to uphold the Constitution, says it is a Capital Offense (meaning it’s OK to kill you) if you lawfully carry your weapon and ammo to a protest.”
And from Rittenhouse, who has made Second Amendment advocacy his cause these days, came similar rejection of Trump’s footing.
“Carry everywhere. It is your right. #ShallNotBeInfringed,” Rittenhouse posted on social media.
The outrage is real. The consequence is less apparent.
— With reporting by Nik Popli
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