On Friday, speaking in Harrisburg at the National Rifle Association’s annual outdoor recreation trade show, former President Donald Trump delivered a plain but meaningful message to thousands of shooting and hunting enthusiasts.
“Your Second Amendment will always be safe with me as your president,” Trump said during his first speech in Pennsylvania in 2024. “When I get back in the Oval Office, nobody is going to touch your firearm. That’s not going to happen.”
In his typically rambling and digressive style, Trump jumped from topic to topic — immigration, energy, electric cars, the indigent quality of highway medians in the nation’s capital — but returned several times throughout his 80-minute speech to Second Amendment rights and gun ownership.
Trump told the audience that he has appointed hundreds of federal judges, whom he described as “conservative originalists” to “interpret the Constitution as it was written,” and warned that another Biden administration would mean hundreds of “radical left judges crusading against law-abiding gun owners.”
He reminded the audience that he had reopened millions acres of federal lands designated for hunting and fishing, and during the pandemic, gun and ammunition retailers have been designated as critical infrastructure that is exempt from closure orders.
And Trump took credit for a key event Supreme Court 2022 decision that established a novel test for the constitutionality of state firearms laws, noting that his administration had filed a petition to overturn New York’s concealed carry requirement.
“I can tell you the only thing standing between you and the destruction of your Second Amendment is me,” Trump said.
Fresh off a symbolic victory in Nevada’s primary on Thursday, Trump emphasized the importance of Pennsylvania in this year’s presidential election. And with victories in Iowa and New Hampshire in his pocket, Trump has seemingly skipped the Pennsylvania primary, which is still more than 10 weeks away, not to mention his only opponent, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
“If you live in this Commonwealth, register everyone you know and encourage them to vote,” Trump said. “We have to win in November or we won’t have a Pennsylvania. They’ll change the name.”
It was not entirely clear what Trump was referring to, but in January the National Park Service put forward a proposal to remove the William Penn statue of Philadelphia’s Welcome Park was closed after protests from Republican Party lawmakers.
On Friday evening, Trump thanked U.S. Reps. Dan Meuser (R-9th District), Scott Perry (R-10th District), Guy Reschenthaler (R-14th District) and Lloyd Smucker (R-11th District), who were in the audience.
He also falsely claimed to have won two elections in Pennsylvania. Although he won the state by a landslide narrow margin in 2016Biden narrowly overtook Trump turn the state back to blue.
“We ran twice, we won Pennsylvania twice,” Trump said. “We did a lot better the second time than the first. That’s interesting, isn’t it?”
During Trump’s 2020 campaign, he has often spoken of his support for fracking and tried to portray Biden as an enemy of Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry. He returned to the topic Friday.
January 26 The Biden administration announced a fleeting pause in approving novel exports of liquefied natural gas to countries that do not have a free trade agreement with the United States. Pennsylvania lawmakers he expressed concern about the implications of the move for a plan to export gas from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale fields from a port near Philadelphia.
“We will reverse Biden’s ban on natural gas exports,” Trump said. “We will end his war on American energy and unleash Pennsylvania’s oil and natural gas at levels never seen before.”
Trump also criticized a recent proposal to sell Pennsylvania-based Japanese company US Steel.
“Pennsylvania steel was poured into the backbone of our country. And now U.S. Steel has just been sold to Japan,” Trump said. “I would not approve that deal.”
At the end of December The Biden administration has said the proposed sale to Japan “deserves serious scrutiny.”
Trump claimed he spoke to several Pennsylvania voters who said he was more popular in the state than in previous elections and said he would “wipe Pennsylvania off the face of the earth.”
“I think that will happen,” Trump said, referring to his chances of winning the 2024 election.
Despite the rhetoric, both Trump and Biden have had constrained ability to change gun policy
Pennsylvania poll shows Biden and Trump in a hypothetical rematch over the Keystone State.
Friday’s event was the third time Trump has spoken in Pennsylvania since announcing his reelection campaign. He spoke at a Moms for Liberty rally in Philadelphia in June and appeared in Erie in July.
With 19 electoral votes, Pennsylvania is considered a must-win state for a presidential candidate.
And although Dauphin County, home to the state capital, has held Democratic presidential nominations in the last two elections, it is a blue island in a sea of red, rural counties on electoral maps.
“To win Pennsylvania, he has to really mobilize his base. He has to make sure that people in rural areas are engaged,” Berwood Yost, director of the Franklin & Marshall College Center for Opinion Research, told the Capital-Star.
The decision to exhibit at the NRA Great Outdoor Show, considered the largest in the country, is a logical one, Yost said, because the event draws shooting and hunting enthusiasts from throughout rural Pennsylvania and beyond.
“If he can talk about freedom and liberty through the lens of the Second Amendment, then it makes sense for him to be here,” Yost said.
