Never before has a president commanded such control over his party in Congress. President Trump has reversed decades of Republican orthodoxy on tariffs, NATO, and Ukraine, among other things. And lawmakers have followed him without hesitation.
That power represents an opening. If he wants to, Trump can deliver what no other president has managed: real gun reform.
That’s the play to decimate the Democrats in 2026 and earn his place in history. This Congress would follow him. If he chose gun reform, they would deliver it. And in November next year, we would all watch him waltz across a map lit up red once again.
The Minneapolis shooter bought the guns legally, with no flags or barriers. And that’s the problem. The system worked exactly the way it was built, and a killer still walked through it.
Background checks, red-flag laws, safe-storage rules will not stop every shooter. But that has never been the standard. The point is to make it harder, to change the odds. These laws would bring children home to their parents at the end of the school day.
And I’ll say this plainly: If Donald Trump stopped school shootings, me and every other mother in America would chisel him into Mount Rushmore ourselves. I’ll take the first shift.
This is why Trump breaking the gun lobby would not just change the issue, it would change the political map.
One of the Democrats’ defining issues for decades would vanish overnight. They would have no way to campaign against it. And the media would melt down trying to process it.
There is precedent. After 9/11, George W. Bush and a Republican Congress pushed through the Patriot Act. Democrats did not dare oppose it, and Republicans used that moment to expand their majority in the 2002 midterms.
Gun reform should do that for Trump. A move so bold that it defines his era and secures his majority.
We expected that moment to come after Sandy Hook. First graders were slaughtered in their classroom. If anything was going to break Washington’s paralysis, that was it. But it wasn’t.
That was the day America learned Congress wasn’t ready. Congress is ready now, if the president tells them to be.
For decades, Republicans were terrified of the National Rifle Association. They feared losing the support of the gun lobby and being primaried out of their seats.
Today, the NRA is weakened, plagued by scandal and shrinking membership. And Republicans’ real primary fear is the president himself.
But here is the thing: They would have the wind at their back. Gun reform is a majority issue.
Over eight in 10 Americans support universal background checks. Most support red-flag laws. Even many Republicans do.
This is one of the rare places where Trump could put his party firmly with the majority and leave Democrats speechless. Imagine Republicans campaigning in 2026 on protecting children from school shootings. That is the ultimate tough-on-crime platform.
Trump can see the upside. He wants more than judges and tax cuts. He wants history.
If he ended America’s grotesque cycle of kids hiding under desks and in closets, it would be an unassailable legacy move. He would get credit not only at home but abroad, where gun violence is seen as America’s great self-inflicted wound.
His slogan has always been America First. What could be more faithful to that than protecting American children before anything else? If America is to be first, it must first be safe.
Instead, America is bleeding. Close to 47,000 Americans died from gun suicides, homicides and accidents in 2023. Our gun homicide rate is over 25 times higher than that of other wealthy countries.
Mass shootings have become so common that kids run lockdown drills the same way they do fire drills. Allies warn their citizens about American gun violence in official travel advisories.
Trump has the opening right now to shock the system, crush Democrats and cement his place in history. This is how he should do it.
Not by echoing the left, but by framing reform as strength, order and winning. He is the only one who can finally bend the curve of American gun violence.
Shannon Felton Spence is a public affairs specialist at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a frequent commentator on U.S. politics and foreign policy.
