Geraldo Claims Trump Told Him ‘I’m Not Afraid of the NRA’ After Parkland Shooting, But Says, ‘Turns Out He Was Afraid’
Tuesday’s installment of The Five opened with discussion of the mass shooting in Buffalo on Saturday, when police say an 18-year-old White gunman murdered 10 Black people in a racially-motivated killing spree. The top-rated show, notably, did not feature any segments on the massacre yesterday.
During the segment, Geraldo Rivera said he had dinner at Mar-a-Lago in 2018 with then-President Donald Trump. The dinner came the day after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that killed 17 people in Parkland, Florida.
Rivera stated Trump and the First Lady were on hand, as well as Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, and his wife Lara Trump.
“He and the first lady had just visited the victims in the hospital. And he came to the dinner, he was rattled,” said Rivera. “The president asked, ‘What can I do? Those wounds were horrible. The rifle that [Nikolas] Cruz had used to kill these 17 kids was… these wounds, they looked like war victims.’ And I said, ‘The kid’s, you know, underaged. Why don’t you pass a juvenile assault weapons ban? A juvenile assault weapons ban. If you can’t buy a beer, you can’t buy an AR. If you can’t drive a semi, you can’t have an assault weapon. What’s wrong with that?'”
The cohost explained Trump was receptive to the proposal.
“The president liked the idea,” Rivera continued. “He said, ‘I’m not afraid of the NRA.’ Couple of days passed and it turns out he was afraid of the NRA. I think that it is impossible now to get any kind of meaningful gun control legislation passed. I think the country has gone crazy, drunk. We’re hooked on weapons, more weapons now than there are Americans out there.”
Despite hinting that he might attempt to tighten federal gun laws after the Parkland shooting, Trump continued to embrace the National Rifle Association.
“Your Second Amendment rights are under siege,” he told attendees at an NRA event a few months later. “But they will never, ever be under siege as long as I’m your president,”
Watch above via Fox News.
