He's the first sitting president to do so since Reagan
+ READ ARTICLEPresident Donald Trump is set to be the first sitting president since the 1980s to address the National Rifle Association when he heads to their annual forum Friday.
“Protecting gun rights, expanding gun rights and getting rid of legislation and gun rights restrictions in this country to make the Second Amendment more powerful than it ever has been before,” NRA spokesperson Jason Brown told NPR of what the group wants to hear from the president’s speech.
The NRA played a critical role in helping get Trump elected, according to a Washington Post analysis, spending more than three times as much money supporting Trump as it spent boosting Republican nominee Mitt Romney in 2012.
The last sitting president to address the NRA was Ronald Reagan in 1983, NPR reports, who largely spoke about the link between gun rights and environmental policy.
Trump has been inconsistent in his positions on gun control over the course of his life. In his book The America We Deserve from 2000, Trump wrote that he supported a ban on assault weapons and a longer waiting period to purchase a gun. But he has said he’s since changed his mind, and during his campaign for president he said he would end gun-free zones and that terror attacks like the ones in San Bernardino or Paris could have been prevented if the civilians were armed.
Watch the speech in the video above starting at 1:30 p.m. ET.