There was the (embarrassingly bad, even if you like gun control) “assault weapons ban” but since then democrats haven’t even been able to consistently achieve the thing that Republicans often say they want instead of more gun laws: “enforce the ones already on the books” (this is so common I assume it must have been pushed initially by some major Republican figure, but I’m not sure who it was) so the risk of their passing substantial gun control laws today is extremely low, even with decent majorities in the legislature and holding the presidency.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of democratic politicians are openly against outright bans and quite a few of them even mean it—Democrats managing to pass even some better version of the extremely-partial AWB is fantasy any time soon, and I very much doubt they’d get half their own people to vote to restrict firearms any more than that. (Setting aside that the courts have recently set perhaps the narrowest scope for allowable gun restrictions in the country’s history, so it might not matter even if they could pass any of this)

I think this is a misunderstanding of how he works, and especially how he got elected the first time.

I believe there has long been a significant gap between what national-stage elected republicans say and do, and what Republican voters say and want them to do.

Frankly, what Republican voters say they want is often a lot meaner than anything their politicians were delivering. I’ve not only heard “why don’t they just build a wall?” from ordinary not-terminally-online R voters, I’ve heard, many times going back 20+ years, “they should just mine the border”. Kilmeade’s comment about just killing homeless people who wouldn’t accept aid (who cares why they don’t, I guess)? I’ve heard it, that’s not new, what’s new is people that prominent saying it.

R voter sentiment also veers far away from the (Republican-initiated) neoliberal (ex-)consensus on trade. (Incidentally, this also isn’t popular on the left, but both major parties agreed on it for more than 30 years, so it didn’t matter).

Dropping lots of foreign aid? Mass government worker firings? Sending the army in to cities to fight out-of-control crime or brutally quelling riots with the army (that one’s on the “we’ll see” list but if we get four full years, the smart money says we will see it)? Normal stuff to hear on a wishlist from an awful lot of R voters. They’ll just tell you this stuff.

I could go on.

Trump got where he is by exploiting a large gap between what voters want and what parties have been delivering. This gap was huge for the republicans, and there was a little overlap with own-voter dissatisfaction with Democrats. He was able to make voters believe he’d do many of the things they’d long wanted their elected officials to do, but that they weren’t doing, and often weren’t even talking about doing.