On Monday, August 31, at 11:31 a.m. Eastern, President Donald J. Trump used his own social-media platform, Truth Social, to amplify a story from The Hill headlined on the ruling that struck down the Biden administration’s frame-or-receiver rule as unconstitutional. He did not draft new commentary of his own; he shared the outlet’s coverage under his own account. But the act of sharing it, on his own network, is itself a signal, and it is a significant one. The president of the United States has publicly aligned himself with a federal court’s judgment against a rule his own administration inherited and, until August 17, was still defending in litigation.
I covered the underlying decision, Defense Distributed v. Blanche, No. 4:22-cv-00691-O, when Chief Judge Reed O’Connor of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued it. He held that the Biden-era rule was unconstitutional and unconstitutionally vague. I am not re-litigating that holding here. What matters now is what happens next, and the president just told us something about that.
What the Post Actually Says — and Doesn’t
Precision matters. Trump’s post was a repost of The Hill’s own headline and link, not an original statement of his own views on the reasoning of the opinion. He did not issue a proclamation on the Second Amendment right to make your own firearm, and nothing here should be quoted as though he did. What he did was elevate, to his tens of millions of followers, a story confirming that a federal court had struck down his own administration’s rule as unconstitutional — and did so without a word of criticism, correction, or distance from the ruling. Fairly read, that is an endorsement. A president who disagreed with a court gutting his own department’s rule has every tool available to say so. He said nothing of the kind. He amplified the win.
Why an Executive Endorsement of a Loss Is Legally Significant
This is not merely a public-relations story. The Justice Department represented the government’s position in Defense Distributed, and the frame-or-receiver rule remains, at least nominally, an ATF regulation until formally rescinded or until the judgment becomes final through appeal or the expiration of the appeal window. Whether the government appeals Chief Judge O’Connor’s ruling is entirely within the discretion of the Solicitor General and the Attorney General — officials who serve at the president’s pleasure. A president who publicly applauds the very ruling his own department could still appeal is sending an unmistakable signal down the chain of command. I do not know whether DOJ will decline to appeal. But an administration rarely spends political capital praising a defeat it intends to keep fighting.
The Right to Make Your Own Firearm
The reason this decision was worth defending in the first place is that it vindicates a right most Americans never think to ask about: the right to acquire a firearm, which necessarily includes the right to make one. The rights to keep and bear arms presuppose acquisition, and acquisition has always included manufacture — by purchase, gift, inheritance, or your own hands. Chief Judge O’Connor’s opinion cites Joseph G.S. Greenlee’s law review article on the American tradition of self-made arms, tracing home gunsmithing back before the founding. He then looked for a historical tradition of restricting that practice and found none that fit. Founding-era proofing laws required that a barrel be tested before sale — a consumer-protection measure ensuring the buyer wasn’t sold a gun that would blow up in his hands, not a restriction on making one. Founding-era gunpowder-storage laws addressed fire risk in crowded cities, not crime control. Neither historical analogue shares the why of the Biden rule, which purported to be about crime prevention. Under the text-and-history methodology this Court set out in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), that mismatch between historical rationale and modern justification is fatal.
Distinguishing This From the Supreme Court’s VanDerStok Decision
None of this conflicts with Bondi v. VanDerStok, 604 U.S. 458 (2025), in which the Supreme Court upheld the ATF’s broader frame-or-receiver framework against a facial administrative-law challenge under the Gun Control Act. That case never reached the Second Amendment question Chief Judge O’Connor decided. Adam Kraut, Executive Director of the Second Amendment Foundation, put the vagueness problem plainly in the statement carried in the article Trump reposted: the rule was “written in such a vague and vaporous manner as to chill that protected conduct by making it impossible to even know what was legal and what was not.” A rule can survive one legal theory and still fail another.
Why This President’s Record Matters Here
I have supported President Trump since his 2016 campaign because his record on the Second Amendment has been genuinely strong, not because he is flawless. Without his three Supreme Court appointments — Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett — there is no Bruen. Without his appointment of Judge James Wesley Hendrix to the Northern District of Texas, there is no injunction protecting suppressor and short-barreled-firearm owners this August. A president who now publicly applauds the ruling protecting the right to make your own gun is acting consistently with that record, and it is a good sign for what his Justice Department does next.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.