1789 Capital founder and President Omeed Malik and Donald Trump Jr. discuss the public trading debut of GrabAGun Digital during an appearance on ‘Mornings with Maria.’
NEW YORK, NY – A Donald Trump Jr.-backed online gun retailer went public on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday and the president’s son spoke to FOX Business about what that means for Second Amendment advocates in the United States.
Trump Jr. along with his business partner, Omeed Malik, helped take GrabAGun public on Wednesday in a move Trump’s son told FOX Business symbolizes the repudiation of anti-gun “woke” policies that have gained a foothold over the last few years.
“I think it’s important. It’s what we’ve talked about for a long time, allowing these great American companies to have the same chance as others that have perhaps been a little bit more politically correct,” Trump Jr. said. “So to come back as a former New Yorker, a political refugee to the free state of Florida, coming back to the People’s Republic and taking a gun company public is like a sort of a great vindication of so much of what we believe in, which is ensuring that sort of democratization of finance and capitalism, you know, across sectors in this country that many Americans care about and have for decades, but perhaps didn’t have the ability to get that sort of equal treatment.”
GrabAGun, which sells ammunition and firearm accessories on its website, went public through a merger with a special acquisition company, or SPAC, named Colombier Acquisition Corp. The Palm Beach, Florida, company said the transaction netted it more than $119 million, which GrabAGun said will be used for working capital and “other purposes to accelerate the company’s future growth.”
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FOX Business spoke to Donald Trump Jr. and Omeed Malik about their new gun venture. ( / Getty Images)
“I think it’s tremendous,” Malik said about the symbolism of a gun company ringing the bell to open up trading at the stock exchange. “One of the things that I like to say is that we are all huge proponents of the First Amendment and we’ve done a lot in finance around that, but there is no First Amendment without a Second Amendment. So it was important for us to go and support the Second Amendment through a transaction like this. We’re one of the only teams that could do it or pull it off for a lot of reasons, and we did. And we’re thrilled about it.”
After years of gun companies being de-platformed and de-banked, Trump Jr. told FOX Business that his investment groups’s involvement with GrabAGun is a “catalyst for change” in an era where there has been a “cultural shift” in attitude toward the Second Amendment.
“It’s the culmination of our thesis, we were doing this and talking about it very aggressively for five years. Back when those other things ruled, DEI, ESG, it was a very different world,” Trump Jr. said. “So I think in this space, we also have a lot of credibility in that we were the guys fighting it when it wasn’t just, hey, this is an opportunity to make a profit. But we’re like, no, we’re actually going against everyone that said you’re gonna ultimately fail and they’re gonna put up whatever obstacles they can to almost ensure that happens.”
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Assorted pistols on display at Blue Ridge Arsenal in Chantilly, Virginia. (Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency / Getty Images)
Trump and Malik told FOX Business that young people and women that support the Second Amendment are a growing segment in the United States that GrabAGun “absolutely” intends to focus on while explaining that the barrier to entry that new gun owners find at gun stores is solved with the new company.
“They’re buying the way they buy everything else. Obviously, you still have to go through your federal firearms license, a gun’s not getting delivered to your doorstep, but to be able to purchase the way you do literally every other household good that you’re buying on a daily basis, you’ll cater to that market,” Trump said.
“For a guy like me who’s been in the gun space forever and is a well-known entity and was a competitive shooter and these kinds of things, I can walk into any local gun shop in America and it’s like, ‘Hey Don, thanks for what you’re doing,’ you know, but if you’re a first time gun buyer, you are female, not really accustomed to it, don’t exactly know what’s going on and you don’t want to go into that experience often where you’re being mansplained or given, frankly, bad information, this creates an ease of access to be able to get into an otherwise perhaps intimidating space for a lot of people who aren’t as familiar.”
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Donald Trump, Jr. speaks to supporters of his father, President Donald Trump, during a panel discussion in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
Trump and Malik spoke to FOX Business about what the Second Amendment means to them and Trump, an avid outdoorsman, echoed the sentiment that there “is no First Amendment without the Second Amendment.”
Trump Jr. explained his belief that violence in the streets over the last several years, which he says has been celebrated by Democrats, has driven Americans toward the Second Amendment and the desire to protect themselves.
“Over the last four years, you’ve seen crime and the stuff through, whether it’s the rampant illegal immigration and the allowing of criminals to only take over a few buildings in places like Colorado, people understood, and now more so than ever, that fundamental right to protect yourselves and your loved ones is tantamount to all of the freedoms that we believe,” he said. “They get that.”
Trump Jr. said the civil unrest in recent years has been “the greatest marketing campaign for the Second Amendment.”
Trump and Malik appeared on Wall Street shortly after New York City’s political landscape was rocked by the surprise Democratic mayoral primary victory by socialist Zohran Mamdani.
Trump told FOX Business a Mamdani administration would likely be the “nail in the coffin” for the city.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
