Donald Trump cancelled his appearance at a “Save the Second” rally in Savannah, Georgia on Thursday, citing a scheduling conflict, and the NRA soon followed suit by nixing the rally altogether. In a statement on the NRA’s Political Victory Fund website, the organization says it remains “committed to ensuring Donald Trump wins in November and returns to the White House”, adding that NRA-PVC has launched statewide radio ads in both Pennsylvania and Georgia to “complement a comprehensive GOTV operation and multi-million-dollar digital outreach strategy to defeat Kamala Harris.”

The New Republic writer Edith Olmstead claims that Trump’s cancellation of the NRA appearance comes as he’s “trying desperately to avoid a mainstream interview with journalists who aren’t in his pocket, opting instead for friendlier, Fox-ier faces,” though it’s hard to imagine a much friendlier audience than NRA members and Second Amendment supporters in the battleground state of Georgia. 

The Reload’s Stephen Gutowski, on the other hand, suggests that Trump’s scheduling conflict might have more to do with The Guardian‘s recent report on NRA executive vice president Doug Hamlin’s connection to a 1979 cat-killing when Hamlin was president of a University of Michigan fraternity. 

On Monday, The Guardian published a story resurfacing news of Hamlin’s role in an animal abuse incident during his time as president of a University of Michigan frat house in 1979. According to contemporaneous local reporting reviewed by The Reload, a group of the frat brothers was upset with the cat, named BK, for not using its litter box. So, they caught the cat, cut off its paws, strung it up by a tree, and set it on fire.

“I do not in any way condone the actions that took place more than 44 years ago,” Hamlin said of the incident. “I took responsibility for this regrettable incident as chapter president although I wasn’t directly involved.”

Reporting from the time is not perfectly clear on exactly what Hamlin’s role was in the killing. He may not have been involved in the act itself, but there are reports he knew about it and could have stopped it. A cook at the house also accused Hamlin of threatening him in an effort to cover up the mutilation after the fact.

Hamlin and four other men were expelled from the fraternity over the incident. They all pled no contest to misdemeanor animal cruelty charges and were ordered to pay a few hundred dollars in fines and fees while completing 200 hours of community service before their records could be expunged. However, the judge singled out Hamlin as particularly responsible for the incident.

“You had the ability to prevent this from ever happening,” Judge S. J. Elden told Hamlin during sentencing, according to The Michigan Daily.

Hamlin remains the head of the NRA. He argued in a statement earlier this week that who he is today shouldn’t be judged based on the decades-old incident.

“Since that time I served my country, raised a family, volunteered in my community, started a business, worked with Gold Star families and raised millions of dollars for charity,” he said. “I’ve endeavored to live my life in a manner beyond reproach. My focus now is on protecting the 2nd Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.”

It’s entirely possible that the Trump campaign decided that appearing on stage with Hamlin would generate the wrong kind of headlines with just two weeks to go before Election Day (and while early voting is already underway in Georgia), though I suspect that Hamlin himself could have suddenly discovered a scheduling conflict that would have prevented him from traveling to Savannah if that would have satisfied Trump or his campaign team. 

The timing of The Guardian story and its discovery of the 45-year-old incident has raised eyebrows among some NRA reformers, who’ve suggested that the story may have been leaked by NRA’s attorney Bill Brewer, who has donated to the Kamala Harris campaign, in an attempt to damage the Trump campaign and Hamlin’s position within the NRA itself. Hamlin was elected EVP with the support of reform-minded board members, who’ve also been trying to remove Brewer as the organization’s outside counsel, but for now, anyway, it’s pure speculation as to how The Guardian discovered Hamlin’s no-contest plea to the misdemeanor charge of animal cruelty almost 50 years ago. 

It’s also possible that Trump’s cancellation has nothing to do with The Guardian story, and instead was based on the Trump campaign’s decision to hold another event in a different battleground state or even another part of Georgia. We’ll have to see where Trump does appear next Tuesday, but with polling showing incredibly tight races in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada, there are plenty of locations where the candidate could hold a campaign rally, with or without the NRA’s involvement.