BOSTON — The Northeast is bracing for a powerful storm that will kick off the volatile month of March, bringing damaging winds, moderate to major coastal flooding, rain and snowfall, CBS Boston reports.

Heavy rain, intermittent snow and high winds with gusts exceeding 50 miles per hour are expected as the storm moves up the Eastern seaboard, beginning in New York and Connecticut on Thursday evening. Along the East Coast, authorities told residents of coastal communities to be prepared to evacuate if necessary in advance of Friday morning’s high tide.

Meanwhile on the West Coast, a huge amount of snow is headed toward the Sierra Nevada, according to CBS Boston meteorologist Eric Fisher. Three to five feet of snow is expected across the Sierra. Across southern California, there’s the risk of dangerous debris, flooding and mudslides. 

Ahead of the storm, many airlines have issued travel waivers to allow passengers to change their flights without penalty, CBS News’ Kris Van Cleave reports.

Here’s how the storm looks as of Thursday afternoon.

Massachusetts

For the first time since a blizzard hit the region in early January, New England will see “bombogenesis” — signifying an intense and rapidly deepening storm, CBS Boston reports.

• What causes bombogenesis?

The storm has the potential to be a historic, crippling event for southern New England. With major coastal flooding, destructive winds and torrents of rain followed by a plastering of heavy, wet snow, the damage will be widespread and significant. Power outages will likely be numerous and lengthy.

The nor’easter will not have a quick exit, instead blocked by a large area of high pressure over Greenland. Combine a very slow moving storm with the highest astronomical tides of the month and you have the recipe for major coastal destruction.

From midnight to 6 a.m. Friday, rain is expected to arrive from south to north, starting as snow in western Massachusetts.

The storm will become an absolute monster southeast of Nantucket on Friday and only slowly pull away farther to the southeast on Saturday. There will be a large and powerful wind field, extending out several hundred miles from the storm’s center.

Cape Cod and the Islands, as well as Cape Ann, are at greatest risk for widespread, damaging winds, ranging as high as 55-80 mph Friday and Saturday. The rest of eastern Massachusetts will see winds gusting 35-55 mph, enough to cause tree and property damage and cause some power outages.

The Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency director has urged residents in vulnerable coastal communities to evacuate, saying the powerful nor’easter is likely to destroy homes.

“It will be dangerous to remain in the homes,” MEMA director Kurt Schwartz said. “Not only may rescue not be possible, but homes will be subject to significant structural damage. We expect to lose homes during this storm. If you’re in one of those areas, you need to get out.”

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said he has activated the National Guard. About 200 guardsmen will work with local and state officials during the powerful storm.

“I can’t stress this enough. This isn’t a snowstorm in eastern Mass, but the storm itself, especially along the coast, is shaping up to be more severe than the storm on January 4,” said Baker. “While crews were able to perform rescues in between high tide cycles in January, it’s possible first responders will be unable to reach all flooded areas at peak high tide tomorrow.”

Coastal residents are warned that the storm’s impact could be felt for several days. Residents should plan to have medicine, food, clothing, and money for an extended period.

“If you are in one of these typically effected areas do not ride out the storm in your home if you are told to evacuate,” Baker said. “Rescue during the storm might not be possible. Staying in homes in flood prone areas puts yourself and first responders at risk.”

Baker said the storm “will impact the entire state,” though what impact is felt depends on location.

Snowfall is the biggest wildcard in the storm for some areas. In at least parts of New England, the first half of the storm will almost certainly be rain, followed by colder air Friday evening and overnight, changing the rain to a heavy, wet snow.

Snowfall in the hills of Worcester and in the Berkshires could easily top 6 inches before tapering off Saturday morning. Several inches are possible in the eastern part of the state Friday night. With the heavy, wet nature of the snow combined with strong winds, power outages may become a big issue.

Rhode Island, New York and Connecticut

The National Weather Service said all of Rhode Island will be under flood and high wind watches from Friday to Sunday morning, calling the situations “life threatening.”

In Connecticut and New York City, rain is expected to begin on Thursday evening. Moderate coastal flooding in Queens and Long island is expected Friday.

The U.S. Coast Guard is advising boaters to exercise “vigilance and extreme caution” Thursday night through Saturday. Authorities recommend residents of coastal communities be prepared to evacuate if necessary in advance of Friday morning’s high tide.

A flood watch is in effect from Friday morning through late Friday night for southern Connecticut and southeast New York.

New Jersey

High winds and flood watches have been issued around New Jersey, where most rains will begin Thursday afternoon, getting heavier in the evening. The storm will then usher in a wet and windy Friday, with gusts of up to 60 mph in Jersey Shore communities. Warning signs are posted at Wildwood beaches and some residents are already boarding up their homes there.

Officials in the state worried that the storm could take a chunk out of beaches just south of Atlantic City that are still being repaired because of damage from previous storms. The National Weather Service said flooding is possible Saturday. Waves of up to 12 feet are in the forecast at the shore in New Jersey.

Power outages are also a concern for coastal areas. Officials say Thursday’s dry morning and afternoon hours are a good time for folks to get supplies and batten down the hatches.

Pennsylvania

In Pennsylvania, heavy rain, high wind and even some whiteout snow conditions are expected in the coming days. The National Weather Service says communities from Pittsburgh east to Philadelphia and the Poconos will be affected.

Rain will start in the state Thursday afternoon in most places and is expected to get heavier overnight. On Friday afternoon, the storm will usher in high winds, with gusts of up to 60 mph near Lancaster, and up to 50 mph in suburban Philadelphia and Allentown. Rain could turn to snow in parts of the Lehigh Valley and the Poconos, causing whiteout conditions with the high winds.

Pittsburgh is also under a flood advisory, and the same storm is expected to bring heavy rain and high winds to a swath of western Pennsylvania from Thursday and into the weekend.

In a sign of the gulf that has opened between gun-rights purists and Republicans with a more pro-business bent, Mr. Deal this week appeared to chastise fellow Republicans who sought to punish Delta, and thus potentially harm Georgia’s business-friendly reputation.

“Ours is a welcoming state — the epitome of ‘Southern Hospitality,’” said Mr. Deal, who will leave office because of term limits early next year. “We were not elected to give the late-night talk show hosts fodder for their monologues or to act with the type of immaturity that has caused so many in our society to have a cynical view of politics.”

In addition to being one of Georgia’s biggest employers, Delta is the economic engine of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, the busiest airport in the world and a bragging point in the city’s claim to national and even international stature.

The divisions over gun control are stark in Georgia, where Mr. Cagle is among a handful of Republicans who are seeking to be the next governor. They are particularly eager to make an impression among the hard-right conservatives who will have a big voice in the Republican primary in May.

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Mr. Cagle, the presumptive front-runner in the governor’s race, presides over the State Senate, and his threat on Monday to kill the tax break was interpreted here as a way to protect his right flank from his Republican rivals.

“I think that obviously Delta is free to make any decision that they want to,” Mr. Cagle said during an appearance on “Fox and Friends” this week. He added that Delta “chose to single out the N.R.A. and their membership, law-abiding gun owners, and I don’t think that’s right.” Delta announced on Saturday that it was ending a discount for N.R.A. members traveling to the association’s annual convention.

Other Republican candidates for governor were also eager to weigh in in favor of rescinding the tax break. Secretary of State Brian Kemp said lawmakers should reject the perk to airlines and instead focus on creating a sales tax holiday for buyers of guns, ammunition, holsters and safes where guns can be stored.

On the floor of the Senate on Thursday, Senator Michael Williams, another Republican candidate for governor, praised his fellow lawmakers for stripping the tax exemption, saying they “stood strong” in the face of pressure from liberals, the media and big business.

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Mr. Deal has said he was “committed to finding a pathway forward for the elimination of sales tax on jet fuel, which is nonnegotiable.” But the political reality seems to leave him with few options.

Democrats have argued that the attack on Delta, which did not comment Thursday, could harm the ability to attract new businesses, chief among them Amazon. The online retailer named metropolitan Atlanta as one possible location for its new headquarters.

“Unfortunately, we’re looking at political gamesmanship, and trying to send ultraconservative messages for the Republican primary,” said Senator Steve Henson, the minority leader. “I think it does not enhance our chances to get Amazon.”

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He also used the speech to reassure Russians that the military buildup was taking place even as the government was spending big sums to improve the quality of their lives.

But the main attention grabber in the speech was the weapons, which Mr. Putin described as a response to what he called the repudiation of arms control by the United States and its plans for a major weapons buildup.

The Trump administration has said that countering the world’s two other superpowers, Russia and China, was becoming its No. 1 national security mission, ahead of counterterrorism.

It has largely blamed Russia’s military modernization for that shift and has justified new work on nuclear weapons and bolstered missile defenses as the appropriate answer.

Mr. Putin may have further fueled the tension on Thursday by essentially declaring that Russia’s military brains had made America’s response obsolete.

He said a team of young, high-tech specialists had labored secretly and assiduously to develop and test the new weapons, including a nuclear-powered missile that could reach anywhere and evade interception.

“With the missile launched and a set of ground tests completed, we can now proceed with the construction of a fundamentally new type of weapon,” Mr. Putin said.

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He showed a video that illustrated the weapon flying over a mountain range, then slaloming around obstacles in the southern Atlantic before rounding Cape Horn at the tip of South America and heading north toward the West Coast of the United States.

Given that deception lies at the heart of current Russian military doctrine, questions arose about whether these weapons existed. American officials said that the nuclear cruise missile is not yet operational, despite Mr. Putin’s claims, and that it had crashed during testing in the Arctic.

The threats evoked the bombast of the Cold War. But this time they are not based on greater numbers of bombs but increased capabilities, stealth and guile.

Mr. Putin’s boasts about undersea nuclear torpedoes and earth-hugging cruise missiles emphasized the uselessness of American defenses against such weapons.

Oddly, apart from a reference to renewing the American nuclear arms enterprise in his State of the Union address, Mr. Trump has said almost nothing about the new era of competition with Mr. Putin or Russia. With multiple investigations into whether his campaign’s connections to Russians had influenced policy, he has neither protested the Russian buildup nor publicly endorsed, in any detail, his own administration’s plans to counter it.

The cruise missile was among five weapons introduced by Mr. Putin, each shown in video mock-ups on giant screens flanking him onstage. He threatened to use the weapons, as well as Russia’s older-generation nuclear arms, against the United States and Europe if Russia were attacked.

“We would consider any use of nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies to be a nuclear attack on our country,” he said.

Mr. Putin said he could not show the actual weapons publicly, but assured his audience of Russia’s main political and prominent cultural figures that they had all been developed.

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If Mr. Putin was not bluffing, said Aleksandr M. Golts, an independent Russian military analyst, then “these weapons are definitely new, absolutely new.”

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“If we’re talking about nuclear-armed cruise missiles, that’s a technological breakthrough and a gigantic achievement,” he said in an interview. But, he added, “The question is, is this true?”

Several analysts writing on Facebook and elsewhere leaned toward the bluff theory. Given the recent history of Russian launch failures or premature crashes, the idea that Russia suddenly possessed a new generation of flying weapons strained credulity.

“The real surprise in among all of this is a nuclear-powered cruise missile,” said Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow for military aerospace at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “It was talked about in the ’60s, but it ran into a lot of obstacles. To the extent that the Russians are seriously revisiting this is pretty interesting.”

Such technology could alter the balance of power, but Mr. Barrie questioned whether Russia was even close to deploying it.

“Does reality mean you have an item in the budget saying, ‘Develop nuclear propulsion for a missile?’” he said. “Or does it mean, ‘We’re going to have one ready to use soon’? I’d certainly want to see more evidence to believe that.”

Mr. Putin said Russia had developed the weaponry because the United States had rejected established arms control treaties and was deploying new missile defense systems in Europe and Asia.

President Barack Obama said that he was willing to negotiate cuts deeper than the 1,550 arms that Washington and Moscow are permitted to deploy under the 2010 New Start treaty, which took full effect last month. But it expires in a few years, and neither Mr. Putin nor Mr. Trump has shown interest in renewing it.

The United States has also accused Russia of violating the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty. After Mr. Putin’s speech, Heather Nauert, the State Department’s spokeswoman, said Mr. Putin essentially confirmed that by trumpeting the country’s development of new nuclear weapons.

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Mr. Putin was correct that the United States is investing in expanding missile defenses. But those were not meant to counter Russia’s huge arsenals, but rather the launching of a few missiles by a state like North Korea.

The new Russian weapons would render such defenses obsolete, Mr. Putin gloated, and if anyone found a workaround, “our boys will think of something new.”

Other weapons the Russian leader discussed included a ballistic missile called Sarmat that could round either pole and overcome any defense system; hypersonic nuclear weaponry that fly at 20 times the speed of sound; and unmanned deepwater submarines that could go huge distances at enormous speed.

Mr. Putin said that some of the weapons were so new that they had yet to be named, and announced a naming contest on the Ministry of Defense website.

Political analysts said it was an effective campaign ploy whether the weapons existed or not. “He’s giving people the image of a desired future, of a future for Russia, and that’s appealing for his domestic audience,” said Aleksei V. Makarkin, the deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies, a Moscow think tank.

Mr. Putin’s guns-and-butter, Russia-can-do-it-all speech came 17 days before the March 18 election. It seemed intended to reassure voters that expanded social spending would help solve the economic problems of the past four years, while sending the message that Mr. Putin was their best hope in protecting a Russia portrayed as a besieged fortress.

The reality that the country lacks the money to pay for a giant increase in social spending combined with a new generation of weapons was beside the point, Mr. Makarkin said.

“People may say Russia depends on oil, Russia doesn’t have the money, but the population at large doesn’t care about that,” he said. “They just want to know that we are a superpower.”

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On the social front, Mr. Putin promised to double government spending on health care and raise pensions. He said Russia would reduce the poverty rate — official statistics indicate that around 14 million Russians live below the poverty line — by 2024.

Mr. Putin also said that life expectancy, currently at 73, a leap from when he first took office in 2000, should exceed 80 by 2030.

Critics doubt that Russia will ever have the means to deliver so much, given its stumbling economy and relatively depressed oil prices. Max Trudolyubov, a newspaper columnist and political analyst, called the speech a modern version of the Czar Cannon, a giant 16th-century piece of armament that sits on the Kremlin grounds and that legend holds never really worked.

For years, Mr. Putin has chafed at the perceived disrespect showed to him and Russia by the United States. “Nobody listened to Russia,” he said near the end of the speech, to huge applause. “Well, listen up now.”

Correction: March 1, 2018

An earlier version of this article misstated the age of the Czar Cannon. It is from the 16th century, not the 15th century.

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The principal, Steve Bartoo, tried to unlock the door with a key, but Davidson “slammed the door before I could open it and said, ‘Don’t come in here, I have a gun,’ ” Bartoo said at a televised news conference.

But the president’s options are constrained, advisers said, because he recognizes that he would have a difficult time winning Senate confirmation for a replacement. Mr. Sessions served there for 20 years, and his former colleagues have bristled at Mr. Trump’s attacks. Any dismissal of Mr. Sessions would be taken by Democrats and even some Republicans as an effort to seize control of the Russia investigation and could trigger a bipartisan backlash.

The exchange on Wednesday began when the president lashed out at Mr. Sessions for seeming to suggest that the Justice Department’s inspector general would look into Republican charges of misconduct in the opening stage of the Russia investigation rather than opening his own examination.

“Why is A.G. Jeff Sessions asking the Inspector General to investigate potentially massive FISA abuse,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Will take forever, has no prosecutorial power and already late with reports on Comey etc. Isn’t the I.G. an Obama guy? Why not use Justice Department lawyers? DISGRACEFUL!”

Republicans have accused Justice Department and F.B.I. officials of abusing their powers while President Barack Obama was still in office by using information from a dossier prepared by a former British spy paid by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign to justify surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. Officials did not fully inform the court that issues warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, of the origin of the information, Republicans complained. Democrats have called that a distortion and distraction.

The inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, was appointed by Mr. Obama in 2012, but previously worked for the Justice Department under Republican and Democratic presidents. He has already been investigating how James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director until Mr. Trump fired him last spring, handled the inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

Mr. Sessions seemed to take umbrage at the president’s latest message. “We have initiated the appropriate process that will ensure complaints against this department will be fully and fairly acted upon if necessary,” he said in his statement.

“As long as I am the attorney general,” he added, “I will continue to discharge my duties with integrity and honor, and this department will continue to do its work in a fair and impartial manner according to the law and Constitution.”

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Mr. Sessions’s response, polite but pointed, was all the more striking because he had largely kept quiet after previous attacks by the president. Mr. Trump has never forgiven Mr. Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, a decision that helped lead to the appointment of Mr. Mueller. Mr. Trump has publicly called Mr. Sessions “weak” and said he would not have appointed him had he known Mr. Sessions would step aside.

His latest eruption was prompted by Mr. Sessions’s comment on Tuesday that if a FISA surveillance warrant was wrongfully obtained, the matter would be “investigated” by the department’s inspector general. His comment was interpreted as confirmation that the inspector general had opened a second official inquiry on top of the Comey review.

But Mr. Sessions only meant to reiterate what he said after a memo drafted by House Republicans was released alleging abuse of the FISA process. At the time, Mr. Sessions said he would “forward to appropriate D.O.J. components all information I receive from Congress regarding this.”

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The nuance was lost on Mr. Trump, who among other things did not seem to understand that an attorney general cannot order an inspector general to investigate anything, only refer information.

“The president’s tweet reveals that he really doesn’t understand how the government works and how the Justice Department works,” said Michael Bromwich, a former department inspector general.

He added that the inspector general’s office has a reputation for professionalism. “It’s incredibly demoralizing to have the chief executive of the government not only not understand and appreciate what you do, but attack what you do on a constant basis,” Mr. Bromwich said.

Inspectors general at cabinet agencies are kept separate to preserve their independence. Paul Light, a New York University professor and specialist on the offices, recalled that President Ronald Reagan fired all of the inspectors general but was forced by Congress to rehire some of them. “They have protections in statutes against arbitrary dismissal,” he said.

After Mr. Trump’s tweet, Mr. Horowitz, the inspector general, received support from Republicans, including Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that confirmed him.

“I have complete confidence in him and hope he is given the time, the resources and the independence to complete his work,” said Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina and the chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

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Several Republicans expressed dismay at the president’s continued campaign against Mr. Sessions. “It’s kind of mind-boggling that he would call out his own attorney general,” former Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah said on Fox News.

Representative Peter T. King of New York, also on Fox, expressed sympathy with Mr. Trump’s desire for a second investigation run by Mr. Sessions, but added that the president should not berate him. “Jeff Sessions is loyal to the president and he’s one of the first to support him, and he’s often in very difficult positions and I think he’s trying to reconcile as best as he can,” he said.

Michael W. McConnell, a former appellate judge now at Stanford Law School, said a president has every right to direct his attorney general.

“What raises eyebrows is the form and tone of the tweet, which appears to be a commentary on the attorney general’s decisions rather than an exercise of presidential supervisory authority,” he said. “Mr. Trump is the president. If he wants something done differently, he should order that it be done differently, with serious reflection, through proper channels and in the proper form.”

Jamil Jaffer, a law professor at George Mason University and former associate White House counsel under President George W. Bush, said social media was not the best way to direct action by an attorney general. “The president has a lot of tools that are a lot more effective than putting the A.G. on blast on Twitter,” he said.

But Mr. Trump got support from other quarters. Representative Lee Zeldin of New York and a dozen other Republicans sent a letter to Mr. Sessions on Wednesday urging him to appoint a special counsel to investigate the handling of Mrs. Clinton’s case and the FISA warrant targeting Mr. Page.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, suggested that Mr. Sessions had never really supported Mr. Trump in the first place.

“@USAGSessions must be part of the Bush/Romney/McCain Republican Establishment,” he wrote on Twitter. “He probably supported @realDonaldTrump early in campaign to hide who he really is. Or he could just be a coward.”

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Democrats, too, said they were skeptical that Mr. Trump would follow through.

“The White House can now launch a lobbying campaign to get universal background checks passed, as the president promised in this meeting, or they can sit and do nothing,” said Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut.

At the core of Mr. Trump’s suggestion was the revival of a bipartisan bill drafted in 2013 by Senators Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Despite a concerted push by President Barack Obama and the personal appeals of Sandy Hook parents, the bill fell to a largely Republican filibuster.

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Mr. Trump’s embrace did not immediately yield converts. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said after the meeting that he was unmoved, repeating the Republican dogma that recent shootings were not “conducted by someone who bought a gun at a gun show or parking lot.” Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican, who sat next to the president looking flustered, emerged from the meeting and declared, “I thought it was fascinating television and it was surreal to actually be there.”

But Mr. Trump suggested that the dynamics in Washington had changed after the school shooting in Florida that claimed 17 lives, in part because of his own leadership in the White House, a sentiment that the Democrats in the room readily appeared to embrace as they saw the president supporting their ideas.

“It would be so beautiful to have one bill that everyone could support,” Mr. Trump said as Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and a longtime advocate of gun control, sat smiling to his left. “It’s time that a president stepped up.”

Democrats tried to turn sometimes muddled presidential musings into firm policy: “You saw the president clearly saying not once, not twice, not three times, but like 10 times, that he wanted to see a strong universal background check bill,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota. “He didn’t mince words about it. So I do not understand how then he could back away from that.”

Just what the performance means, and whether Mr. Trump will aggressively push for new gun restrictions, remain uncertain given his history of taking erratic positions on policy issues, especially ones that have long polarized Washington and the country.

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The gun control performance on Wednesday was reminiscent of a similar televised discussion with lawmakers about immigration in January during which the president appeared to back bipartisan legislation to help young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children — only to reverse himself and push a hard-line approach that helped scuttle consensus in the Senate.

Mr. Trump’s comments during the hourlong meeting were at odds with his history as a candidate and president who has repeatedly declared his love for the Second Amendment and the N.R.A., which gave his campaign $30 million. At the group’s annual conference last year, Mr. Trump declared, “To the N.R.A., I can proudly say I will never, ever let you down.”

But at the meeting, the president repeatedly rejected the N.R.A.’s top legislative priority, a bill known as concealed-carry reciprocity, which would allow a person with permission to carry a concealed weapon in one state to automatically do so in every state. To the dismay of Republicans, he dismissed the measure as having no chance at passage in the Congress. Republican leaders in the House had paired that N.R.A. priority with a modest measure to improve data reporting to the existing instant background check system.

“You’ll never get it,” Mr. Trump told Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House Republican whip who was gravely injured in a mass shooting last year but still opposes gun restrictions. “You’ll never get it passed. We want to get something done.”

Mr. Trump also flatly insisted that legislation should raise the minimum age for buying rifles to 21 from 18 — an idea the N.R.A. and many Republicans fiercely oppose. When Mr. Toomey pushed back on an increase in the minimum age for rifles, the president accused him of fearing the N.R.A. — a remarkable slap since the association withdrew its support for Mr. Toomey over his background check bill.

“If there’s a Republican who’s demonstrated he’s not afraid of the N.R.A., that would be me,” Mr. Toomey said after the meeting.

The president appeared eager to challenge the impression that he is bought and paid for by the gun rights group. While calling the membership of the N.R.A. “well meaning,” he also said he told its leaders at a lunch on Sunday that “it’s time. We’re going to stop this nonsense. It’s time.”

Officials at the gun group were taken aback by the president’s comments and immediately ramped up their lobbying against measures that they have long said would damage the Second Amendment and do little to protect people against gun violence.

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“While today’s meeting made for great TV, the gun control policies discussed would make bad policy that wouldn’t keep our children safer,” said Jennifer Baker, a spokeswoman for the N.R.A.’s lobbying arm. “We are going to continue to work to pass policies that might actually prevent another horrific tragedy.”

But at least for Wednesday, Mr. Trump seemed willing to venture far from the N.R.A. script, even appearing to suggest that he might back an ban on assault-style weapons when Ms. Feinstein asked what they could do about “weapons of war.” The N.R.A. has helped defeat an assault weapons ban since the last one expired in 2004.

The reaction in Washington was swift. Breitbart.com, a right-wing site once led by Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s onetime chief strategist, published an article with a headline in bright red that said, “TRUMP THE GUN GRABBER.”

The site added that the president “Cedes Dems’ Wish List — Bump Stocks, Buying Age, ‘Assault Weapons,’ Background Checks. Tells Scalise to Take a Hike — After Surviving Assassination Attempt.”

The president did return several times to a proposal that conservatives like: arming teachers in schools and ending the so-called gun-free zones around schools that Mr. Trump said had made those institutions among the most vulnerable targets for mass shooters.

“You’ve got to have defense, too,” the president told the lawmakers. “You can’t just be sitting ducks. And that’s exactly what we’ve allowed people in these buildings and schools to be.”

But several times, he acknowledged how controversial that proposal was, and seemed to accept the idea that it might not be included in a comprehensive gun control measure that could pass both chambers of Congress.

He also backed a modest measure sponsored by a Republican and a Democrat in the Senate to improve the quality of the data in the background check system. But he told the bill’s author, Mr. Cornyn, to consider just adding that proposal to the broader expansion of the background check system.

“It would be nice to add everything on to it,” Mr. Trump said. “Maybe change the title. Maybe we could make it much more comprehensive and have one bill.”

Correction: February 28, 2018

An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of a similar televised meeting. It was in January, not last year.

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