President-elect Donald Trump has “lost faith” in the National Rifle Association, according to a top official at the gun organization, who argued in a recent letter to fellow board members that the NRA needed to regroup so that it could help protect the Republican Party’s new edge in Congress in the 2026 midterm elections.

Bill Bachenberg, the group’s first vice president and a staunch Trump ally, also told fellow board members that during this year’s election Trump was upset that the NRA had not committed to doing more to help him win. And Bachenberg wrote that during a conversation at the group’s annual conference in May, Trump expressed incredulity that the NRA was paying tens of millions of dollars a year to a lawyer, William A. Brewer III, whose political donations have favored Democrats over the years.

“I can say for a fact that President Trump and his most inner circle have lost faith in the NRA,” Bachenberg wrote last week in his letter, which was co-signed by Mark Vaughan, the NRA board’s second vice president. “I communicate with them often. We have a tremendous amount of work to rebuild trust with them, just like our members and donors.”

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Asked for comment, Karoline Leavitt, a Trump-Vance transition spokesperson, responded only broadly, saying in a statement that “President Trump believes that every American has a God-given right to protect themselves and their family, and he will defend law-abiding gun owners.”

The letter is the latest evidence of the NRA’s diminished political status. Once among the most influential lobbying forces in Washington, it has been reeling after years of scandal and corruption allegations. The group is divided between loyalists to its former CEO Wayne LaPierre and another wing, which includes Bachenberg, that wants to break from LaPierre’s controversial legacy.

Doug Hamlin, the NRA’s new CEO, said in a statement that because the group had spent heavily to defend itself against a civil case brought by Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, it had “to take a targeted approach in the 2024 election cycle.”

“Looking forward, 2025 represents the first time in years the NRA can focus on rebuilding,” he added.

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NRA in Deepening Financial Turmoil

New tax filings show that the NRA is in deepening financial turmoil. Its annual deficit widened to about $33 million last year, up from roughly $22 million a year earlier.

That came despite the NRA’s receipt of nearly $18 million from an affiliated charity called the NRA Foundation, though some of that was used to reimburse expenses. The group’s ability to rely on cash from the foundation will be curtailed by a settlement agreement that the group struck in April with the office of Brian Schwalb, the attorney general of Washington, D.C., where the foundation is based. Schwalb had accused the NRA of using the charity as “an unchecked piggy bank.”

Revenue and contributions have also cratered in recent years amid the corruption allegations and relentless internal infighting. The turmoil has cost the group roughly $1.3 billion in revenue over six years, Bachenberg and Vaughan estimated in their letter.

Since LaPierre’s departure this year, the NRA’s internal fractures have deepened, with Hamlin in one camp, along with Bachenberg, and the president of the board of directors, former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., in another.

A central dispute between the camps is the role of Brewer, who became the gun group’s aggressive lead lawyer in the last several years of the LaPierre era. Bachenberg and Vaughan’s letter assailed Brewer, saying he had billed the NRA more than $198 million since 2018.

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“Brewer’s reputation is our number one impediment in bringing back the members, donors and industry, and rebuilding NRA brand trust,” the men wrote.

In a statement Wednesday evening, Brewer said his firm had helped the NRA successfully “confront a barrage of blue-state regulatory investigations,” including an effort by New York regulators to dissolve the group. His firm has also previously said that some portion of its billing is spent on outside experts and services.

Barr, in a separate statement, said that “attacks on the NRA’s legal strategy are, at best, misinformed” and that they disregarded “the existential threat the association has been facing.”

Despite the NRA’s continuing internal turmoil, the prospects for federal gun control legislation have rarely seemed more distant. Trump is a staunch ally of pro-gun groups, and even more so is his son Donald Trump Jr., whose has emerged as the most politically vocal of the president-elect’s children.

Jeff Knox, a board member, said in an interview that the legal fees were “the difference between being in the red and being in the black,” adding, “I think we’re going to be less prominent in the political arena over the next several years as we rebuild, but I think we’re moving in the right direction.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Danny Hakim/Desiree Rios
c. 2024 The New York Times Company