President-elect Donald J. 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 N.R.A. needed to regroup so that it could help protect the Republican Party’s new edge in Congress in the midterm elections in 2026.
Bill Bachenberg, the group’s first vice president and a staunch Trump ally, also told fellow board members that during this year’s election Mr. Trump was upset that the N.R.A. had not committed to doing more to help him win. And Mr. Bachenberg wrote that during a conversation at the group’s annual conference in May, Mr. Trump expressed incredulity that the N.R.A. 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 N.R.A.,” Mr. Bachenberg wrote last week in his letter, which was co-signed by Mark Vaughan, the N.R.A. 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.”
Asked for comment, Karoline Leavitt, a Trump-Vance transition spokeswoman, 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 N.R.A.’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 chief executive Wayne LaPierre and another wing, which includes Mr. Bachenberg, that wants to break from Mr. LaPierre’s controversial legacy.
Doug Hamlin, the N.R.A.’s new chief executive, 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 N.R.A. can focus on rebuilding,” he added.
New tax filings show that the N.R.A. 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 N.R.A.’s receipt of nearly $18 million from an affiliated charity called the N.R.A. 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 L. Schwalb, the attorney general of Washington, D.C., where the foundation is based. Mr. Schwalb had accused the N.R.A. 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, Mr. Bachenberg and Mr. Vaughan estimated in their letter.
“My overall take on the financial health of the N.R.A. is that it is tenuous,” said David Nelson, a retired tax partner at Ernst & Young who specialized in charities, after reviewing the group’s latest filings. “The annual losses for the last two years are not sustainable.”
In February, Mr. LaPierre, who led the organization for more than three decades, was found liable for misspending $5.4 million in N.R.A. funds after it was revealed that he had splurged on superyacht junkets, charter flights, vacations in the Bahamas and nearly $275,000 in suits from a Beverly Hills boutique. The judgment came in the case brought by Ms. James’s office, which has not yet been fully resolved.
Since Mr. LaPierre’s departure this year, the N.R.A.’s internal fractures have deepened, with Mr. Hamlin in one camp, along with Mr. Bachenberg, and the president of the board of directors, former Representative Bob Barr, Republican of Georgia, in another.
A central dispute between the camps is the role of Mr. Brewer, who became the gun group’s aggressive lead lawyer in the last several years of the LaPierre era. Mr. Bachenberg and Mr. Vaughan’s letter assailed Mr. Brewer, saying he had billed the N.R.A. more than $198 million since 2018.
“Brewer’s reputation is our number one impediment in bringing back the members, donors and industry, and rebuilding N.R.A. brand trust,” the men wrote.
The Brewer firm deferred comment to board members, though in the past it has emphasized the breadth of lawsuits it has taken on for the group, and it has said some portion of its billing is spent on outside experts and services.
Mr. Barr, in a statement, defended the Brewer firm and said: “These attacks on the N.R.A.’s legal strategy are, at best, misinformed. More likely, they reflect a bad-faith, post hoc posturing that disregards the existential threat the association has been facing” from blue-state regulators.
Mr. Bachenberg has been a Trump ally for years. In 2020, he acted as an alternate elector from Pennsylvania on Mr. Trump’s behalf, and he is now a 2024 elector.
In one part of the letter, attributed solely to Mr. Bachenberg, he wrote: “I spoke with President Trump at the May annual meeting. He was very troubled that N.R.A. would not be there to help like N.R.A. did in 2016. He could not understand how we could be using Brewer, a lawyer who” had donated “to anti-Second-Amendment candidates and drained our organization.” (Mr. Barr and other N.R.A. officials said in their own recent message to the board that the Brewer firm’s litigation team “includes several strong conservatives.”)
Despite the N.R.A.’s continuing internal turmoil, the prospects for federal gun control legislation have rarely seemed more distant. Mr. 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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