Review of Misfire by Tim Mak: How the Wheels Came Off at the NRA – The New Republic

LaPierre also became reliant on Ackerman McQueen in the day-to-day running of the organization. During crises or extended P.R. rollouts, LaPierre would consult with the firms name partner Angus McQueen several times a day and would not make a single strategic decision without consulting him, as though the ad man were his security blanket, Mak writes. By 2016, around 100 Ackerman McQueen employees were detailed to the NRA account, coordinating bloated projects such as the infamous NRATV boondoggle, which drew an anemic audience while hemorrhaging cash on a dumbfounding scale. The Ackerman McQueen brass kept any viewership metrics tightly under wraps, but before the NRA finally pulled the plug in 2019, a Comscore report indicated that the networks website had netted just 49,000 unique visitors over the month of January.

Ackerman McQueen enabled the top-down corruption at the NRA in far more direct fashion, however: Under a bookkeeping setup ominously dubbed Out of Pocket, LaPierre would route personal expensesprivate plane flights for him and his family members, clothes-shopping binges on Rodeo Drive, European and Caribbean getaways, and the likeinto an obliging Ackerman McQueen account, which would arrange for prompt reimbursement to the NRA chieftain without nettlesome details such as receipts or business rationales. The arrangement dated back to LaPierres elevation to the executive vice president postthe de facto leadership position in the gun lobbys Byzantine org chartand fatefully shaped Ackerman McQueens own business model: By 2018, the NRA accounted for 41 percent of the firms total revenue.

The ever-burgeoning corps of NRA-affiliated boodlers knew no national boundaries. Mak came to the LaPierre saga via the antics of now-jailed Russian agent Maria Butina, who helped coordinate an NRA junket to Moscow in 2015 and proceeded to arrange stateside confabs between Russian officials, prominent right-wingers, and Trump campaign hands the following year, all while enrolled as a graduate student at American University. Much has been made of Butinas ties to the Russian intelligence world, but as Mak notes, she was as much as anything a collateral player in the gun lobbys full-on embrace of Donald Trump and all facets of Trumpworlda debt-riddled nexus of global boodling in its own right. The NRA was one of the first right-wing power brokers to sign on with the Trump candidacy during the GOP primaries, and duly put its money where its mouth was:

The NRA dedicated more than $50 million to candidates in the 2016 elections, 99 percent of that to Republicans. It was by far the most the NRA had ever spent in an election cycle. The NRA spent more on boosting Trumps campaign in 2016 than it did in 2008 and 2012 combined. In fact, the NRA spent $30.3 million on the Trump election effort, more even than the leading Trump super PAC, which spent a paltry $20.3 million.

The group also launched a devastating round of gun-themed attack ads in the general election against Hillary Clinton, right after the damaging release of the Access Hollywood tapes showing Trump bragging of his own history of sexual assault. The release was the groups largest ad buy of the cycle, at $6.5 million, and it targeted the pivotal battleground states of Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. As Fred Barnes wrote in an election postmortem for the Weekly Standard, There are many claimants to the honor of having nudged Donald Trump over the top in the presidential election. But the folks with the best case are the National Rifle Association and the consultants who made their TV ads.

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Review of Misfire by Tim Mak: How the Wheels Came Off at the NRA - The New Republic