We watched them turn on a dime with the election of Donald Trump. A recent report from The New York Times shows an NRA link to plan for a "back-channel meeting between the Trump campaign and Putin" during the campaign.
One of their recent ads attacked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:
And as Samantha Bee discussed last month, our spineless lawmakers are afraid to oppose them and have nothing to offer us but "thoughts and prayers" after every one of these mass shootings in the United States.
And who could forget this nasty piece of work from NRA mouthpiece Dana Loesch, where she's basically doing her best to stoke another civil war:
Here's more from Media Matters: The National Rifle Association’s first year as Trump propagandists:
Standing before a raucous crowd of supporters in April 2015 during the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting, the group’s longtime leader Wayne LaPierre snarled into the microphone, “Eight years of one demographically symbolic president is enough!”
One and a half years later, LaPierre got his wish as an aging white man again captured the presidency.
In a promotional video published by the NRA on January 3, three weeks before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, LaPierre stood before a shadowy backdrop at the NRA studios, looked into the camera, and said, “We are Donald Trump's strongest, most unflinching ally. The powerful partner he needs to get things done on behalf of American freedom. Join our ranks. Donate to our cause. And together, we will truly make America great again.”
Though Trump had already won the election by that time, LaPierre still adopted a defiant and apocalyptic tone fitting of the NRA’s siege mentality; he castigated the press, called out conservative groups for abandoning Trump after he bragged on tape about sexually assaulting women, and warned viewers of enemies at every turn. [...]
During the presidential campaign, the NRA had broken its own spending records in Trump's support and now it was time for the organization to try to cash in. In the video, LaPierre claimed that Trump was “the most openly pro-Second Amendment presidential candidate in history” -- glazing over the fact that Trump previously supported several gun safety measures that would normally be disqualifying violations of NRA orthodoxy.
Despite Trump’s past stances, the NRA and Trump were the perfect political match. The then-president-elect and the country’s foremost gun group shared an affinity for culture war rhetoric, driven by white racial grievances, retrograde views of women, and anti-immigrant, anti-free press, and pro-authoritarian sentiments. They also shared a penchant for spreading division through fearmongering and peddling conspiracy theories.
On Inauguration Day, the NRA flipped a switch, pivoting from a group that often raised the spectre of violent insurrection against a presidential administration it didn’t like to a group that now raises the spectre of violence against critics of a presidential administration it loves.
Go read the rest. It details their authoritarian attacks on the press and gaslighting for Trump.
