The National Rifle Association is finally on the other side of its New York corruption trial with reformers firmly in control, but its existential crisis is still growing.

This week, President Donald Trump decided to bail on the gun-rights group’s annual conference for the first time since he began his political career in earnest. That blow came shortly after news that the NRA is still shedding members. Plus, two other lawsuits against it present more potential peril.

Can the NRA still survive?

On Tuesday, we broke news that President Trump won’t be speaking at the Annual Meeting. The NRA claimed this is because of scheduling conflicts.

“Though President Trump is unable to attend the NRA’s 2025 Annual Meeting, he is always welcome on our stage to address our members and has done so on nine occasions over the last decade,” the NRA told The Reload. “As an NRA Life Member himself, President Trump remains a steadfast advocate for NRA members and a champion for the right to keep and bear arms. Considering the high level and pace of work being done by his administration on many fronts to make America great again and put America first on the world stage, we can understand that he has a complex, ever-moving schedule.”

That’s also what the NRA claimed when he cancelled on the Georgia rally it planned for him back in October.

The White House didn’t even bother to provide an explanation for why Trump won’t be speaking at the meeting for the first time since 2015. However, my sources indicate the NRA has fallen out of favor with Trump. That’s a pretty bad development for a group that has, for better or worse, hitched its wagon to Trump for a decade.

It’s not hard to see why the NRA’s political power is wavering at the moment. It has lost millions of members. It was outspent in the last election. And things might actually be getting worse.

In a memo reported in several outlets and reviewed by The Reload, NRA President Bob Barr had dire news about continued membership declines despite major leadership changes.

“Unfortunately, membership continues to decline, even with the departure of Wayne LaPierre and The Brewer Law Firm,” he wrote. “In fact, we lost 286,215 members — that’s ~14 % of all non-life members in 2024 alone. The membership continues to decline in 2025.”

As the blog NRA in Danger notes, when combined with the group’s magazine subscription numbers, that implies membership has fallen to around 3 million. That’s down about 800,000 from 2023, 1.3 million from 2022, and about 2.15 million from its peak in 2018.

A remarkable slide that hasn’t abated yet despite the resignation of LaPierre, end of the New York corruption trial, and ascendence of reformers in leadership.

The NRA’s legal troubles aren’t over yet, either. Former president Oliver North, who was forced out by LaPierre at the onset of the group’s corruption scandal, is filing a new suit against the group. The class action suit against the NRA Foundation, led by David Dell’aquila, also recently got permission from a federal judge to move forward.

“If the Letitia James lawsuit was an atom bomb, this lawsuit is the hydrogen bomb; it’s a factor of 10,” Dell’aquila told The Reload.

He’s accused the NRA of misleading him and other donors about how their money would be used. Instead of going to charity efforts by the Foundation, his suit claims the donations were knowingly funneled to the NRA’s other arms, and some of it was actually spent on LaPierre’s luxurious personal expenses.

US District Judge William L. Campbell Jr., a Donald Trump appointee, refused to dismiss any of the claims against the NRA.

“Plaintiffs plausibly allege that the letters represent that the funds donated will be used for ‘The NRA Foundation’s Leadership Fund Endowment’ and that the funds were not used for that purpose. Instead, donated funds were ‘routinely transferred to the NRA without oversight and were then used for illicit purposes,'” Judge Campbell wrote in Dell’aquila v. NRA. “Although the ultimate question of whether the letters contain misrepresentations concerning the use of funds will be for the trier of fact, at this juncture, viewing the allegations in the light most favorable to Plaintiffs, the mailed communications could be viewed as a solicitation of funds for the NRA Foundation’s Leadership Fund Endowment.”

Dell’aquila said he’s unsatisfied with the reforms the group has already implemented since the end of the New York case.

“I mean, nobody’s gonna take their word for it at this point,” he said.

He still wants to see the board turned into an advisory committee, a smaller executive group take over control, and refunds for donors who were misled. He said he’s committed to that outcome.

“If they want to settle, fine. If they don’t want to settle, we’re more than happy to take this thing all the way to its conclusion with a jury.”

Still, it’s not all bad news.

The NRA remains the largest gun group on either side of the political divide in the world. It still has millions of dues-paying members. And it just regained some prominent backers.

“The National Rifle Association has led the fight to keep and bear arms, but, as you know, they simply lost their way, and many people like me took a step back and refused to condone their behavior with our time and resources,” Marty Daniel, founder of Daniel Defense, told customers in a February video. “The message was heard loud and clear, and now change is on the way. With former leadership gone and new leaders at the helm, there’s a plan in place to revive the organization and restore trust with NRA members and all gun-owning Americans.”

Trump has started to take some pro-gun actions as well. He ordered a review of executive branch gun policy, ended the Biden-era “zero tolerance” ATF policy for gun dealers, and moved to restart the gun-rights restoration process. He’s also resisted the call for new gun laws in the wake of the first school shooting to garner significant media attention, which has caused him to waver in the past.

He’s also notoriously fickle when it comes to who is in and out of his good graces. While it’s unlikely he changes his mind tomorrow and decides to show up at the Annual Meeting, it’s not impossible. Down the line, it’s even more likely he could come back around on the NRA, especially if it can show it’s still a formidable political force.

That could still happen.

The NRA’s board election results just recently came in, and the reformers now have a larger majority on the board than ever before. That will likely result in a more unified front from the group’s leadership. That should make it easier for the group to implement changes that add transparency.

Of course, the big question is whether they can change fast enough to win back members.