Ackerman McQueen wants to quit nearly 40-year relationship amid the partners’ legal dispute
Advertising firm Ackerman McQueen Inc. said it was moving to terminate its nearly 40-year relationship with the National Rifle Association, the latest salvo in the dispute between the two longtime partners that has embroiled the NRA in controversy in recent months.
Oklahoma City-based Ackerman McQueen has been the NRA’s ad agency since the 1980s and has been credited with helping to transform the gun-rights group from a grass-roots operation to a powerful national advocacy group. But the two organizations have had a falling out in recent months involving litigation and dueling claims that each has leaked confidential information about their relationship to the media.
The NRA in a lawsuit filed last week accused Ackerman of being behind what it called a failed coup attempt at its recent annual meeting, aimed at ousting NRA Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre. Ackerman countersued, claiming the NRA was looking for pretexts to cancel its contract and seeking as much as $100 million in damages.
In the announcement Wednesday, Ackerman said it had formally provided a notice to terminate its contract with the NRA, claiming the agreement already had been “constructively terminated” by the NRA’s own “inexplicable actions.”
The dispute traces to a drive by the NRA to shore up its internal governance practices. The gun-rights group has said it demanded that all vendors submit detailed records to back up invoices to the NRA, and the only vendor that didn’t comply was Ackerman. The NRA paid the ad firm more than $40 million in 2017, the most recent year publicly available.
Ackerman has said it has complied with all authorized demands for records. It also sent several letters to NRA officials, saying it was unable to comply with demands for records related to certain expenses it incurred on behalf of top NRA officials without additional detail from the NRA itself.
Among the expenses was more than $500,000 the ad firm said it allegedly incurred for clothing and travel expenses for Mr. LaPierre, which included suits from a Beverly Hills, Calif., boutique and travel to locales such as Italy and the Bahamas. The NRA has said the expenses were justified, but the letters leaked out after they played a role in an internal NRA board drama that led to the departure of then-NRA President Oliver North.
Ackerman produces the gun-rights group’s NRATV, a venture that includes live video programming. It isn’t clear what will happen to NRATV once the ad agency no longer works for the NRA.
Donald Trump Goes Full Fredo
But unlike the Godfather character, the president of the United States is backed by powerful people enabling him.
.. The Corleone family had the awareness and vigilance to exclude Fredo from power. The American political system did not do so well.
.. Until now, Trump’s worst moments have occurred behind closed doors, and have become known to the public only second-hand, leaked by worried officials, aides, and advisers. Yesterday and today, we have seen a Trump temper-tantrum in real time on Twitter
.. the most important moment in Wolff’s book are words attributed at second or third-hand to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at the time of Donald Trump’s election. “He will sign anything we put in front of him.”
.. Who and what Donald Trump is has been known to everyone and anyone who cared to know for years and decades.
- Before he was president, he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist.
- Before he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist, he was a celebrity gameshow host.
- Before he was a celebrity gameshow host, he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate.
- Before he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate, he was the protege of Roy Cohn’s repeatedly accused of ties to organized crime.
.. Instead, since he announced his candidacy in mid-2015, Donald Trump has been enabled and protected.
The enabling and protecting not only continues. It accelerates.
.. The Senate Judiciary committee—the Senate Judiciary Committee! The committee that oversees the proper enforcement of the law!—formally filed a criminal referral with the Department of Justice against Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous dossier about Trump’s Russia connections. The referral was signed by the committee’s chairman, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, without even notice to Democrats on the committee, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein said; a startling abuse of majority status and a sharp departure from the norms of the Senate, especially a 51-49 Senate.
.. It’s ominous, however, that on the very same day, the FBI obeyed Trump’s repeated demands and reopened a long-closed criminal investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
.. the important thing about Trump is not the man; it’s the system of power surrounding the man.
.. What sustains Trump now is the support of people who know what he is, but back him anyway.
Republican political elites who know him for what he is, but who back him because they believe they can control and use him;
conservative media elites who sense what he is, but who delight in the cultural wars he provokes;
rank-and-file conservatives who care more about their grievances and hatreds than the governance of the country.
.. he is indeed the “very stable genius” he claims to be: Trump understands how to mobilize hatred and resentment to his own advantage and profit. He has risen higher than Joe McCarthy or Charles Lindbergh or Theodore Bilbo—and he has lasted already nearly a full year in office, holding the approval of one-third of the country.. without the complicity of other power-holders, Trump would drop from his central position like a tooth from a rotten gum. What we need to do now is widen the camera angle beyond Fredo Trump to the hard-faced men and women over his shoulders. Those are the people who put Trump where he is, and keep him there, corrupting the institutions of American democracy and troubling the peace and security of the world.
John Kelly’s Latest Mission: Controlling the Information Flow to Trump
For months, the White House under President Trump operated with few real rules, and those were barely enforced. People wandered into the Oval Office throughout the day. The president was given pieces of unvetted information, and found more on his own that he often tweeted out. Policy decisions were often based on whoever had last gotten Mr. Trump’s attention.
.. In two memos sent to the staff on Monday he began to detail his plan, starting with how he wants information to get to the president, and how Mr. Trump will respond.
.. Mr. Kelly’s predecessor, Reince Priebus, sent some similar guidelines around early in the administration, according to two officials, but they were never taken seriously. Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine general, has been treated with a different level of deference
.. Mr. Kelly has made clear that one thing he will not seek to directly control is the behavior of the president, and there is a good reason for that.
.. Mr. Trump has a history of lashing out at advisers who have publicly conveyed their attempts to impose tighter procedures on him. Just before Election Day, for example, Mr. Trump blew up publicly after a New York Times report that his aides had succeeded in keeping him off Twitter for the final stages of the campaign. He tweeted several times to enforce the point.
.. Despite Mr. Kelly’s fairly deft touch at approaching the president, Mr. Trump has shown signs of rebelling
.. That included his news conference at Trump Tower in which he doubled down on his blame for “both sides” in the racially charged violence in Charlottesville, Va., and his campaign rally speech in Arizona
.. Mr. Kelly had urged Mr. Trump to deliver a more somber, traditional statement the day before. And he and other advisers had urged the president to avoid taking questions from the news media at Trump Tower, a request that the president ignored.
.. In one of the memos, White House aides were told that all materials prepared for the president must go first to Mr. Porter for vetting and clearance. Then Mr. Kelly must sign off on them before they go to Mr. Trump’s desk.
.. given the propensity for some of Mr. Trump’s staff to slip him news accounts from dubious sources that shape his thinking or prompt him to cite unreliable or inaccurate information.
.. Mr. Priebus had tried to take firmer control of that process after Mr. Trump’s first week in office, when Stephen K. Bannon, the recently departed chief strategist, and Stephen Miller, the president’s senior policy adviser, pushed across the president’s desk two orders redesigning the National Security Council, and putting in place the first, court-contested travel ban on seven predominantly Muslim countries.
.. That process is expected to curtail freelancing and hijacking of decisions by West Wing aides. Mr. Bannon was often accused of taking advantage of the loose process, but Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter, Ivanka Trump, who both work in the West Wing, have also frustrated their colleagues for months by going directly to the president on specific issues.
.. “Let’s assume for the moment that Trump has learned the first big lesson of his first six months, which is that you have to empower the White House chief of staff to be a real gatekeeper,”
.. “What he hasn’t learned, what he has shown no sign of learning, is that governing is completely different from campaigning,” Mr. Whipple said.
Bannon Firing Proves Trump is Winging It
He risks having no base from which to build, no prospect for governance.
In the wake of Stephen Bannon’s firing, it has become almost inconceivable that President Trump can avoid a one-term fate. This isn’t because he sacked Bannon but because of what that action tells us about his leadership. In celebrating Bannon’s dismissal, The Wall Street Journal wrote in an editorial: “Trump can’t govern with a Breitbart coalition. Does he see that?” True enough. But he also can’t govern without the Breitbart constituency—his core constituency—in his coalition. The bigger question is: Does he see that?
It’s beginning to appear that Trump doesn’t see much of anything with precision or clarity when it comes to the fundamental question of how to govern based on how he campaigned. He is merely a battery of impulses, devoid of any philosophical coherence or intellectual consistency.
Indeed, it’s difficult to recall any president of recent memory who was so clearly winging it in the Oval Office. Think of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, both of whom made huge mistakes that cost them the White House. But both knew precisely what they wanted to accomplish and how to go about accomplishing it.
.. Further, that agenda had to give a majority of Americans a sense that
- the economy was sound and growing,
- that unnecessary foreign wars would be avoided,
- that domestic tranquility would prevail,
- that the mass immigration of recent years would be curtailed,
- that the health care mess would be fixed, and that
- infrastructure needs would be addressed.
Consider some of the elements of conventional wisdom that he smashed during the campaign.
- Immigration
- Foreign Policy
- Trade
The important point about these issues is that they all cut across partisan lines. That’s what allowed Trump to forge a nontraditional coalition that provided him a slim margin of victory—but only in the Electoral College. His challenge was to turn this electoral coalition into a governing one.
.. What we see in these defeats and stalled initiatives is an incapacity on the part of the president to nudge and herd legislators, to mold voter sentiment into waves of political energy, to fashion a dialectic of political action, or to offer a coherent vision of the state of the country and where he wishes to take it. Everything is ad hoc. No major action seems related to any other action. In a job that calls for a political chess master, Trump displays hardly sufficient skills and attentiveness for a game of political checkers.
.. It’s telling, but not surprising, that Trump couldn’t manage his White House staff in such a way as to maintain a secure place on the team for the man most responsible for charting his path to the White House. This isn’t to say that Bannon should have been given outsized influence within West Wing councils, merely that his voice needed to be heard and his connection to Trump’s core constituency respected.
But that’s not the way Trump operates—another sign of a man who, over his head at the top of the global power structure, is winging it.