Campaign Finance and Ethics

President Donald Trump’s Never Surrender Inc. political action committee sent a fundraising email this week offering donors a 'National Security Briefing Membership' that promises 'private national security briefings' and 'unfiltered updates on the threats facing America' directly from the president. The appeal is explicitly pegged to the ongoing Iran war and features an official White House photo — rendered in black and white — of Trump in a 'USA' cap saluting a transfer case during the March 7 dignified transfer of U.S. service members killed in Kuwait at Dover Air Force Base. Several links in the email drive recipients to a donation page, while the White House and Pentagon declined to answer questions about what these 'briefings' entail or whether any classified material would ever be shared. Brennan Center elections and government program director Daniel Weiner told MS NOW that actually disclosing classified information to donors would be a clear legal violation, but absent that, the scheme likely sits in a gray zone of campaign‑finance norms rather than law. Ethics experts and veterans’ advocates online are already criticizing the use of fresh battlefield dead and official Dover imagery as fundraising fodder, calling it a new breach of long‑standing civil‑military and political norms even if it remains technically legal.