In case you were feeling too rosy about the state of the world, it’s worth reading this new article by Zvi Bar’el in Haaretz (sub.req.) about “day after” scenarios in Gaza. You can believe, as I do, that Israel is and was justified in and in fact obligated to destroy Hamas’s de facto army in Gaza after the events of October 7th. Here Bar’el goes into some depth about the utter lack of any realistic plan about what comes after that happens, assuming it does happen.

I’ve already noted the malign role of the disgraced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is of course ideologically opposed to any move toward self-rule or statehood for any of the Palestinian territories. At the moment what is equally important is that he sees leaving the military and “day after” questions unresolved being in his personal and political self-interest.

That is only the beginning of the problems.

Over the weekend I had an exchange with TPM Reader AB that I’d like to share with you. AB is a dedicated listener to our podcast (and you should be too!) as well as a reader and he flagged an exchange in which my cohost Kate Riga discussed Donald Trump’s recent “vermin” comments, which mapped quite closely to a lot of Nazi rhetoric from the 1920s and 1930s. The comments would have gotten more attention, she said, had they happened in the heat of the campaign instead of 9 months or a year prior. AB insisted that we need to be vigilant. We need to be sounding Red Alerts. We can’t be complacent thinking the actual election is a year off and everything will change for be better.

To be clear, this was an aside from Kate in part of a longer discussion. And AB himself seemed to recognize this. So I raise this not to disagree with anyone or call anyone out. I note it because it illustrates an impulse and dynamic I think countless Democrats (and others who simply oppose Donald Trump) are finding themselves caught up in. I won’t belabor the foundational point. Trump 1.0 was really bad. Trump 2.0 promises to be much worse. A year out, polls suggest Trump and Biden are tied or with Trump slightly ahead in the popular vote. That makes something really unthinkable seem like a very real possibility.

That’s bad. Really bad. So get to sounding the Red Alerts. Break the glass and pull the alarm. Pick your metaphor. These are all very understandable and logical responses, not so much — in my mind at least — because of the percentage chances of one candidate winning over the other but because of the consequences of a bad outcome.

A ‘faith-based’ leader of Moms for Liberty in Philly turns out to be (subscription required) a registered sex offender. But don’t worry: He says he was framed. It was part of a squabble from when he was part of the LaRouche movement back in Chicago, he claims.

AI and who runs the company-cum-non-profit OpenAI is far from much that concerns TPM. But I felt I had to return at least once to the topic of the previous post. Because it did turn out to be “quite a story” but a story of a totally different sort than I’d imagined. The abruptness of CEO Sam Altman’s ouster, the potential loss to investors of tens of billions of dollars and the apparent claims of malfeasance in the company’s announcement made it seem certain that some vast scale of wrongdoing must be at the heart of the story. But now it doesn’t seem like that was the case at all. We still don’t know quite what happened or why. But the weight of evidence now points to some kind of non-wrongdoing-based spat between Altman and certain members of the board. Within a day, the board was trying to get Altman to come back and be CEO again. They’re currently negotiating to see if they can get him to come back. But he may choose to just start his own company with another employee who was canned.

You’ve probably seen the news that Open AI, which created ChatGPT, has fired CEO Sam Altman because the board concluded he was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” Yikes. He was sacked as CEO and removed from the board. I come at this with no knowledge of the inner workings of the company or Altman. But when a board out of the blue fires a CEO at the helm of a company that has skyrocketed to around $80 billion in value and is at center of huge bets about future economic gains across the economy you have to assume that something really, really bad must have happened.