I just noticed a write up on Trump stumbling into saying there’s lots you can do in terms of cutting Social Security and Medicare. The Biden campaign and other Democrats were promptly all over those comments, as you’d expect. But it raises a point that is too little discussed in the campaign dialog. Trump has two big advantages right now. The first is simply that he’s not Joe Biden and Biden’s approval has been low since the fall of 2021. The other is a general sense that things were better before the pandemic. You might say, wait, the pandemic happened on his watch and the worst of it took place during his presidency. But that’s not really the public memory. In any case, those are his two big advantages. And they could get him elected.

What this has tended to obscure, however, is that politically he is very, very rusty. Even in Trumpian terms his speeches these days are disjointed, weird, discordant. And again — not by the standard of who you might want within a mile of the Oval Office. I mean even in terms of Trumpian politics. He’s not the same.

I find it very hard to make sense of what the likely outcomes are. But I wanted to point your attention to a series of developments in the Biden-Netanyahu relationship and the U.S.-Israel relationship that could escalate dramatically very soon. First there’s this article in Haartez which says the U.S. might suspend the sale of offensive weaponry to Israel by later this month. (Unfortunately the piece is paywalled.) The tripwire is a national security memorandum Biden signed last month which gives Israel until March 25th to provide the U.S. with written assurances that weapons sales from the U.S. will only be used in accord with international law and that it will pledge to facilitate and not obstruct aid deliveries into Gaza.

That’s the calendar tripwire.

One of the big developments of the Trump years is the increasingly central role of a California outfit called the Claremont Institute as a kind of house think tank of Trumpism. If you haven’t had a chance yet to see our big exclusive from over the weekend (thank you, members!) you’ll want to get reading. Our Josh Kovensky got a trove of documents from the secret society planning and recruiting for a white, male, Christian government that will take over after the fall of the American “regime.” And a central player in that group is none other than the head of the Claremont Institute. Check our exclusive report out here.

I hope you have a chance to check out our new exclusive from TPM’s Josh Kovensky. Josh got access to a trove of documents from a secret society of right-wing Christian men who are on a crusade to build a Christian government-in-waiting for after the right achieves “regime change” in the United States, either through a civil war or a “national divorce.” The group goes by a fairly anodyne name, the Society for American Civic Renewal. But that belies the extremism of the program.

Of course you and your three weirdo pals can call yourself a secret society. And we’ve seen examples of militia groups or boogaloo boys saying some of the same things. What’s different here though is that these aren’t people on the fringe. They are people who present as respectable business leaders, academics, think tankers. Indeed, one of their number is the President of the Claremont Institute, which, in recent years, has functioned as a kind of brain trust of Trump campaign intellectuals. It’s fascinating, disturbing and important story and your memberships made it possible. You can read it here.