The American-Israel Political Action Committee convention is an annual show of strength in DC. (Here’s Dana Milbank’s amusing 2005 Washington Post column AIPAC’s Big, Bigger, Biggest Moment about just how over the top the logistics of the AIPAC conference are in order to impress participants and speakers.)

Today, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump announced he was skipping the next Republican debate in favor of his AIPAC speech. (Hillary and Bernie are also speaking.)

This will be an important moment for Trump since it could affect just how negative his media coverage will be through the election. As Australian immigrant Rupert Murdoch once observed to a friend of mine in explaining his sponsorship of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, to be somebody in America you don’t need all the Jews in New York on your side, but you do need some.

John Rivers points out on Twitter that Obama’s nomination of a mainstream Jewish white male liberal to the Supreme Court is likely to present Republicans with a problem with this influential demographic slice:

Obama’s nomination of Garland and Trump’s upcoming speech to AIPAC can be seen as a response to the dust-up btw Trump and the Jewish Right. … I expect Trump’s AIPAC speech heals the rift, but we’ll see. Some like Shapiro & Kristol have gone so far out on a limb, hard to walk back.

From Haaretz, a long column on how antsy Jews are feeling about Trump:

Trump/AIPAC Conference Could Embroil Israel and Inflame American Jews

Speech by controversial GOP candidate could give him legitimacy he lacks, which is precisely what enrages his opponents.

Chemi Shalev Mar 15, 2016 7:56 PM

Presumably, Trump, the master salesman, will tell AIPAC what it wants to hear. It’s not an impossible sell: Sheldon Adelson is sympathetic to Trump, for example.