President Trump is the most successful, prominent promoter of anti-Semitism in American history. Certainly he is the only president who has ever compiled such a record.

I wanted to put together just a handful of examples of this. I ignored the voluminous examples of avowed anti-Semites promoting and supporting the President as their candidate. I’m not included accounts in books of anti-Semitic smears and comments from Trump. I’m also not including numerous statements about Jews in which he makes American Jews simply an extension of Israel, comments which feed into a long history of anti-Semitic discourse but are at least notionally framed as praising Jews and Israel. I’m referencing things he’s done publicly over the last three plus years. Just a few examples. Read More

There is quite a lot of perplexity and disgruntlement that Nancy Pelosi has apparently ruled out impeachment, saying Trump’s “just not worth it.” This has led to a number of theories. Possibly Pelosi has received some intelligence briefings that touch on the Mueller probe and she knows that the final verdict won’t be strong enough to sustain an impeachment. Perhaps she worries about impeachment spurring an even deeper round of polarization which will hurt the Democrats in the 2020 elections. Perhaps she simply wants to get out ahead of a Mueller Report with a firm line in the sand to prevent a headlong rush to impeaching the President.

I don’t know Pelosi’s character or thinking well enough to know precisely which of these it is. I can’t know what’s motivating her. But her statement yesterday seemed far less momentous or consequential to me than it appears to have seemed to almost everyone else. Read More

We’ve now heard from one of the 23 Republicans for voted against the anti-semitism, anti-racism, anti-hate bill. Mo Brooks of Alabama says he voted no because the resolution didn’t condemn discrimination against white people and Christians.

TPM Reader JB on the impeachment question…

I’ll bet you’ve been inundated with….comments, let’s call them, about your take on Pelosi negative remarks toward impeaching the President we have now.

Impeachment, of course, is a political process. It’s also a process used so infrequently that assessing its political impact cannot be reliably done. Preparing impeachment proceedings would be a considerable undertaking for the House; they would need to rest on findings of several committees now investigating Trump for various things, plus Mueller’s. And there is every reason to think that Senate Republicans, regardless of the facts uncovered or the charges against Trump, will spare no effort to remain loyal to their Leader.

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Nice find here from Matt Shuham that started from a reader tip. Freshman Rep. Denver Riggleman has been sending out constituent letters claiming he voted to override President Trump’s emergency declaration. Actually he voted to support it.

Very nice piece of sleuthing here from Josh Kovensky: Cindy Yang, the massage parlor baron at the center of the Mar-a-Lago pay to pay story also hawks EB-5 visas, the ones that allow you to buy a green card for making certain investments in the US.

For almost two decades I’ve told you about the importance of your emails. We want your feedback, your commentary, your criticisms. But there’s really nothing we want more than your tips. People tend to focus on secret information, sometimes super secret information that people can lose their jobs or even lives over. If you’ve got something like that by all means contact us for a secure channel to send us the information. But most tips are far more prosaic. They’re not even really secret at all. Matt Shuham has a quick note here about how a TPM Reader tipped us off to a Virginia congressman deceiving his constituents about how he voted on Trump’s emergency declaration. Read More

My favorite part of Allegra Kirkland’s run-down (P) of the Ricketts family’s other problems hanging out with racists and white nationalists is when she notes that family patriarch Joe Ricketts has some very bigoted views on Muslims and Barack Obama, as revealed in some earlier leaked communications. Son Pete Rickets is the one who we found out yesterday had an anti-Semite and white supremacist on his campaign staff. But in fairness, she notes, when son Pete found out about father Joe’s backward and bigoted views he did send his dad a Snopes article debunking stereotypes about Muslims.

Paul Manafort is scheduled to be sentenced at 9:30 a.m. ET. This is the DC case, separate from the Virginia case he was sentenced in last week. TPM’s Tierney Sneed is at the courthouse and will be bringing the proceedings to you in real time. You can find her here.

Over the last few days, as part of his continued attacks on Jewish Democrats, President Trump has insisted that American Jews are streaming out of the Democratic party. We have a century of statistics on these issues. In fact, the exact opposite is happening. In 2012, 2016 and 2018 the percentage of Jews voting for Democrats has gone up in each cycle, from 69% in 2012 to 79% in last November. But I thought this was a good opportunity to look at Jewish voting demographics in the context of the increasing racialization of voting in general.

Here is the breakdown going back to 2008. I haven’t included midterms except for the most recent election. Exit polls aren’t the only or necessarily the best way to count vote breakdowns for ethnicity and race. But they’re a good broad indicator. And they provide good baselines of comparison. Read More