In a normal news cycle it would be a huge headline for the president to claim that his former personal attorney asked him directly for a pardon before deciding to turn against him in dramatic fashion, as President Donald Trump claimed Friday was the case with Michael Cohen.
But that statement came just moments after the president was making far more inflammatory remarks in which he twice claimed that “Democrats have become an anti-Jewish party.”
That type of shock-jock identity politics may work in elections, but it doesn’t offer clarity on what happened between the president and his former fixer or what any of that means for a congressional investigation into the matter.
Welcome to Fact Check Friday.
Anti-truthism
On Friday, the president told reporters: “The Democrats have become an anti-Israel party. They’ve become an anti-Jewish party.” His comments came after the House voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution broadly condemning hatred rather than specifically calling out alleged anti-Semitic comments made by freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is Muslim.
This is obviously an egregious lie. His comments were immediately rebuked by several Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups, including the Jewish Democratic Council of America. Jonathan Greenblatt, national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, criticized the comments as “grandstanding”.
It must be pointed out that 23 members of the Republican Party voted against the resolution because they said the resolution wasn’t aggressive enough in critiquing Omar.
It’s also important to note that the president has a troubling record on the issue of calling out anti-Semitism himself. In the days after white supremacists marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us,” the president claimed there “very fine people on both sides.”
During his presidential campaign, he told the Republican Jewish Coalition ““You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money,” which critics note rings of the same antis-Semitic tropes Congressman Omar is accused of trafficking in.
The Times of Israel published a timeline of…
