THE BASE PLAYING TO HIS BASE:

Don Jr.'s tweets provoked a rare response from Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, who referred to his invocation of Soros, a left-leaning Jewish billionaire, as an "anti-Semitic trope" and a "dangerous" insinuation.

Dangerous indeed. On October 22, 2018, Trump supporter Cesar Sayoc sent a pipe bomb to the Westchester, New York, home of Soros. Six days later, white nationalist Robert Bowers murdered 11 Jewish worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue because he believed that wealthy U.S. Jews were conspiring bring "invaders in that kill our people," an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory endorsed by the president of the United States. "A lot of people say" that Soros funded the migrant caravan, Trump irresponsibly claimed only three days after the Pittsburgh massacre.

So why isn't there more outrage over Trump's blatant and dangerous anti-Semitism, in the specific context of this impeachment inquiry? Why has his nasty, conspiratorial and Jew-baiting response to it not been a bigger story?

One reason is that Trump's anti-Semitism is nothing new. He was an anti-Semite when he accused U.S. Jews of being dumb and disloyal. He was an anti-Semite when he praised neo-Nazis as "very fine people." He was an anti-Semite when he referred to comedian Jon Stewart as Jonathan Leibowitz. He was an anti-Semite when he kept -- no joke -- a book of Hitler's speeches next to his bed. So we have become inured to his anti-Semitism, just as we have become inured to his anti-Muslim bigotry and his anti-black and anti-Latino racism.

Another reason is the cynical and partisan weaponization of anti-Semitism by the right to attack the left -- especially the likes of Reps. llhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib - aided and abetted by a lazy liberal media. (Can you imagine the reaction if Omar had called, say, Trump's Jewish Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin "shifty" or a "savage"?)

But we cannot afford to give Trump a pass on this. "As the impeachment inquiry escalates," Beinart writes, "Trump's anti-Semitic rhetoric probably will too." Remember: The president's paranoid and cultish online supporters have already begun promulgating mad conspiracy theories to try and protect their hero from being impeached and, as Vox's Jane Coaston has observed, "an environment where conspiracy theories flourish and find new ground is the perfect environment for anti-Semitism itself to flourish and find new acolytes," especially because "anti-Semitism itself is a conspiracy theory."

Hate crimes targeting Jews or Jewish institutions in the U.S. rose by 37 percent during Trump's first year in office. 

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