Virginia Is For Lovers, Part II

Part I can be found here and I don't want to repeat anything. Instead, I want to start with a few Sunday thoughts from Rev. William Barber's Washington Post OpEd:

If Northam, or any politician who has worn blackface, used the n-word or voted for the agenda of white supremacy, wants to repent, the first question they must ask is “How are the people who have been harmed by my actions asking to change the policies and practices of our society?” In political life, this means committing to expand voting rights, stand with immigrant neighbors, and provide health care and living wages for all people. In Virginia, it means stopping the environmental racism of the pipeline and natural gas compressor station Dominion Energy intends to build in Union Hill, a neighborhood founded by emancipated slaves and other free African Americans.

Scapegoating politicians who are caught in the act of interpersonal racism will not address the fundamental issue of systemic racism. We have to talk about policy. But we also have to talk about trust and power. If white people in political leadership are truly repentant, they will listen to black and other marginalized people in our society. They will confess that they have sinned and demonstrate their willingness to listen and learn by following and supporting the leadership of others. To confess past mistakes while continuing to insist that you are still best suited to lead because of your experience is itself a subtle form of white supremacy.

At the same time, we cannot allow political enemies of Virginia’s governor to call for his resignation over a photo when they continue themselves to vote for the policies of white supremacy. If anyone wants to call for the governor’s resignation, they should also call for the resignation of anyone who has supported racist voter suppression or policies that have a disparate impact on communities of color.

While we must name and resist white supremacy, we can also recall that we are never alone in this work. During the 19th century, there were anti-racist abolitionists-- black and white-- who worked to subvert and transform a system that considered some people chattel. In the new dawn of Reconstruction, black and white men worked together in statehouses across the South to reimagine democracy. During the 20th century’s movements for labor unions, women’s suffrage, and civil, human and environmental rights, fusion coalitions of black, white, brown, Native and Asian worked together to pursue a more perfect union that both acknowledges our original sin and holds on to the hope that we might yet live up to the better angels of our nature. Whenever we ask what repentance means, we don’t have to start from scratch. We have a long tradition to draw on, full of examples of what true repentance must look like.

In his 20s and 30s, Democrat Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia was a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, serving as the exalted cyclops of his local chapter. He continued to support the Klan into the 1940s, but Byrd later said joining the Klan was his greatest mistake. He demonstrated what repentance can look like by working with colleagues in Congress to extend the Voting Rights Act in 2006 and backing Barack Obama as his party’s candidate for president in 2008. “Senator Byrd and I stood together on many issues,” wrote Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who nearly died fighting for voting rights in Selma, Alabama In our present moral crisis, we must remember that real repentance is possible-- and it looks like working together to build the multiethnic democracy we’ve never yet been.

Virginia has been looking bluer and bluer. The state went for Nixon twice and then voted for Gerald Fiord, Reagan twice, George H.W. Bush twice, Dole, George W. Bush twice... Hopeless? In 2008, Obama beat McCain 52.6 to 46.3 and then went on to beat Romney. Even Hillary won the state (albeit with a plurality). 4 of the last 5 governors of the state were conservative Democrats (Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Terry McAuliffe and Ralph Northam). And since John Warner retired in 2008, Virginia has had 2 Democratic senators. Despite severe gerrymandering, the state's delegation to Congress has went from 8 Republicans and 3 Democrats in the 113th and 114th Congresses to 4 Republicans and 7 Democrats in the 116th. The Republicans hoped the change the dynamic by starting a coordinated series of scandals beginning with Gov. Ralph Northam's yearbook picture in blackface.

Now, as Politico pointed out yesterday, Republican strategists and activists are abuzz about their chances this November, when the party’s slim control of both state legislative chambers are in jeopardy in Virginia’s off-year elections. Republicans have a two-seat majority in the Senate, which has flipped back and forth between the parties four times during the past decade. Four Republican seats had been considered vulnerable this fall, compared to just two Democratic seats. In the House, Democrats made massive gains in 2017 and nearly took control. They were favored to make more gains in the House, where Republicans hold a three-seat majority with one vacancy."

“The entire executive branch of Virginia is apprised of Democrats and all of them are embroiled in their own respective scandals at this point so yes, that has obviously done damage to them,” Republican House Majority Leader Todd Gilbert said. Still, he added, “The damage this has done to Virginia is a much larger issue than these secondary political implications.”

Even if they hang on, the three top leaders won’t be of much help to down-ballot Democrats. Normally they would be among the most powerful Democratic surrogates to appear at campaign rallies or raise money.

After this week, Republicans said they expect to recruit more formidable candidates, while Democrats wonder who they’ll have to run for statewide races in in 2021, the next time the seats are up. Fairfax and Herring had both been expected to run for governor.

"Candidate recruitment for the GOP is being made a lot easier thanks to the events of the last two weeks,” said John March, a spokesman for the Republican Party of Virginia, referring to the scandals and Northam’s controversial comments about late-term abortions.

Some Democrats dispute the consequences, saying the focus will quickly turn back to Trump and national politics.

“Six months from now, everything is going to be in the rearview mirror and the focus on D.C.,” state Sen. Scott Surovell said.

Other Democrats lamented they had only hurt themselves by acting so quickly on Northam, who said he was in his yearbook photo then reversed course, but did admit to donning blackface on another occasion.

Bleak? Yes. But deadly? Perhaps not. First of all, the sanctimonious Republicans have their own problem. Their Senate majority leader, Tommy Norment-- who already has a very strong general election opponent in progressive Democrat Herb Jones, has been exposed as an arch hypocrite. Norment, who was screaming for Notham's head, turns out to be the former managing editor of a college yearbook that contains ugly racial and ethnic slurs and, of course, images of people in blackface. And the news got worse for Virginia Republicans. "Students in a college course Norment taught at the William & Mary say that he routinely made racially insensitive and transphobic comments, forced students of color to defend Confederate iconography, and even defended the university’s defunct Brafferton Indian School that educated Native American kids-- often without their family’s consent-- in the 1700s."

Last week Dahleen Glanton, an African-American reporter for the Chicago Tribune wrote two OpEds on the Virginia scandals, If Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam resigns over racist photo, who wins? on Monday and As of today, let’s forgive everyone who has ever appeared in blackface. But anyone who does it tomorrow will get no mercy. on Friday. First, she identified the problem as political, "little to do with African-Americans... If there ever was a case that pointed out both parties’ shallow interest in pushing forward an agenda addressing racial equality, it is this made-up angst over a picture that appeared 35 years ago in a medical school yearbook in Virginia. Virginia, of all places. Everyone knows the racist history of that state. It is where much of the Civil War was fought. Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy, for Christ’s sake... Is it really so shocking that someone who grew up on a farm in a county with such strong ties to slavery might have put black shoe polish on his face at one time or another?"

Northam says he didn’t realize the harm he’d done by dancing in blackface until he had a conversation about it later with a person of color.

“He let me know why this was offensive,” Northam said at a news conference Saturday. “I apologized to him, and I will never do it again.”

This is what a conversation on race looks like. Someone does something racially insensitive. He discusses it with someone he has hurt and he comes away understanding why this seemingly innocent act is so painful to others.

These are the kinds of interpersonal discussions that can move our nation forward, not the angry, hate-filled rhetoric Trump has encouraged Americans to spew onto each other.

I will not pretend to speak for every African-American, but for many of us, there is simply no outrage over that blackface photograph on Northam’s yearbook page. Of course, it’s racist and offensive. But many of us who live in blackface every day aren’t shocked to learn that a white politician has racist skeletons in his closet. What many African-Americans care about is what Northam has done for them lately.

Apparently, black people in Virginia thought he would be their best ally when 87 percent of them turned out to vote him into office in 2017.

He agreed with them that Confederate monuments have no right in public spaces. Since taking office, he has worked to expand Medicaid to serve the poor. He has helped restore voting rights to felons, politically empowering more black men.

The African-Americans in Virginia have a right to feel betrayed by a friend. But the question they and black people across the country should be asking themselves is: What purpose would Northam’s resignation serve?

As our country engages in a bitter dispute over race, African-Americans have to figure out what we want the end game to be. If it is to enlighten white people about issues of race and help them to understand what it is like to walk in our shoes, then we must allow second chances.

While each case is different, we must consider whether to hold someone hostage as a racist for life because of a mistake made before they became aware. We must decide if it is in our best interest to have someone who has worked to make amends over the years standing with us against those who refuse to accept change... [O]n the larger, more important, issue of racial reconciliation, Northam’s resignation would achieve nothing.

Republicans, on the other hand, would get to rejoice that a racist was unveiled in the Democratic Party. They could point to Northam whenever someone brings up Rep. Steve King’s defense of white nationalists or Florida’s former secretary of state, Michael Ertel, who was forced to resign last month after a picture of him in blackface as a Hurricane Katrina survivor surfaced.

For Democrats, the reward is more calculating. By declaring zero tolerance for a racist act that occurred three decades ago, they’d get to throw African-Americans a small token of appreciation for years of loyalty. That will come in handy when they’re out on the campaign trail in Virginia fighting to keep this important swing state blue.

Trump, though, would get the greatest reward of all. A president known for stoking racial fear and ignoring the truth gets to call a Democrat a liar on Twitter.

After a game of golf with Tiger Woods on Saturday, Trump tweeted that Northam’s denial of being in the blackface photo after first apologizing for it is “unforgivable.”

What’s unforgivable, Mr. President, is how people like you use racism as a political pawn.

The second column she wrote that "racism is bipartisan. It’s not Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative. It has permeated red states as well as blue states. It has always been part of this country’s moral fabric. It is rooted as deeply in America’s political history as the Founding Fathers, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Racism is part of the foundation on which our country was built. Blackface is a symbol of that racism, whether intended or not. It is merely a symptom of the larger, more complicated issue. Focusing on blackface alone is like pulling one rotten tooth when the whole mouth is decayed. Why would African-Americans still struggling to overcome the devastation of slavery, Jim Crow laws and systemic social and economic injustices spend a minute worrying that a politician, trusted or not, once wore blackface?... The way I see it, there is only one way out of this mess. As of today, black people have to forgive every white person who has ever worn blackface. But if anyone does it tomorrow, we’re coming after you."

Yesterday, in an interview with the Washington Post yesterday, Northam said he will spend the rest of his time in office-- 3 years-- remedying ongoing inequities related to race in his state. "It’s obvious from what happened this week that we still have a lot of work to do. There are still some very deep wounds in Virginia, and especially in the area of equity... There are ongoing inequities to access to things like education, health care, mortgages, capital, entrepreneurship. And so this has been a real, I think, an awakening for Virginia. It has really raised the level of awareness for racial issues in Virginia. And so we’re ready to learn from our mistakes." When will Trump look inward and decide to learn from his mistakes?  Yeah, I know. But what about state Senator Norment?

The North Carolina GOP/KKK Never Got Over Obama's Win In 2008 In Their State

North Carolina is pretty evenly divided between supporters of a progressive vision of governance and supporters of a conservative or reactionary vision. Trump won the state last month— 2,362,631 (49.8%) to 2,189,316 (46.2%). Hillary won all 7 of the state’s biggest counties— Wake, Mecklenburg, Guildford, Forsyth, Durham, Buncombe and Cumberland. Trump won all but one of the state’s 20 smallest, backward, rural counties. But on the same day Trump won, divisive Republican governor Pat McCrory was beaten by Democrat Roy Cooper 2,281,155 (49.0%) to 2,276,383 (48.9%). Democrat Josh Stein beat Republican Buck Newton for Attorney General 2,276,553 (50.2%) to 2,256,025 (49.8%), progressive Democrat Elaine Marshall was reelected Secretary of State over Republican Michael LaPaglia 2,340,550 (52.2%) to 2,141,414 (47.8%). A Democrat won the state Auditor job but Republicans won races for Lt. Governor, Treasurer, Labor Commissioner, Insurance Commissioner , Supervisor of Public Instruction and Agricultural Commissioner. A Democrat, Michael Morgan beat a dangerous far right psychopath, Robert Edmunds, for the Supreme Court opening, 2,134,650 (54.5%) to 1,785,437 (45.5%). These were all state-wide races and they were all very close.

What wasn’t close were the races for Congress and for the legislature, where theRepublicans drew districts that have been found unconstitutional by the courts and have ordered them to be redrawn a revoted in 2017. The state Senate has 34 Republicans and just 15 Democrats and the state House 72 Republicans to 45 Democrats. The congressional delegation is split 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats. The 3 congressional winners with the biggest wins were:

• G.K. Butterfield- 69%
• David Price- 68%
• Alma Adams- 67%

All three were Democrats. That’s because their districts were loaded up with African American voters with the explicit intent of making the surrounding districts whiter and less competitive, giving an edge to vile Republican racists who don’t want to compete for black votes. NC-13, for example, a newly drawn district, is surrounded by African-American voters on 3 sides but skillfully zigs and zags around them, creating a district that minimizes African-American impact and guaranteed a win for racist Republican Ted Budd with a 56.1% win over Democrat Bruce Davis. The bizarrely-shaped 1st and 4th districts were designed to make sure only Republicans could win in the 13th. That’s what “democracy” looks like in North Carolina in 2016. Neo-fascist billionaire Art Pope paid for it to look that way and the GOP has been happy to take his money and do his bidding.

On Thursday the News & Observer published a widely acclaimed Op-Ed by UNC Professor Andrew Reynolds, renowned internationally for his work as a specialist in democratization, electoral system design and constitutional design. He has helped set up and supervise elections in countries attempting to transition to democracy— Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, Lebanon, South Africa, Sudan. Yemen. His Op-Ed’s premise is that North Carolina is no longer classified as a democracy, at least not by the first comprehensive method for evaluating the quality of elections around the world, which he designed. “Our system,” he explained, “measured 50 moving parts of an election process and covered everything from the legal framework to the polling day and counting of ballots.”

When we evolved the project I could never imagine that as we enter 2017, my state, North Carolina, would perform so badly on this, and other, measures that we are no longer considered to be a fully functioning democracy.

In the just released EIP report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table– a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.

Indeed, North Carolina does so poorly on the measures of legal framework and voter registration, that on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.



That North Carolina can no longer call its elections democratic is shocking enough, but our democratic decline goes beyond what happens at election time. The most respected measures of democracy— Freedom House, POLITY and the Varieties of Democracy project— all assess the degree to which the exercise of power depends on the will of the people: That is, governance is not arbitrary, it follows established rules and is based on popular legitimacy.

The extent to which North Carolina now breaches these principles means our state government can no longer be classified as a full democracy.

First, legislative power does not depend on the votes of the people. One party wins just half the votes but 100 percent of the power. The GOP has a huge legislative majority giving it absolute veto-proof control with that tiny advantage in the popular vote. The other party wins just a handful of votes less and 0 percent of the legislative power. This is above and beyond the way in which state legislators are detached from democratic accountability as a result of the rigged district boundaries. They are beholden to their party bosses, not the voters. Seventy-six of the 170 (45 percent) incumbent state legislators were not even opposed by the other party in the general election.

Second, democracies do not limit their citizens’ rights on the basis of their born identities. However, this is exactly what the North Carolina legislature did through House Bill 2 (there are an estimated 38,000 transgender Tar Heels), targeted attempts to reduce African-American and Latino access to the vote and pernicious laws to constrain the ability of women to act as autonomous citizens.


Third, government in North Carolina has become arbitrary and detached from popular will. When, in response to losing the governorship, one party uses its legislative dominance to take away significant executive power, it is a direct attack upon the separation of powers that defines American democracy. When a wounded legislative leadership,  and a lame-duck executive, force through draconian changes with no time for robust review and debate it leaves Carolina no better than the authoritarian regimes we look down upon.

…Practically we need to address the institutional failures which have cost us our democratic ranking– districting, equal access to the vote and the abuse of legislative power. An independent commission is the sine-qua-non of democratic districting (no democracy in the world outside of the U.S. allows the elected politicians to draw the lines). Voter registration and poll access should make voting as easy as possible and never be skewed in favor of any one section of society. Last, elected officials need to respect the core principles of democracy– respect the will of the voters, all the voters and play the game with integrity.

Do You Want The Democratic Party To Be As Ruthless And Brazen As The Republican Party?

"President Obama," Michael Moore told Chris Hayes on Friday, "wants to be the nice guy." Neo-Nazis-- I mean Republicans-- on social media sites now routinely taunt Democrats as "snowflakes." Are they up to leading the resistance against Trump? Ted Lieu, a Congressman from the stretch of southern California coastline from Malibu through Santa Monica, Venice and Manhattan Beach to Rancho Palos Verdes, is also an Air Force colonel. Saturday morning he told us that "It is possible that Donald Trump-- who lost the popular vote-- will have some ideas that benefit my constituents, California and our nation as a whole. On those policies-- such as withdrawing from the TPP-- I will support. What I will fight-- in every way at my disposal as a member of the United States House of Representatives-- are any policies that put our national security, our privacy, our economy or the well-being of Americans at risk. Any attempt to pass a sham infrastructure plan: I will fight. Any plan to gut the VA and privatize care for our Veteran heroes: I will fight. Any plan to create a so-called Muslim registry: I will fight. Any plan to gut the Affordable Care Act or Wall Street regulations: I will fight. Any plan that moves our nation further away from leading the clean energy revolution and undermines the undeniable science of climate change: I will fight. This is a challenging time in our great nation's history; a time that calls for serious leaders with serious policy solutions that make our nation healthier, more sustainable, more just and more prosperous. My hope is that Trump arrives at the White House and governs differently than he has campaigned."

The video above starts with a segment from Rev. William Barber discussing the pernicious Republican coup d'état in North Carolina. Barber, who you should remember as one of the most inspiring speakers at the Democratic National Convention this past summer. Friday he was on Democracy Now talking with Amy Goodman about how the white fascists-- I mean Republicans-- routinely steal elections and subvert Democracy in Nazi dominated-- I mean Republican dominated-- regions, like the Old Confederacy of slave holding states (and Dunces).

[I]f you rule the South, if you can control the South, you control 171 electoral votes, by just controlling the former 13 Confederate states. You control 26 senators in the United States Senate, which means you only need 25 from the other 37 states. You control 31 percent of the United States House of Representatives, which means you only need 20 from the other 37 states. And you control 13 governors and 13 general assemblies, that control state boards of election. So, if you break through that, then you have fundamentally changed politics.

I believe all of the pushback we’re seeing-- the voter suppression, the redistricting-- is because the extremists see the possibility of a third Reconstruction. They know that if we register 30 percent of the African-American voters, unregistered voters, in the South, and if we add to that whites and progressive whites and Latinos, you will have changed the South. And if you ever change that map and you ever gave deep down organizing that gets people to stop voting against their own interests, [have] grown-up conversations about race and economics, and people begin to see themselves as allies, blacks and whites, and no longer fear one another, then you have a third Reconstruction. I think we’re in the birth pangs of it. North Carolina is one of the places that points to it. Virginia is one of the places that points to it. The closing gaps that we’re seeing-- when you look at Trump, he didn’t win the South by the gaps that Ronald Reagan did. And if we have deep down organizing in the South, we can have-- we can push this third Reconstruction to full adulthood.

...I actually think a lot of what we’re seeing a last stand. I think when President Obama was elected, for instance, and you had this fusion coalition-- remember, he won in Virginia, won in North Carolina early on, Florida-- I think that scared extremists, which is why you had the 15 who got together and said, “We’re going to block him from doing anything.” You know, Jeff Sessions was in that group, who is now being proposed for the attorney general.

I think that the fact that Ryan and McConnell-- we talk a lot about the racism of Trump, but look at the racism of McConnell and Ryan, because, for me, racism is not the KKK or David Dukes or calling somebody the N-word. It’s policy. It’s systemic racism. So, for instance, Ryan and McConnell and Boehner have held up fixing the Voting Rights Act for over a thousand days, almost over 1,200 days, since June 25th, 2013, when the Supreme Court passed this ill-fated decision in Shelby. Strom Thurmond only filibustered the Civil Rights Act of ’57 for a day, 24 hours. These people have held up fixing Voting Rights Act Section 4, so that Section 5 can be implemented in states like North Carolina, for over 1,200 days. They’re afraid. They are afraid of this possibility of us organizing all of America.

And I think that that’s the same thing you see here. This Legislature now has been told twice, by the highest courts, “You are racist. You have engaged in racist voter suppression and racist gerrymandering.” They know they cannot win without this. For instance, what they did when they redistricted, they put 49 percent of black voters into 19 out of 50 Senate districts, and they put 51 percent of black voters into 27 out of 120 House seats. They did that to isolate, stack and pack the black vote, not just to disallow or keep black people from being elected, but to keep black and white people from forming fusion coalitions to elect progressive candidates. That’s what the game was. And all of that is falling apart now, every bit of it. And they see it falling apart in their face. And we have to understand what is at stake here.

And none of it, lastly, would have been possible if we had Section 5 preclearance. If Section 5 preclearance was in place-- and the people in the Congress understand this-- none of these laws that have been passed in the South would have been able to have been passed. And without them-- and I think the story, Amy and others, that we have not talked about is, people talk about this election. Ari Berman says we’ve had almost 900 less voting sites in the black community in this election than we had in 2012. It could have impacted more than a million African-American voters. And we did not have one discussion in our national debates, candidates for president, about voting rights and racism as it relates to voting rights. That was a tremendous error during this campaign.

As Paul Waldman wrote over the weekend in the Washington Post, in regard to the GOP coup in North Carolina, "[P]erhaps nowhere in the country have Republicans moved more aggressively to solidify power by disenfranchising their opponents as they have in North Carolina... This isn’t just hardball politics. This is a fundamentally anti-democratic approach to government, one that says that when we win, we get to implement our agenda, and when you win, you don’t.”

It's not just North Carolina, of course, or even just the South. Maine stumbled into electing a fascist, Paul LePage, in 2010 (with 38.1% of the vote) and reelecting that same fascist in 2014 with 48.2% of the vote. His approval rating this month is 38% across his state but Friday he announced he plans to nullify the minimum wage law approved by referendum last month. The referendum passed with 834,264 votes (55.5%), fair more votes than LePage ever got from Mainers or anyone else. (His 2010 vote total was just 218,065 and his 2014 vote total was 294,533. LePage combined vote total for his two gubernatorial campaigns is 321,666 less than the votes in favor of a modest, gradual increase in the minimum wage. He ordered his department of labor to not enforce the changes and has every intention of trying to overturn the will of the voters in the legislature. Republicans control the state Senate, 20-15 but Democrats, who are extremely tepid to act against the colossally unpopular LePage control the state House, 78-69 (with 4 independents). The House has consistently refused to make any serious impeachment moves against LePage after a series of unconstitutuional acts. The Bangor Daily News described the bullshit Democratic efforts as "having no teeth or sustained meaning." That about sums it up.

Normally when a U.S. Senator leaves office during their term, the governor of the state appoints a successor to either finish the term or on an interim basis until a special election can be called and organized. On the other hand, when a House member leaves office during their term, there is no appointment, just a special election-- except in Montana. Trump announced that he's appointing Montana's sole congressman, Republican Ryan Zinke, to head the Department of the Interior. Montana's newly-reelected Democratic Governor Steve Bullock can appoint an interim replacement-- just like they do for senators-- and then has between 85 and 100 days to hold a special election. There's some contention about whether or not this law allowing for an appointed congressman is even constitutional-- the state's Democratic Secretary of State, Linda McCulloch, says it isn't-- and Bullock has indicated he will not be appointing anyone. Imagine if the governor was a Republican. Do you think there would be the slightest hesitation?

In a piece last week, George Lakoff pointed out how many Democrats, progressives and members of the news media are inadvertently helping Trump on a daily basis-- spreading his vile message.

Think about it: every time Trump issues a mean tweet or utters a shocking statement, millions of people begin to obsess over his words. Reporters make it the top headline. Cable TV panels talk about it for hours. Horrified Democrats and progressives share the stories online, making sure to repeat the nastiest statements in order to refute them. While this response is understandable, it works in favor of Trump.

When you repeat Trump, you help Trump. You do this by spreading his message wide and far.

Nobody knows this better than Trump. Trump, as a media master, knows how to frame a debate. When he picks a fight, he does so deliberately. He tweets or says outrageous things, knowing they will be repeated millions and millions of times. When the news media and Democrats repeat Trump’s frames, they are strengthening those frames by ensuring that tens of millions of Americans hear them repeated over and over again.

...When you repeat Trump, you help Trump.