Trump just proved the power of repetition. Trump just proved the power of repetition.

And if we don't use it for good, we're at the mercy of the merciless.

Of course, he did.

That’s the assessment of anyone who has watched Donald Trump closely over the last eight years. Of course, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of even the most violent insurrectionists. Of course, he went after birthright citizenship. Of course, he declared false national emergencies even though he inherited an America that is more stable than any new president has greeted since George W. Bush in 2000.

He didn’t just say he would do all those things. He sold those things.

And how did he do that? Mostly repetition. Just saying the same shit over and over. He also attached values and moral messages to his lies and boasts. The most effective one, perhaps? “I was indicted FOR YOU.” For his fundamentalist base, the resonance of that claim is laden with their deepest—yet murkiest—religious beliefs. It’s illogical and baffling to those beyond the cult, but it digs into the neural circuity of his most ardent supporters, who then went into the world to do the converting for Trump.

Repetition and values-based messaging are two ways to change brains Dr. George Lakoff has been trying to get Democrats to adopt for decades—as you might know if you’re joining us in reading Lakoff’s classic The Political Mind at the FrameLab book club. Every word we hear changes our brains and activates the instincts and circuity that guide our decisions more than we can ever truly comprehend.

From Trump’s repetition, we also know precisely what is coming next: Retribution.

No one has followed Trump’s war on the rule of law and democracy more closely than Marcy Wheeler—whom I’m honored to have collaborated with on her Ball of Thread series documenting how we got to this very dark place. And she knew the pardons were coming for all of them, even Enrique Tarrio, former head of the Proud Boys—who led the assault on the Capitol. According to the encrypted communication the FBI accessed, Tarrio claimed credit for the Capitol breach in real time. And now he’s free. The point of those pardons is that Trump wants these guys ready to play a role in the retribution that was his stated campaign theme. Obviously.

The last Ball of Thread episode is above. In it, Marcy provides the best explanation for how Trump won that you will find. He used his grievance myth, which was born to help him defeat the Russia investigation, and his alliances with some of the worst influences on young men in America to activate an army of disaffected men voting for policies that would do nothing to help them except provide the vicarious pleasure of punishing Trump’s imagined enemies.

There’s nothing to learn from Trump but the power of a message repeated. We all know “witch hunt” and “Russia, Russia, Russia” and “Make America _________” and “drill, drill, drill,” and “close the border.”

What message do you remember from Democrats?

People who tend toward progressive thought avoid or despise repetition for various reasons. We tend to think of preaching to the choir as gauche. We believe logic alone should be enough to defeat Trump. Nope. Not in a country where our safety net is built on oppressing women and where the strategic racism of dog whistle politics has been the defining mode of campaign rhetoric for generations. The message matters a lot. It must be based on empathy, the core progressive value, and the principle we have in common with the best of the American Founders.

Something like, “Rule by billionaires betrays the American promise of democracy, fairness, and opportunity,” to bastardize Lakoff’s colleague Gil Durán a bit.

If you got better, we need to hear it—a lot.

As Lakoff writes in the introduction to The Political Mind:

Radical conservatives have been fighting a culture war. The main battlefield is the brain. At stake is what America is to be. Their goal is to radically change America to fit the conservative moral worldview. The threat is to democracy and all that goes with it. Not just here, but wherever American influence extends.

That 2008 statement has never been more accurate. If we’re going to fight back, people need to know what they’re fighting for and against.