This doesn’t mean that Democrats should not speak out when a cop kills someone for driving while black. Nor does it mean that Democrats should not join with progressive institutions — the military and forward-looking corporations among them — when Trump turns back the clock on transgender rights, or equal opportunity.

But you can’t bang just one drum. Trump has said demonstrably racist things many a time, from his birther obsession to his taco bowl tweet. He still won, “on a straightforward platform of economic nationalism,” as Bannon noted.

“As long as Democrats fail to understand this, they will continue to lose,” he said.

So, even though Trump now threatens to shut down the government that he runs over his insane and unpopular border wall, even though he’s told 1,000 verifiable lies since he’s been in office, his horrid character will not be enough to help the forces of good.

Democrats need to flip 24 House seats to get a majority. History is certainly on their side. When Harry Truman was at his nadir in 1946, Democrats lost 45 seats in the House. George W. Bush, with an approval rating about the same as Trump’s current standing, saw his party shed 30 seats and the majority in 2006.

I wouldn’t trust that history. We’re in a different universe — not end times, but truly awful times. Too many Americans have turned inward and dark. But they don’t have to reside in that cave, if the Democrats can give them a reason to come out.

The history I would trust is with Franklin Roosevelt, who rallied broken Americans during the Great Depression to an agenda in which government could lift people up.

So far, Democrats have come up with a tepid slogan — a “better deal” — and a bushel of banalities. They need to go big, bold and simple, pounding home a single economic message: Trump is trying to make life worse for most Americans. Call him out for going after people’s health care, for gutting protections for clean air and water, for killing studies on the health of miners in Appalachia.

Democrats could grab the economic nationalism argument from Bannon, refine it along Bernie Sanders lines, and run with it. Health care for all is pro-American. Raising wages across the country is pro-worker. A moonshot infrastructure program would lift every community. And then, Trump will do his part, ranting in the gutter where he feels most at home.