The media is helping President Trump’s reelection effort by its constant, obsessive, nearly unhinged determination to tell their audience for the 2,965th time that Trump’s tweets about four radical congresswomen were “racist.”

At least three respected polls, including one just out today, have shown the backlash those tweets — in Trump’s favor. I immediately predicted this would happen if the media persisted in its passionate, unprofessional behavior of affixing the “racist” label to the tweets as if the label were straight news rather than an opinion.

As I explained last week, words matter, and wolf cries eventually cause people to get angry at the crier. The word “racist” in particular has been so overused as a pejorative that plenty of nonracist people at least tune it out and sometimes revolt against it.

In this case, if the observer sees Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar primarily as “women of color,” then the nasty Trump tweet appears aimed at their “color,” which in these “woke” days often is misused as a stand-in for “race.” Yet if the observer doesn’t look at everything first and foremost through a racial or colorized lens, what the women have in common isn’t their supposed pigmentation similarities but their radicalism.

Telling a radical to leave the country if they hate America seems, to many eyes, to be childish and even nativist, but not a racist way to make an otherwise valid point. Witness, for example, the eight Republican women who insisted to CNN’s clueless Randi Kaye that Trump’s tweets weren’t racist, no matter how much she expressed incredulity and even hectored them to affix that label.

While telling a black American to “go back to Africa” is clearly a racial reference, telling a radical to go back to her family’s country of origin is, well, just anti-radical. Indeed, for decades "love it or leave it!" has been a rather common, noncolor-dependent suggestion made to or about any public figure whose criticism of the United States or its current administration seems a little too impassioned. In 2002, CBS’ Connie Chung asked tennis star Martina Navratilova why she didn’t just “go back to Czechoslovakia … if you don’t like it here.” (Later, Navratilova mused that perhaps Chung should go back to China.)

If the media interviews thoughtful people explaining why Trump’s tweets were nasty, nativist, or even racist, that’s one thing. But to yell “racist” from the rooftops without letting viewers or readers make up their own minds is to remind those viewers of all the times their opinions in favor of, say, welfare reform, or against college racial quotas that disadvantage Asians, or even against Obamacare, were not just called unwise but “racist” and thus evil.

The reason the utterly amoral Trump is keeping up his drumbeat even today, more than a week after his original tweet on the subject, is that he thinks, and the polls show, that it’s working for him. Yet those who warn against using the “racist” label are denounced as if by warning against the label, the one making the warning is saying Trump wasn’t wrong.

Memo to media: “Racist” and “wrong” aren’t synonyms. An observer can make distinctions, while understanding basic human psychology, and while still condemning the president’s tweets and actions. As my former colleague Keith Woods wisely advised the staff of National Public Radio: Make the report, “but ditch the labels.”