Why Trump’s Washington keeps speaking in football - Newsweek
Brian Dawkins launches himself into a receiver, drives him backward and sends both men crashing into the turf. Then comes another hit, and another. It's a reel of the former Philadelphia Eagles safety at his most violent and most celebrated. The Department of Homeland Security used those collisions in a video promoting immigration enforcement. Dawkins said he had not authorized the use of his image and the NFL asked DHS to remove it. DHS responded by saying Border Patrol was “playing lockdown defense” and would use every “Weapon” available, a reference to Dawkins’ nickname, “Weapon X.”
Welcome to the football politics of Trump’s Washington, where the country’s favorite game offers a convenient language for the exercise of power. Football begins with a battle over territory, with one side advancing and the other defending. There is always ground to protect and an opponent whose movement forward makes force in the other direction look legitimate. Strip away the details and it all sounds oh-so-Washington.
That moral logic is what makes the sport so politically useful.
In football, aggression can become defense simply by changing who is doing the hitting and why. The Trump administration’s attraction to the game amounts to more than spectacle. The sport gives hard power a familiar moral vocabulary, one in which territory must be protected, intruders must be stopped and force becomes legitimate when it is exercised in defense of the line—and the DHS video demonstrates how that translation works.
Linguists have been studying the traffic between politics, war and sport for decades. Football is particularly rich in the language of warfare—attacks, defenses, tactics, weapons—while American politicians have long borrowed the sport’s vocabulary to make contests over power feel more familiar.
Richard Nixon once said there were “a great deal of similarities between the game of football and the game of politics.” Two decades later, during the Gulf War, the metaphor hardened.
George H.W. Bush described Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz’s treatment of Secretary of State James Baker as “a total stiff-arm,” while reporters and military officers reached for “end runs,” interceptions and football scores to describe diplomacy and combat. Washington has long used football to make power legible.
Trump’s version just makes the underlying logic unusually explicit.
Otto Santa Ana, a professor emeritus at UCLA whose research examines language, social hierarchy and media portrayals of Latinos, said nationalism works through precisely this kind of compression.
“That’s what all the metaphors of nationalism do,” he told Newsweek. “They flatten things so it’s a binary: the United States versus the outsider.”
Football is exceptionally good at flattening. It gives almost perfect clarity about who belongs where—offense here, defense there, territory in between. It gets even easier—the player coming forward is supposed to be stopped and the person stopping him is doing his job.
DHS’s formulation imports that clarity into a subject that ordinarily resists it. Immigration policy involves statutes, asylum standards, executive authority, courts and individual circumstances—not as binary as you might think, but clearly able to shapeshift into that duality.
Santa Ana was struck by DHS’s choice of Dawkins himself.
“Although he is human in his uniform, he is no longer just a human, he is a weapon—Weapon X—in that game,” he said. “And the game, instead of being football, is ICE, and it’s easy to see who the targets are.”
Could there be a less ambitious interpretation? Always. Football commands a massive audience; hard tackles produce irresistible social media footage and political figures have used sports metaphors for generations, so the Trump administration may simply be taking advantage of a language Americans already speak.
But that explanation leads back to the same point. The metaphor works because there is no translation needed. Faced with criticism over its use of football imagery, DHS answered in more football language—“lockdown defense,” “Weapon.”
The metaphor was doing more than decorating the argument...it was carrying it, which is exactly what the video reveals about football's usefulness to political power. It makes force feel like defense before the argument has even begun.
