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Not, an Invasion [1]

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Date: 2025-04-13

This is yet another post in the series entitled, Words Matter — and this is a big one. Today’s word is “Invasion.” You all heard it a lot during the 2024 Election, it was every speech given by Donald Trump, in 100’s of ads and 1000’s of posts — it was everywhere and it is still with us. In his June Acceptance Speech at the RNC, Trump mentioned the word invasion no less than 13 times. Here’s an excerpt:

The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country. They are coming in from every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, Middle East. They’re coming from everywhere. They’re coming at levels that we’ve never seen before. It is an invasion indeed, and this administration does absolutely nothing to stop them.

So, in that instance, it wasn’t just an invasion, rather it was the greatest invasion in history (the actual largest invasion in history was known as Operation Barbarossa, see the picture above). What exactly is Trump referring to when he uses the term — well, it’s illegal immigrants coming into the US of course, but how could the crossing of unarmed civilians compare for example to the armed incursion by 4.1 million soldiers involved in the 1941 German invasion of Russia? Wasn’t that the greatest invasion in history? The media and perhaps most voters may have considered these types of wild statements to be typical Trump-level hyperbole, and thus such claims were effectively sane-washed in terms of potential impacts to his campaign.

Note — “sane-washing” was an excellent lexical introduction to our political vocabulary last year (it may have originated before then, but it became widespread during the last election).

In other speeches, Trump went much further than he did in the convention to extend the distortion of invasion as a foundational pillar of his agenda:

comparing the wave of illegals entering the US to an invading army, saying that it consisted of millions of fighting-age youths.

he then applied hate speech to characterize all those coming over as criminals and degenerates — going so far as to compare them (on dozens of occasions) with the cannibal Hannibal Lector.

he claimed that these truths required a not just an immigration response but a military one, which he promised to provide at multiple levels.

Thus per our Words Matter Framework, the word “Invasion” as modified language (level 0), was used to build a core rhetorical concept that a real-life military invasion was underway (level 1) and this drove multiple aspects of both the election campaign as well as forming the core of a coming policy framework (levels 3 and 4). So now, as a result of the fact that word Invasion wasn’t properly challenged during the election, it has now become the justification for militarizing the border, closing off immigration, persecuting several million people who had been the following legitimate immigration processes and even going so far as to use it in a SCOTUS argument for applying the Alien Insurrection Act 1798.

The entire premise of that invocation and all related policy is based upon acknowledging the reality of the border situation being an actual military Invasion of the United States — claiming that various Latin American gangs constituted the armed forces of foreign nations. So, this is no longer hyperbole or Trump being Trump — this distortion of reality is becoming both policy and law (and it may later be used to justify attacks on sovereign Mexican territory). This particular agenda item then, arguably the most important one within the entire Trump 2.0 platform, is thus entirely dependent upon the acceptance of a metaphor as truth.

In other words, the battle for reality begins and ends with the battle for the language itself. We didn’t do a good enough job pushing back on the bizarre application of this word last Fall, but we can certainly address it now. The strategy here is pretty simple; everyone, everywhere must point out every time that it comes up — that illegal (and /or legal) immigrants are not an army and their coming here does not in any way constitute a military invasion. It may sound too easy to do this — but sometimes, the simplest answers are the best ones.

This instance, more than many lately, illustrates just how important words are in the struggle to preserve Democracy.

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