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. 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.
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