President Trump’s re-election campaign has been working hard — and spending millions — to convince voters that an “invasion” is taking place on the southern border.
Concern over the use of that word in thousands of Trump campaign ads on Facebook this year has intensified since Saturday, when dozens of people were gunned down, and 22 killed, during an attack in El Paso TX.
Many of the victims were Hispanic. Eight of the dead were Mexican nationals who crossed the border to shop at a Walmart, according to Mexico’s government.
“The suspect in that shooting, which left 22 people dead, appeared to be the author of a manifesto declaring that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” reports the New York Times.
The ads in question make up only a small portion of the more than 240,000 Trump ads placed on Facebook since May 2018 at a cost of about $5.6 million. But they are unusually forceful — and fearful.
“Most of the ‘invasion’ ads began running between January and March [2019], though a few dozen began running in May. Many of the ads began with a blunt message — ‘We have an INVASION!’ — and went on to say, ‘It’s CRITICAL that we STOP THE INVASION,’” the Times says.
Invasion is a fraught word, implying panic and desperation.
“If you’re invaded, you’re invaded by an enemy,” linguist George Lakoff told the Times. “An invasion says that you can be taken over inside your own country and harmed, and that you can be ruled by people from the outside.”
The writer of the El Paso manifesto, posted on 8chan, an online forum dominated by right-wing extremists, took pains to distance himself from Trump, claiming his anti-Hispanic views “predate” Trump’s rise.
“But Mr. Trump, through his speeches, tweets and campaign ads,” the Times says, “has elevated the idea of an ‘invasion,’ once a fringe view often espoused by white nationalists, into the public discourse.”
And recent ads by some other Republican candidates, mostly in the South, have adopted the word — like Tommy Tuberville, a former football coach running for Senate in Alabama, whose ad says: “Let’s call this what it is — an invasion of our country.”
Republicans have been using such alarmist language and images about immigrants since at least 1994, but Trump and his campaign have cranked it up.
The president “seized on the ‘invasion’ imagery in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, when he claimed without evidence that a caravan of migrants making its way north toward the border had been infiltrated by ‘criminals and unknown Middle Easterners,’” the Times says, noting that the tactic failed and the GOP lost the House anyway.
