The power of mangluage.

This isn’t political. It’s lexical. In Time’s interview, Trump uses civilians instead of citizens in arguing that the US military could be employed against immigrants who aren’t ‘civilians’. But they are civilian, they just aren’t citizen.
If we can be abstract and academic and ignore the real-world implications of that statement for a moment (even if we can’t ’ignore’ it) - it’s a very deft use of a substitution. They’re not synonyms and it’s not the right word. But it’s close enough to make people gloss over the inaccuracy. It’s marketing. We use words to mean things, and we juxtapose words to mean other things. And 100 years from now we will examine Trumps mangling of language (academically) and see, repeatedly, how he is a copywriter of extraordinary creativity. I have no idea if he knows it, if he means it, or if he knows what it means - but it happens so routinely that you cannot ignore it - so it’s certainly something.