President Donald Trump’s weekend social media post reignited his campaign of threats toward Chicago, pairing fiery rhetoric with an image straight out of a war film.
On Saturday, the president shared a photoshopped scene mimicking Apocalypse Now, helicopters swooping above a flaming skyline, with Trump depicted in the war-loving attire of Lt. Col. Kilgore. Across the top he wrote: “I love the smell of deportations in the morning. Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
The caption, he said, was “Chipocalypse Now,” riffing on the 1979 Vietnam War classic whose original line declared, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
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Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker blasted the post within hours, calling Trump a “wannabe dictator” and warning, “The president is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal.”
Trump had signed an executive order on Fiday, seeking to rebrand the Pentagon as the “Department of War,” a proposal requiring congressional approval.
The Chicago meme underscores months of threats by Trump to flood Democratic-led cities with federal enforcement. His administration previously dispatched National Guard units to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and he has floated similar deployments in Baltimore, New Orleans, and even Portland, where he once vowed to “wipe ’em out,” referring to protesters.
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Local leaders in Illinois have vowed legal action if federal troops appear. Pritzker, eyeing higher office in 2028, wrote on X alongside the doctored image, “Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated.”
Despite insisting, “I am not a dictator,” Trump has repeatedly suggested broad authority to use the Guard at will. “I’m the president of the United States,” he said in an earlier interview. “If I think our country is in danger — and it is in danger in these cities — I can do it.”
The president offered no operational details about when or how his proposed Chicago surge might occur, leaving the city bracing for a confrontation that remains more threat than plan.
