US President Donald Trump escalated his threats toward Chicago on Saturday, pledging to unleash federal muscle on the city while posting a dramatic parody online.
Trump shared an edited image styled after the 1979 film ‘Apocalypse Now’, with a fiery explosion and helicopters flying across Chicago’s skyline.
“‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning,’” Trump wrote, adding, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” The meme was labelled “Chipocalypse Now,” a twist on the 1979 Vietnam War movie, where a character famously declares, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
The post triggered outrage from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who blasted Trump as a “wannabe dictator.”
Trump signed an executive order on Friday to rename the Pentagon as the Department of War, although such a change would need Congress to sign off, reports AP/UNB.
The threat comes after Trump’s repeated warnings that Chicago could soon face the same treatment as other Democrat-run cities. His administration has already toughened immigration enforcement in Los Angeles, dispatched National Guard troops there in June, and stationed troops in Washington since last month.
He has also floated Baltimore, New Orleans, and Portland, Oregon, as possible next targets, at one point vowing to “wipe ’em out.”
Although Trump has offered few specifics, leaders in Illinois and Chicago vowed to block any such move in court.
Pritzker, seen as a potential presidential hopeful in 2028, wrote on X that the president “is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal.” He added, “Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”
Trump has long hinted at sweeping powers to deploy the National Guard, even flirting with the idea of being called a dictator.
“Most people are saying, ‘If you call him a dictator, if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants’ — I am not a dictator, by the way,” he said last month. “Not that I don’t have — I would — the right to do anything I want to do.”
“I’m the president of the United States,” Trump continued. “If I think our country is in danger — and it is in danger in these cities — I can do it.”
