Donald John Trump, U.S. president and known shitposter, shared an apparently AI-generated image to social media on Saturday that suggests he is champing at the bit to unleash the military on the city of Chicago.
In the image, Trump’s face is imposed on the body of “Apocalypse Now” actor Robert Duvall, who played the unhinged warmonger Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 classic. Duvall delivers the film’s famous line: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” read Trump’s post. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
Behind him is the Chicago skyline, tinted a deep orange as it burns. Military helicopters fly overhead.
Truth Social / @realDonaldTrump
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) responded in turn on X.
“The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city,” Pritzker wrote. “This is not a joke. This is not normal.”
“Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator,” the governor wrote.
On Friday, Trump signed an executive order ostensibly renaming the Department of Defense as the “Department of War” because it has “a stronger sound.”
Congress, however, would need to approve an official change to the department’s name. Trump’s order merely allows Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to use secondary titles to refer to himself and the organization. The rebrand is intended to show that the U.S. is, in Hegseth’s words, “going to go on offense, not just on defense.”
“Maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” Hegseth said Friday.
Since retaking office, Trump has been threatening to militarize cities run by Democrats in order to crack down on crime and immigration — and spread a message of fear.
He has repeatedly spoken in recent weeks of sending National Guard troops to Chicago, citing a crime wave, even though violent crime has been declining there. Trump has not yet revealed when he might make such a move, saying that he would “love” for Pritzker to agree to it.
Even though local and state have responded with a firm no, they believe Trump is planning to use a naval base near the city to stage operations.
Similar orders in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., this year led to protests.
National Guard members have also been helping federal immigration authorities round up supposedly unauthorized immigrants, as Trump reportedly seeks to deport up to 1 million people in a single year.
Trump’s entire post appears to be a screenshot, indicating that the president may not have created it himself, but saw it elsewhere and reposted it to his Truth Social page.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson called the president’s threats “beneath the honor of our nation.”
″[T]he reality is that he wants to occupy our city and break our Constitution,” Johnson wrote on X. “We must defend our democracy from this authoritarianism by protecting each other and protecting Chicago from Donald Trump.”