President Donald Trump has threatened Chicago with “WAR” in an unhinged Truth Social post on Saturday.
“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” Trump wrote Saturday on Truth Social. Trump renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War via an executive order on Friday.
The threat featured an AI-generated image of the president as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore—played by Robert Duvall in Francis Ford Coppola’s classic 1979 Vietnam War film, Apocalypse Now—with helicopters flying over the city and fire raging behind him accompanied by the title, “Chipopalypse Now.”
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“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” Trump wrote—a riff on Kilgore’s line, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
His comments come as the president continues to threaten to send National Guard troops into Illinois’ largest city, which he called “the most dangerous city in the world” on Saturday. Trump told reporters at an Oval Office conference on Tuesday, “We’re going in,” adding that “I didn’t say when.”
According to statistics released by the Chicago Mayor’s Office, the last 12 months have in fact seen a 22 percent reduction in overall violent crime, including a 32 percent reduction in homicides, a 32 percent reduction in robberies, a 49 percent reduction in vehicular hijackings, and an 18 percent reduction in aggravated assaults. Murders in the city over the summer were at their lowest rate since 1965.
On Saturday, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker responded to Trump’s muddled Apocalypse Now references by lamenting that, if taken at surface value, “The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city.”
“This is not a joke. This is not normal,” he wrote in a post on X. “Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on Trump’s post.
