In a bizarre and very entertaining turn of events as President Donald Trump works to crack down on crime in the notoriously violence-ridden city of Chicago, the president used the famous napalm line from the movie “Apocalypse Now” to threaten Chicago with a National Guard-led crackdown on crime, comments that sparked a social media meltdown from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
As background, the general situation regarding a potential crackdown in Chicago began with PresidentTrump, commenting on the situation in DC and where the crackdown will happen next, saying, “To me, D.C. is very exciting and a lot of people say, ‘Whoa, where’s he going from there?’ Well, I have calls from politicians begging me to go to Chicago, begging me to go to New York, begging me to go to Los Angeles.” He added, “Chicago is a mess. You have an incompetent mayor, grossly incompetent, and we’ll straighten that one out probably next.”
Adding to that, he claimed that Chicago’s residents are calling for him to take that momentous step and solve their city’s massive crime problem. He claimed, “That’ll be our next one after this, and it won’t even be tough. And the people in Chicago … are screaming for us to come … so I think Chicago will be our next and then we’ll help with New York.”
As could be expected, that led to a full-blown meltdown from the left, particularly Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. He declared that, really, the problem in Chicago is that there are red states that are permissive regarding gun purchases, and he called on residents of Chicago to “rise up” against Trump and the National Guard if it is deployed.
President Trump, for his part, ended up responding to those threats in a very entertaining post on his Truth Social social media platform, in which he posted a picture that appeared to be AI-generated of him as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now looking on as helicopters attack a skyscraper-studded horizon that is presumably Chicago, with the phrase “Chipocalypse Now” written on the picture.
Captioning it with a paraphrased version of Kilgore’s famous quote from the movie, the president wrote, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning…” He then added a reference to his decision to rename the Department of Defense the Department of War, writing, “Chicago [is] about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” Here’s the hilarious post:
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Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson responded in an angry post on X in which he insisted that cracking down on crime is a violation of the US Constitution and that Trump is an authoritarian. Beginning, he said, “The President’s threats are beneath the honor of our nation, but the reality is that he wants to occupy our city and break our Constitution.”
Continuing, Mayor Johnson then breathlessly claimed that blue cities need to fight for “our democracy” against the “authoritarianism” of a crackdown on crime, saying, “We must defend our democracy from this authoritarianism by protecting each other and protecting Chicago from Donald Trump.”
Watch Trump comment on sending the Guard to Chicago here: