Thousands of protesters marched in Chicago on Saturday against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and President Donald Trump’s plan to send National Guard troops and immigration agents to the city, the Associated Press reports, with a photo gallery.
Mr Trump signaled stepped-up immigration enforcement in Chicago on Saturday, posting a video of military helicopters over the lakefront skyline with the caption “Chipocalypse Now,” the Chicago Tribune reports.
“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” the paper quoted the president’s Truth Social account as saying. For the post, a famous phrase from the 1979 movie “Apocalypse Now” was hijacked, as Trump is depicted in US Army fatigues and sunglasses, wearing a Stetson US Cavalry hat, like the lieutenant colonel portrayed in the movie by actor Robert Duvall.
“Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” the post declared, a day after signing an executive order to rename the Department of Defense to its pre-1949 title.
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.
Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator. pic.twitter.com/f87Zek7Cqb
— Governor JB Pritzker (@GovPritzker) September 6, 2025
In addition to the retort above, Mr Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, put on his social media account, under the words “Know your rights, Illinois,” and “Stay safe and stay informed,” a post with information about Americans’ rights in both English and Spanish.
Editorial
When the president of the United States posts an image of military helicopters over Chicago’s lakefront, branded “Chipocalypse Now,” we are no longer in the realm of metaphor. This isn’t the “war on poverty” or the “war on drugs.” It is the commander-in-chief invoking imagery of actual combat — Vietnam, no less — to threaten the deployment of federal troops against an American city. That city happens to be governed by his political opponents.
This isn’t just overheated rhetoric. It’s a grotesque escalation: a sitting president treating Chicago, one of the nation’s great cities, where I spent 40 years of my life, as if it were enemy territory. The use of military iconography isn’t accidental; it is meant to intimidate, to normalize the idea that American soldiers can and should be turned on fellow Americans for political gain. That is not law enforcement but an authoritarian spectacle.
The real question is not just how unhinged this moment is, but how it is being allowed to go forward. Where are the voices in Congress, in the courts, even within the president’s own party, who will say “Enough is enough”? Silence in the face of this imagery is complicity. Allowing a president to casually declare war on a US city, with a meme no less, crosses a line that no democracy should ever accept.
