Donald Trump Threatens ‘War’ on Chicago with AI ‘Apocalypse Now’ Image

Donald Trump is once again using an AI likeness to share a strong message.

On Saturday, Sept. 6, the president, 79, posted an AI-generated image of himself on Truth Social, along with a threatening message directed toward the city of Chicago. The image is inspired by Apocalypse Now, showing Trump as Robert Duvall’s character in the Francis Ford Coppola-directed film, Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore.

While Coppola’s 1979 movie takes place in South Vietnam and Cambodia in the Vietnam War era, Trump’s AI parody depicts Chicago, with the city’s skyline peppered with helicopters. In the image, the president is also backdropped by a city beach covered with fire and smoke, seemingly imitating an active war zone.

Trump accompanied the AI image, which also parodies the title of the war movie (“Chipocalypse Now”), with a threatening message, a nod to his plan to bring the National Guard to Chicago, a move that comes amid his ongoing militarization of Washington, D.C.

“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR 🚁 🚁 🚁 ,” the image caption reads in part, a reference to Trump’s plan to rebrand the Department of Defense. The caption also nods to Trump’s aggressive, ongoing immigration enforcement campaign, using an altered version of the most famous quote from Apocalypse Now.

“I love the smell of deportations in the morning…,” the post said. (The original quote is, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” delivered by Duvall.)

The apparent threats come as Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker warns Chicago residents of a surge in ICE agents in the city, according to ABC 7 Chicago. The governor, a vocal opponent of Trump, said there could be up to 300 ICE agents in Chicago this weekend, the outlet reported, citing local officials.

It didn’t take long after Trump shared the post for Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson — who have both opposed the president’s plans for militarization in Chicago — to fire back.

“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,” Pritzker wrote on X. “Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”

Meanwhile, Johnson wrote: “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. We must defend our democracy from this authoritarianism by protecting each other and protecting Chicago from Donald Trump.”

Since sharing the AI photo and message, Trump has claimed that he was not threatening war. “We’re not going to war. We’re going to clean up our cities,” the president told reporters on Sunday, Sept. 7, according to ABC 7 Chicago.

“We’re going to clear them up so they don’t kill every five people every weekend,” Trump added. “That’s not war. That’s common sense.”

Trump first announced his takeover of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department on Aug. 11, telling reporters that he was seizing control of the police and deploying the National Guard to fight crime and target the city’s homeless population. He has since touted D.C. arrest numbers and shared plans to expand the program to other blue-state U.S. cities such as Chicago, Baltimore and New York City.

“The people of Chicago… are screaming for us to come,” Trump told reporters on Aug. 22. “African-American ladies, beautiful ladies, are saying, ‘Please President Trump, come to Chicago, please,’ ” he said. “I did great with the Black vote, as you know. They want something to happen… So I think Chicago will be our next, then we’re gonna help with New York.”

Though Trump said on Sept. 2 that there was not yet a concrete plan to send troops into Chicago, he told reporters, “Well, we’re going. I didn’t say when. We’re going in.” He also took shots at Pritzker, saying the governor should call him for help after gun violence in Chicago left several dead over Labor Day weekend.

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Hours later, Pritzker fired back at Trump in a press conference. “When did we become a country where it’s OK for the U.S. president to insist on national television that a state should call him to beg for anything — especially something we don’t want?” the Illinois governor said. “Have we truly lost all sense of sanity in this nation, that we treat this as normal?”

“There is no emergency that warrants deployment of troops. He is insulting the people of Chicago by calling our home a hellhole, and anyone who takes his word at face value is insulting Chicagoans, too,” Pritzker said.