US President Donald Trump has threatened to send troops to wage a “war” against protesters advocating for immigrants’ rights in the city of Chicago.
Trump threatened Chicago on Saturday with sending in National Guard troops to clamp down on protesters opposed to the deportation of suspected undocumented immigrants.
Thousands of protesters demonstrated their opposition to a surge in arrests by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the president’s plan to deploy troops to Chicago.
The protesters marched through the streets of downtown Chicago, with signs bearing slogans like “ICE out of Illinois, ICE out of everywhere.”
Speakers offered the crowd instructions on what to do if encountering ICE agents. They also drew comparisons between the proposed ICE crackdown on Chicago and the Israeli regime’s genocidal war on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
“We are inspired by the steadfastness of Palestinians in Gaza, and it is why we refuse to cower to Trump and his threats,” Nazek Sankari, co-chair of the US Palestinian Community Network, said to the crowd as many waved Palestinian flags and donned keffiyehs.
“Chicago [is] about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” Trump wrote on a post in his social media platform Truth Social, titled “Chipocalypse Now,” a reference to the 1979 Vietnam War movie “Apocalypse Now.”
The post featured a parody image from the film, showing a ball of flames as helicopters zoom over the skyline of Chicago, the US’s third-largest city.
The doctored photo showed Trump depicted as the amoral Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore (Robert Duval), the secondary antagonist of the film.
“‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’” the president wrote in reference to Kilgore’s line, “Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
Napalm bombs had incendiary substances made by mixing naphthenic acid and palmitic acid, smelling like a blend of gasoline and detergent. The name is a portmanteau of two of the constituents.
Illinois officials condemned the president’s message, saying the post published by Trump was “not normal.”
Democratic Governor JB Pritzker denounced the Republican president on Saturday in a post on X, describing Trump as a “wanna-be” dictator.
“The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city,” he said.
“This is not a joke,” Pritzker said, adding, “Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson also denounced Trump’s threat as “beneath the honor of our nation”.
“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,” Johnson wrote on X.
In addition to sending troops to Los Angeles in June, Trump has deployed them since last month in Washington, DC, as part of his unprecedented law enforcement takeover of the country’s capital. He has also suggested that Baltimore and New Orleans could get the same treatment and, on Friday, even mentioned federal authorities possibly heading for Portland, Oregon, to “wipe ‘em out”, meaning the protesters.
The US president on Friday also signed an order changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, saying it sends “a message of victory.”
The deployment of troops and federal agents to US cities has prompted legal challenges and protests, with critics calling them an authoritarian show of force.
Trump himself has hinted he can do whatever he wants when it comes to domestic issues. He has even touched on questions about his being a dictator several times. “Most people are saying, ‘If you call him a dictator, if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants’. I am not a dictator, by the way,” Trump said last month.
He added, “Not that I don’t have – I would – the right to do anything I want to do.”
“I’m the president of the United States,” Trump said. “If I think our country is in danger – and it is in danger in these cities – I can do it.”