Almost fifty years ago, the film Apocalypse Now showed Americans the horrors and damage done when the military is used for immoral purposes. It highlighted the sheer destructiveness and lethality of American military power during the Vietnam War.
Talking about the movie in 2019, the film’s director, Francis Ford Coppola, worried that its “stirring scenes of helicopters attacking innocent people” would “rev up people to be warlike.” And he acknowledged that Apocalypse Now served to “glorify war.”
Glorifying violence and “rev(ing) up people to be warlike” may be why, on Saturday, President Trump posted to Truth Social a meme showing him as the starring figure in a film, “Chipocalypse Now.” Above that image, he wrote “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” echoing what the actor Robert Duvall said in Coppola’s movie, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
And if that wasn’t enough to get the president’s message through, he added, “Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR,” accompanied by three helicopter emojis, reminiscent of the helicopters attacking Vietnamese villages in Apocalypse Now.
Politico rightly said that it was “among the president’s most aggressive language targeting an American city.” In Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., the president presented himself as a peacemaker, using the military to restore order in disorderly places.
No more. And while the day after his Truth Social post, he insisted he was “not going to war” on Chicago, a president imagining the possibility of using the American military to make war on an American city is an American nightmare.
It should be an unthinkable thought. Trump had that thought because Illinois Governor JB Pritzker refuses to bend his knee to the president.
Trump’s fantasy, if it was that, would undo two hundred and fifty years of military history in this country.
It threatens to turn our military from one of the most respected institutions in the United States to one that, if Trump has his way, will be feared and reviled by the very people it is supposed to serve and protect. And as Paul Rieckhoff, Founder & CEO of Independent Veterans of America, put it in an appearance on Friday night on MSNBC, “Among all the chaos and drama, I think this is the most important story in America and maybe in the world.”
Rieckhoff explained that Trump has focused particular attention on bringing the Pentagon to heel because “that’s where all the power is.” That’s why he appointed Pete Hegseth to lead it and purged some of the military’s top brass.
Renaming the Department of Defense into the Department of War, and using military might as an expression of Trump’s power, Rieckhoff continued, resonates with so-called bro culture and appeals to many young men who are not “going to Harvard.”
The prospect of using soldiers to make war on an American city recalls the way British troops were used before the Revolutionary War. Substantial garrisons of redcoats were stationed in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.
In the latter place, they even fired on and killed civilians. Elsewhere, their mere presence terrorized the colonists.
That is why, prominent in the list of grievances against the British King that were elaborated in the Declaration of Independence were the following: “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures….protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.”
Not surprisingly, the people who wrote the Constitution were deeply suspicious of standing armies, seeing them as a threat to the liberty and well-being of the American people. In 1787, Alexander Hamilton warned, as if anticipating Trump’s war on immigrants, “Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates.”
The “alarm attendant on a state of continual danger,” Hamilton observed, “will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights…. The military state becomes elevated above the civil.”
That is what is unfolding in Trump’s America.
In the past, the fear that a military state would threaten liberty led Congress to pass laws forbidding or limiting the use of the military in the United States itself. But more importantly, the idea that the military should serve the people has informed the ethos of the military itself.
From time to time, that ethos has broken down, but not often and not for long. When it has, it has given way to the imperatives of wartime.
Think of Union General William T. Sherman's burning of Atlanta during the Civil War or the military’s internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
A decade after the internment, President Dwight Eisenhower, a former general himself, used his farewell address to warn of the rise of what he called “a military-industrial complex.” He urged his listeners “to comprehend its grave implications… (and) potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power…”
Misplaced power could be a slogan for President Trump’s administration and especially his vision of the role of the military in American life. Recall his tendency to refer to military leaders as “my generals” and his statement, "I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
But why is the prospect of using his generals to make war on Chicago now so appealing to the president?
It would be a way of making Governor Pritzker pay for refusing to play nice.
He has stood up to Trump, repeatedly calling him out as a “wannabe dictator.” And months ago, he used his State of the State address to sound the alarm, comparing what is happening in this country to what happened in Nazi Germany.
At that time, he said, “I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately… Here’s what I’ve learned—the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed—a seed of distrust and hate and blame…I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. “
“It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes,” he noted, “to dismantle a constitutional republic….After we’ve discriminated against, deported, or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women, and the minorities—once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends—After that,” Pritzker asked, “What comes next?”
The president’s ominous warning that “Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR” offers an answer to Pritzker's question. That answer should alarm all Americans and the military who would be used to turn the president’s fantasy into a reality.
Writing in 1944, in the wake of the internment of Japanese Americans, Supreme Justice Robert Jackson echoed the Founding Fathers when he noted that “the existence of a military power resting on force, so vagrant, so centralized, so necessarily heedless of the individual, is an inherent threat to liberty.” He warned that the courts could only do so much to control that power.
“If the people,” he said, “ever let command of the war power fall into irresponsible and unscrupulous hands, the courts wield no power equal to its restraint.” That’s why it is on all of us to help stop our “irresponsible and unscrupulous” leader from using the military to burn down the Republic.
Governor Pritzker got it right when he concluded in his State of the State address with this admonition: “Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity… and do not let the ‘tragic spirit of despair’ overcome us when our country needs us the most.”
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
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