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.
Americans across the political spectrum have continued to ask about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections among the political elite. (Angela Weiss/AFP)
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.