United States President Donald Trump has threatened to unleash his newly rebranded “Department of War” on Chicago, as thousands of protesters marched in the city as well as in Washington, DC, to denounce the deployment of National Guard troops and immigration agents to Democratic-led cities.
Trump’s threat, posted on his Truth Social platform on Saturday, featured a parody image from the movie Apocalypse Now, showing a ball of flames as helicopters zoom over the skyline of Chicago, the US’s third-largest city.
“‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning,’” Trump wrote on his social media site. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
The president offered no details beyond the label “Chipocalypse Now,” a play on the title of Francis Ford Coppola’s dystopian 1979 film set in the Vietnam war, in which a character says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”.
The post from Trump follows his repeated threats to add Chicago to the list of other Democratic-led cities he has targeted for expanded federal enforcement. His administration is set to step up immigration enforcement in Chicago, as it did in Los Angeles, and deploy National Guard troops.
Democratic Governor of Illinois JB Pritzker, where Chicago is located, voiced outrage at Trump’s post and said the state “won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator”.
“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,” he wrote in a post on X.
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.
Protests in Chicago, DC
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” to the world.
The troop and federal agent deployments have prompted legal challenges and protests, with critics calling them an authoritarian show of force.
On Saturday, more than a thousand protesters marched through the streets of downtown Chicago, with signs bearing slogans like “I.C.E. out of Illinois, I.C.E. out of everywhere”, referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).
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 Israel’s presence in Gaza.
“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.
Viviana Barajas, leader with the community organisation Palenque LSNA, promised that Chicagoans would “stand up” as Los Angeles had if Trump deployed the National Guard in their city.
“If he thinks these frivolous theatrics to undermine our sovereignty will shut out the passion we have for protecting our people, this is Chicago, and he is sorely mistaken,” Barajas said. “We have been studying LA and DC, and they have stood up for their cities.”
In the US capital, protesters at the “We Are All DC” march, who also included supporters of Palestinian statehood, marched behind a bright red banner reading, “END THE D.C. OCCUPATION”, in English and Spanish.
They chanted slogans denouncing Trump and carried posters, some of which read, “Trump must go now,” “Free DC”, and “Resist Tyranny”.
Al Jazeera’s Heidi Zhou-Castro, reporting from Washington, DC, said the protesters were “furious” of Trump’s order, and were calling him “a fascist and an authoritarian”.
She noted that Trump had deployed the 2,000 troops last month to fight what he called a surge in violent crime, but that such offences in the US capital last year had hit “a 30-year low”.
Mark Fitzpatrick, a former US diplomat who has been a DC resident for about a decade, told The Associated Press news agency on Saturday that he was worried about the “authoritarian nature” in which the administration is treating DC.
“Federal agents, national guards patrolling our streets, that’s really an affront to the democracy of our city,” he said, adding that it is worse for DC residents due to their lack of federal representation. “We don’t have our own senators or members of the House of Representatives, so we’re at the mercy of a dictator like this, a wanna-be dictator.”
Among the protesters on Saturday was Jun Lee, a printmaker artist, who showed up with a “Free DC” sign that she made on a woodcut block.
She said she came to the protest because she was “saddened and heartbroken” about the impact of the federal intervention on her city.
“This is my home, and I never, ever thought all the stuff that I watched in a history documentary that I’m actually living in person, and this is why this is important for everyone. This is our home; we need to fight, we need to resist,” she said.
Trump has suggested that he has nearly limitless powers when it comes to deploying the National Guard. At times he has even touched on questions about his being a dictator.
“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.”
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