Trump is invading Chicago -- just like he promised

Trump is invading Chicago — just like he promised
POTUS was serious about unleashing "Chipocalypse Now." Why won't people take him at his word?

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published September 9, 2025 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) For about a week I have been watching military transport helicopters fly over Chicago. They are UH-60s, which is basically a flying bus that can hold up to 20 people.

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But watching those Black Hawks now is an uncomfortable, anxiety-inducing presence — especially for those communities likely to be targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or other law enforcement agencies. Chicago is approximately 30 percent Hispanic. Are these helicopters carrying masked ICE agents? National Guard troops? Both? Neither?

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Over the weekend, Trump signaled this was coming. On Saturday he shared an AI-generated image on Truth Social of himself as Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore from “Apocalypse Now,” the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola film that chronicles the breakdown of empathy and examines humanity’s capacity for evil against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. The image depicted an explosion set against the Chicago skyline, with military helicopters flying overhead. Using the same font as the film poster, it read “Chipocalypse Now.”

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If our democracy were healthy, such a threat — made by an American president against the American people — would be immediate grounds for impeachment, as former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan pointed out. But America is no longer such a place.

Instead of taking his warnings seriously, the mainstream media has often litigated what Trump “really meant” when he has made such threats against Chicago and other Democratic-led cities. On Saturday, CBS News predictably used a qualifier in its tortured headline about his “Apocalypse Now”-style threats: “Trump appears to again threaten sending troops to Chicago for immigration enforcement.” As media critic Dan Froomkin recently wrote, “The top story of the moment is the one story that our most influential newsrooms won’t touch: That the United States has become an authoritarian state…Every outrage is just one more thing Trump has done, rather than the ever-mounting evidence of a corrupt dictatorship. The coverage is a play-by-play as the burners click upward, rather than a check to see if the frog is still alive, which it is not.” ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/09/09/trump-is-invading-chicago-just-like-he-promised/