Over the weekend, President Donald Trump invoked “Apocalypse Now” to threaten a military crackdown in Chicago ― one of the American cities he’s claimed is so crime ridden, he wants to send in the National Guard.
This being President Trump ― a man who’s been called “the emperor of AI slop” by The New Yorker ― he did so by sharing a ludicrous AI-generated image of himself as Robert Duvall’s character in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War saga. Crouched down and wearing aviator glasses, Trump watches as Chicago goes up in flames and helicopters fly in.
In the 1979 film, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, played by Duvall as an amoral warmonger, famously delivers the line: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
In the president’s latest AI slop post ― “Chipocalypse Now” ― the caption reads, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning. Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” (Last week, Trump issued an executive order to rename the Department of Defense to the “Department of War,” claiming the former is too “politically correct.”)
Quite a lot to unpack. But a day later, Trump angrily told a reporter that the image ― posted on his own Truth Social account ― was “fake news.”
