by Daniel Johnson
September 6, 2025
‘The President’s threats are beneath the honor of our nation, but the reality is that he wants to occupy our city and break our Constitution,’ Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson posted on social media.
After Donald Trump appeared to threaten Chicago with a National Guard invasion using his favorite communication device, memes posted to his Truth Social account, leaders in Illinois responded with swift and strong condemnations of both his message and tone.
According to The Chicago Sun-Times, Trump made several references to the 1979 movie “Apocalypse Now,” with Trump apparently casting himself in the role of Lt. Colonel Kilgore. In a take on Robert Duvall’s delivery of the often quoted “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” line, Trump amended his post to read “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning,’” a clear reference to the film.
The implication is both clear and troubling, evidenced by the response of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on X on Sept. 6. Pritzker declared that the post, which the White House’s official account also posted to the social media site, “is not normal.”
He continued, “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. Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”
Likewise, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson used his X account to call on the city’s citizens to protect each other amid more lawless threats aimed at the city from Trump and the Trump administration.
“The President’s threats are beneath the honor of our nation, but 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.
As Chicago resident and former member of the Chicago City Council and the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times from 2017-2019, Edwin Eisendrath, told The Guardian, the National Guard won’t solve any perceived problems with crime. In addition, Chicago’s history as a city of activists does not bode well for a deployment of troops inside the city.
“If you think of the civic action you’ve seen over history, whether that’s the Pullman strikes a century ago, or Haymarket, or the early union movement, or what we did in the civil rights movement, or the organizing for the Women’s March, Chicagoans are organized. So we aren’t helpless,” he told the outlet.
Sjonia Harper, a resident of Bronzeville, one of Chicago’s most well-known historically Black neighborhoods, also recognizes the pattern in Trump’s calls to invade certain cities across the country, which he says are dealing with unacceptable crime rates.
“It’s not going to just end with [Chicago]. It’s going to expand. He’s already talking about New Orleans, and if you think about all the cities he’s talking about – LA, Black mayor; DC, Black mayor; Chicago, Black mayor; Baltimore, Black mayor; New Orleans, Black mayor. We have to be able to call it out for what it is,” Harper noted.
According to Matt Conroy, a Democrat who is running for election in Chicago’s fifth congressional district, the federal troops will likely “terrorize” Black and Latinx communities while costing taxpayers an exorbitant sum of money.
“Rather than addressing the root cause of this, they’re just doing what they think looks good for the TV and pretending to be a strongman authoritarian, and that’s all that Donald Trump really wants to be. What they’re doing is completely illegal. … Honestly, [Trump could] invoke the Insurrection Act, but [it’s important] to stay together, have a plan, know your rights and be respectful of law enforcement, to not escalate the situation further, and to provide [Chicago residents] with additional resources,” Conroy pointed out.
To that end, Denise Poloyac, a board member for the Indivisible Chicago Alliance, indicated in her comments to the outlet that for Chicagoans, the best prescription for federal overreach is solidarity.
“We can’t be effective if we don’t act together, and I think we draw our strength from each other. I think that is the strength of Chicago, and that’s what’s going to get us through this, and, you know, I think that’s the strength of a lot of places in this country. I think that’s what Trump’s administration doesn’t understand, that we are in a community,” she noted.
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