In any other presidential term but this one, the commander-in-chief joking about invading a major American city using a meme based on the U.S. bombing of Vietnam would cause at least a few days of scandal. In Donald Trump‘s second term, it’s unlikely to outlive the weekend.
For the uninitiated, Trump shared an edited image of himself as Robert Duvall in “Apocalypse Now” on Saturday as part of his ongoing threats to carry out military actions in Chicago.
“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” he captioned the image. “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of War.”
That post caused an understandable uproar among Illinois officials and general believers in the sovereignty of states and cities.
“This is not a joke,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker wrote on X in response. “This is not normal.”
That cycle of outrage wiped away a scandal over Vice President J.D. Vance downplaying extrajudicial killings in a social media tit-for-tat. After the U.S. military carried out an operation against alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers, Vance called the deployment “the highest and best use of our military” on X. When influencer Brian Krassenstein pointed out that the operation could be considered a “war crime,” the vice president was dismissive.
“I don’t give a s**t what you call it,” he said.
That story helped erase one from earlier this week, in which the Department of Labor shared a propaganda poster for its apprenticeship listings that rang a few too many Nazi Germany bells in the minds of its audience. The image — a towheaded young man in front of a map of the United States with the slogan “Build your homeland’s future!” — alarmed social media users.
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸https://t.co/IuqkysMA9X pic.twitter.com/KxNPDaIG0T
— U.S. Department of Labor (@USDOL) September 4, 2025
“That Marx quote about how history repeats itself first as tragedy & then as farce is prescient as always,” wrote one commentator. “Feds using your tax dollars to make AI slop Nazi homages.”
The Trump administration has a poster’s heart, constantly churning out half-thought-out riffs on propaganda posters, hopping on AI trends and playing keyboard tough guy. Aided by the algorithm’s endless churn and the 24-hour news cycle’s constant present, they’ve turned trolling into a key plank of their agenda. Steve Bannon’s mantra of “flooding the zone with s**t” has been supercharged with tools like generative AI and the relentless feed of sharp sticks to the eye means no one even remembers when the same administration was using Hiyao Miyazaki-style art to brag about deporting families or when Trump echoed one of the most famous Nazis in the history of musical theater.
The feed refreshes automatically, after all, goose-stepping us toward the next bit of juvenile edgelordism from the phone-addicted folks who run the country.
