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.
At first, the helicopters were a novelty. I have followed military affairs for a long time, and it was always “cool” — in a juvenile, adolescent, male-power fantasy way — to see such military equipment “out in the wild.” I grew up during the end of the Cold War, and I watched G.I. Joe cartoons and read all the comic books. That curiosity is part of my socialization, and it will likely be with me for the rest of my life.
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?
Juvenile power fantasies are now meeting realpolitik and power. The latter almost always wins.
On Monday, the Trump administration announced it was launching “Operation Midway Blitz,” an immigration enforcement operation led by the Department of Homeland Security that is part of President Donald Trump’s war on “sanctuary cities” like Chicago. According to DHS, the operation is being carried out in honor of Katherine Abraham, a 20-year-old woman who was allegedly killed by a drunk driver who was an undocumented immigrant.
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.”
As Kilgore, Duvall captures this callousness in a famous scene. “Napalm, son,” he says. “Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over, I walked up…The smell, you know, the gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like…victory.”
Trump parroted that line — and the vile ideology behind it — in his post. “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” it read. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
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.
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.”
After widespread criticism, including from Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Trump minimized the threat. “We’re not going to war” with Chicago, he said. But the implication was clear: The administration was preparing to invade the city, and this was their final warning. With Operation Midway Blitz, they have now made good on that promise.
Trump’s “Chipocalypse Now” action is just the latest in a months-long pattern of political intimidation against Chicago and other American cities. He has repeatedly said that he is going to “clean up” Chicago, which he recently called “the most dangerous city in the world” — an absurd claim. Chicago is not a city in Ukraine, Syria or Libya. It’s not some civil war-torn region in sub-Saharan Africa, or a city in Latin or South America under the control of drug cartels.
For weeks, as Trump’s threats against Chicago have escalated, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has demonstrated great leadership by directly confronting the president. “This is not a joke,” he recently posted on X. “This is not normal. Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.” At a press conference on Aug. 25, he said, “If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is, a dangerous power grab.”
Pritzker has backed up his strong rhetoric with actions. The governor has been coordinating with leaders of Democratic cities about how to coordinate resources to effectively push back against the Trump administration’s attacks.
In a recent essay at the American Prospect, Ryan Cooper praised Pritzker’s measures. “Turning America fascist will be much more difficult if blue states learn from Gov. Pritzker.”
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The governor’s use of military language is critically important. For far too long, Democrats have continued to operate under the rules of “normal politics.” But Trump and his MAGA forces view politics as warfare, a zero-sum game of the conqueror and the conquered. They intentionally use specific military terms, such as “blitzkrieg” and “shock-and-awe,” and describe Democratic-led cities that do not cooperate with Trump’s policies and mass deportation campaign as “rogue state actors.” Now, they are signaling that Chicago is their next battlefield.
America is now a “warfare state,” social theorist Henry Giroux wrote in CounterPunch. “The state itself has been weaponized, turning inward against its own population, normalizing domestic terrorism as a tool of rule. The scourge of militarization as the driving force of American politics, which has its contemporary roots in the terror state created by Bush and Cheney after 9/11, is even more intensified as a domestic and foreign policy mode of governance…The task before us is not only to defend the remnants of democratic institutions but to cultivate a cultural and educational imagination capable of shattering the grip of authoritarianism.”
Consensus liberalism, which favors bipartisanship and futilely searches for Republicans who “believe in the system” and are “the adults in the room,” will not stop Trumpism. Just as “the walls” never did close in on Trump, “when they go low, we go high” is fairy tale talk in an era when the U.S. is teetering on a state of competitive authoritarianism and de facto one-party MAGA Republican rule.
Democrats and the larger pro-democracy movement need to study and borrow from the GOP’s playbook to win the hearts and minds of the electorate and defeat Trumpism. By confronting Trump, Pritzker is showing other Democrats they have the means and ability to resist, and they too can coordinate the resources to do so.
There are many Americans who still believe, contrary to the preponderance of the evidence, that the courts, institutions and rule of law will ultimately constrain Trump’s dictator-king behavior. They point to decisions like last week’s ruling by federal Judge Charles Breyer, who found that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles in June violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the use of the armed forces in domestic law enforcement.
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Such hope, though, is just that — a fantasy. The MAGA justices on the Supreme Court have basically ruled that Trump has unlimited power to do anything he wants as long as he claims “presidential responsibilities.” The administration is already operating according to a doctrine of maximum presidential authority, giving him the power to essentially nullify and ignore any court ruling he finds disagreeable.
In the New York Times, political scientist Robert Pape recounted his experience studying military occupations that took place within the borders of democracies. “These occupations occurred for a range of reasons,” he wrote, “and often started out suppressing violence, but they ended up provoking or exacerbating widespread civil unrest, political violence and terrorism…Things usually escalate.”
Pape concluded, “This is a Chicago story, but it is also a national story. If the administration proceeds as expected, Chicago will be the third major American city governed by members of Mr. Trump’s political opposition to be subjected this year to the presence of military force, after Los Angeles in June and Washington last month. Other blue cities and states may reasonably fear that they will be next. Mr. Trump is threatening to radicalize our nation’s politics in a way not seen in our lifetimes.”
I began writing this column on Sunday night. The Baltimore Ravens were beating the Buffalo Bills by a score of 20 to 13. The sound of the helicopters had not ceased. If anything, they were flying faster.
