WASHINGTON — President Trump put thugs in crime-ridden Chicago on notice Saturday, promising to send in the newly-renamed Department of War in a threatening Truth Social post.
“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” the president wrote, referencing his Friday executive order renaming the Department of Defense to its original name.
The post was accompanied by an AI picture of Trump seated with fire and helicopters with the Chicago skyline in the background, dressed as the character Robert Duvall played in the movie “Apocalypse Now.”
“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” the text on the image read, along with “Chipocalypse Now.”
Trump has previously warned Chicago about his desire to deploy National Guard troops to the Windy City to fight crime and illegal immigration — and indicated that they would absolutely be sent in, despite backlash from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
“We’re going in,” Trump told reporters during an Oval Office meeting on Tuesday. “I didn’t say when.”
The White House has refused to say when the troops would be deployed, but reports have circulated that they may be sent in the coming days.
Pritzker responded to Trump’s latest Truth Social post by calling him a “scared man.”
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“The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city,” he wrote on X. “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.”
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson also weighed in: “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 on X.
The president had first said he wanted to wait for Pritzker to voluntarily invite the troops, but raged in the Oval Office remarks that his patience was thinning.
“If the governor of Illinois would call up, call me up, I would love to do it.” Trump said of Pritzker. “Now, we’re going to do it anyway. We have the right to do it.”
Trump had slammed Pritzker and “weak and pathetic” Sunday after the governor claimed the president was “attempting to manufacture a crisis.”
“Six people were killed, and 24 people were shot, in Chicago last weekend, and JB Pritzker, the weak and pathetic Governor of Illinois, just said that he doesn’t need help in preventing CRIME,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The following Labor Day weekend, seven people were killed and 54 people were shot.
Still, Pritzker has protested Trump every step of the way. His conspiracy theory is that the president wants to engage with Chicago because of elections.
“He has other aims, other than fighting crime,” Pritzker confidently said on Sunday, during an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“The other aims are that he’d like to stop the elections 2026 or, frankly, take control of those elections,” he went on.
“He’ll just claim that there’s some problem with an election, and then he’s got troops on the ground that can take control.”
And Johnson ordered local police to not cooperate with federal troops and guardsmen if Trump were to deploy them.
He ordered city residents to “stand up against this tyranny” in remarks on Saturday.
“We have received credible reports that we have days, not weeks, before our city sees some type of militarized activity by the federal government. It is unclear at this time what that will look like exactly,” The Democrat governor warned.
The president has pointed to several more cities he wants to “clean up” with the mobilization of guardsmen and federal law enforcement, including New York and New Orleans. But he’s especially been hot on Chicago, the third-most populous city in the US, that he’s deemed the “murder capital of the world.”
Chicago had 573 murders in 2024, coming in higher than the 377 in New York City and 268 in Los Angeles. Chicago’s murder rate came in at 21.7 killings per 100,000 people, while New York’s was a mere 4.7 per 100,000 people.
Trump already sent National Guard troops to Washington, DC, in August to combat crime. The troops have not been arresting individuals and have only aided in security, but federal law enforcement via the FBI and additional local police have arrested nearly 2,000 individuals since the Aug. 7 directive.
The deployment of troops to Chicago would be more complicated than to DC. The nation’s capital guardsmen are controlled by the president, whereas troops from individual states are controlled by their governor, meaning if Trump acted on Chicago, he could run into legal hurdles.
Trump had deployed 4,000 members of the National Guard to Los Angeles during anti-ICE protests in June, overruling protests from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who subsequently filed a lawsuit alleging illegal deployment of troops.
A federal judge sided with Newsom in a ruling on Tuesday, finding that the Trump administration violated the 19th-century Posse Comitatus Act — which bars the military from enforcing domestic laws.
The White House and Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to inquiries from The Post.
