U.S. President Donald Trump has again threatened military intervention in Chicago, the third-largest city in the United States.
“Chicago will understand why the Department of Defense is now called the Department of War,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social.
For days, the U.S. President has been threatening to send federal forces to allegedly combat crime.
Trump also posted a picture, apparently generated by artificial intelligence, that shows the president in military uniform against a backdrop of fires and helicopters in an orange sky above Chicago, with the caption “Chipocalypse Now.”
This is an allusion to the film “Apocalypse Now” by the famous director Francis Ford Coppola about the Vietnam War.
The governor of Illinois, the U.S. state where Chicago is located, reacted by saying he did not see the message as a joke. “This isn’t a joke. The President of the U.S. is threatening to go to war against an American city,” wrote Governor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, on the platform X.
He added that Illinois “will not be intimidated by an increasingly powerful dictator.”
Calling Chicago a “rat hole” and the “murder capital of the world,” Trump has been threatening since late August to send the National Guard there, a military reserve force he has already deployed in two other strongholds of the Democratic opposition, Los Angeles and Washington.
Uniformed soldiers equipped with armored vehicles have been patrolling the U.S. capital since mid-August.
Today, several hundred people marched through the streets of Washington, protesting the “occupation” of the city by federal forces.
“In Washington, the big criminal is in the White House,” one of the banners read.
On Friday, Trump signed a decree renaming the U.S. Department of Defense to the “Department of War,” adding that he wants to send a “message of victory and strength to the rest of the world.”
Source: Nedeljnik; Photo: AP Photo / Evan Vucci