‘Chipocalypse Now’: Is the Trump administration culturally illiterate?

After the rebranding of the Department of Defense as the “Department of War”, Donald Trump has once again used an AI-generated image of himself to seemingly threaten "war" on the city of Chicago.

The image depicts him as Robert Duvall’s character, Lieutenant Colonel William Kilgore, in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now. The backdrop depicts Chicago’s skyline peppered with helicopters and fire, seemingly imitating an active war zone. 

“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” the image caption reads, with an altered version of one of the film’s most famous quotes to refer to Trump’s plan to bring the National Guard to Chicago – a move that follows his ongoing militarization of Washington D.C.: “I love the smell of deportations in the morning…”.  

The original quote is: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” 

Trump accompanied the AI image with a parody of the film’s title, transforming it to “Chipocalypse Now”. 

The reaction to this troubling post from Trump was swift.  

“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,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker wrote on X. “Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson wrote: “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.” 

As for California governor Gavin Newsom, who has recently used Trump’s own branding tactics against him, he accused Trump of using US troops “like political pawns”, adding: “DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO BECOME NUMB TO THIS."

Not that this is the most pressing priority, considering Trump’s threats, but the image once again shows a classic tactic from the president and his administration: the use of AI memes to engage in “memetic warfare” - a term employed by Kurt Sengul, a researcher at Macquarie University in Australia. 

Sengul recently spoke to Euronews Culture about Trump and his administration’s use of memes and generative AI, which allows for the creation of an ecosystem where nothing appears to be serious. Trump’s stance is that if you get upset, it’s because you are “humourless and can’t take a joke,” according to Sengul. 

Additionally, this latest Apocalypse Now meme betrays quite how culturally illiterate Trump and his administration are when it comes to movie references.  

Nothing new here, as Trump has prior form.

He repeatedly used Thomas Harris / The Silence of the Lambs references during the campaign trail last year, routinely namechecking of one of cinema’s greatest villains: Hannibal Lecter.

“Has anyone seen Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner. That’s insane asylums, they’re emptying out their insane asylums,” he said, adding that Lecter was “a wonderful man.”

This showed Trump’s misunderstanding of the cultural reference, as Hannibal is: a) not a real person; b) hardly “wonderful” due to his lack of empathy for his fellow man; c) famously not dead, as the character survives at the end of the 1991 Oscar-winning film, and maintains his oxygen habit in the books and all other TV and film adaptations - thereby not being “late”.  

His scaremongering tactic was a way of injecting fear into the minds of the public through a well-known scary movie villain and demonising migrants - all through an unintentionally confused movie reference.

Then came the Jedi image he posted on Star Wars Day 2025, a computer-generated picture of a muscled-to-the-point-of-overcompensation version of Trump clutching a red lightsaber in front of US flags and a pair of bald eagles. It was captioned: “Happy May the 4th to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting so hard to bring Sith Lords, Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, & well known MS-13 Gang Members, back into our Galaxy. You’re not the Rebellion - you’re the Empire.” 

As even the most casual of Star Wars fans can attest, red is the chosen colour of the villainous Sith Lords. Star Wars creator George Lucas once said regarding lightsaber colours: “Good guys are green and blue, bad guys are red.” Hardly rocket science, but it made Trump’s image an almighty self-own, signaling that Trump is the Empire and the very evil he proclaims to seek to defeat. 

Then came the cringe-inducing image of Trump as Superman, posted by The White House with the caption: “THE SYMBOL OF HOPE. TRUTH. JUSTICE. THE AMERICAN WAY. SUPERMAN TRUMP”. 

Once more, Trump failed to get the cultural reference: Superman was technically an undocumented immigrant who grew up on an American farm. Considering this glaring irony, the image only showed that Trump, whose anti-immigration agenda has led to wide protests over the ICE raids this year, was using the wrong reference at the wrong time.

Which brings us back to his latest AI-generated gaff: "Chipocalypse Now".

Coppola’s classic transposes Joseph Conrad’s 1899 book “Heart of Darkness” on to the Vietnam War, and his film serves a savage portrait of the absurdity of war. 

The film depicts the darkest aspects of the human condition and how humanity’s capacity for evil through waging war can only lead to madness.

While it may not be an “anti-war” film in the mind of its director, who has said that Apocalypse Now “shouldn’t have sequences of violence that inspire a lust for violence” and that his film has “stirring scenes of helicopters attacking innocent people - that’s not anti-war", the film certainly has no heroes.  

Just look at the character Trump has co-opted as his valiant avatar. Kilgore commands a helicopter attack against an innocent village, and orders a napalm strike – something which leads to that famous “napalm in the morning” line. Kilgore is not a hero. The clue’s in his name.

If Trump sought to portray himself as an absurd, empathy-devoid character capable of senseless violence, his AI-generated image is right on target. Should this not be the case, and he was seeking to peacock as a strongman, this is another massive self-own that shows all the president has in mind is the basic reference of helicopter squadrons playing ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’ 

No one is asking for die-hard cinephilia, but had he or anyone behind this image actually bothered to read Conrad or watch Apocalypse Now, they’d have stumbled upon Marlon Brando’s rogue Colonel Walter Kurtz.

Kurtz observes about the American military machine and the lunacy of violence: “We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplanes because it’s obscene.”

Trump and his administration could learn something here. Their latest image is double-barreled proof of artificial intelligence's nominative determinism and that the memetic warfare they are engaged in is now backfiring without the appropriate cultural ammo. In the words of Kurtz: “The horror... the horror...”