When U.S. President Donald Trump shared a meme of himself last Saturday making war on the denizens of Chicago as the fictional Lt. Col. Kilgore from the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now,” it was met with shock across liberal and progressive social media.
Francis Ford Coppola’s film portrays Vietnam not as a conventional war but as a descent into madness, where traditional notions of morality, discipline and reason collapse under the weight of violence. Coppola offers an ambiguous framing of the Vietnam War: On the one hand, the journey the protagonist takes upriver into the jungles of Cambodia mirrors the logic of empire — bringing destruction in the name of civilization while being consumed by the very brutality it unleashes. On the other, the film’s epic scale and surreal combat sequences can be seen as glorifying warfare and masculine aggression.
The character of Kilgore, played by a young Robert Duvall, exemplifies this ambiguity, satirizing the idea of American invincibility and showing how violence and mass death can become trivialized as he leads a helicopter assault on a Viet Cong-held village at the mouth of a river to secure its beach for surfing. And yet his swaggering charisma, leading the attack to the rising strains of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” evinces exactly the bravado of “warrior culture” fetishized by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, (now secretary of war, as per the “Department of WAR” renaming that Trump mentioned in his post). Indeed, the morbid absurdity here brings to mind another one of Trump’s memes: the transformation of a decimated Gaza into a luxury beach resort.
Trump’s “Chipocalypse Now” meme demonstrates how the MAGA movement has overcome the very American ambivalence exhibited by “Apocalypse Now”: How do you square creedal commitments to democracy, equality and freedom — the signal qualities of American exceptionalism — with the persistent racialized domination and empire that also fundamentally mark it?
The authoritarians now in power no longer concern themselves with the former insofar as they stand in the way of the latter.
A few days before Trump posted the “Chipocalypse Now” meme on Truth Social, the fifth annual National Conservatism Conference (NatCon 5) was underway in Washington. That gathering, which has grown in influence over the last half-decade, mixed members of the Trump administration and elected officials with far-right influencers, white supremacists, Christian nationalists and far-right intellectuals. The main theme of the event was America under assault — meaning not an assault on its freedoms, its democracy or its Constitution, the way the right used to frame it, but an assault on America as a distinctly racial entity.
In a plenary address titled “What is an American?” Sen. Eric Schmitt laid out a vision of peoplehood that eschewed the universal principles standing in the way of the historic birthright bestowed by Euro-American settlers. “For decades the mainstream consensus on the left and the right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an ‘idea,’” the Missouri Senator said. “We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty, and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence.”
Schmitt went on to say that “the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian warband attacks from beyond the stockade walls” would be “astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a proposition” rather than “a homeland for themselves and their descendants.”
Throughout the long Cold War era, American exceptionalist rhetoric entwined beliefs in national supremacy and empire with the ideals that were meant to justify it. In his 1989 presidential farewell address, for instance, Ronald Reagan invoked Puritan leader John Winthrop, as he often did, to refer to America as a “shining city on a hill,” one that was “teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”
But for today’s right, neither Winthrop’s light unto the nations, the promise of equality for all in the Declaration of Independence, the broad rights enshrined in the Constitution, nor the invitation by Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty are universal touchstones of American political culture. They are rather a hindrance in the war to define the American nation by its historical particularity and, more importantly, its bloodlines.
Schmitt’s hostility to universal principles recalls another Schmitt: Carl, the German conservative political theorist who has become increasingly influential on the right today. In his 1932 book “The Concept of the Political,” Schmitt argued that politics is fundamentally about the friend/enemy distinction: an existential decision about who belongs to a political community and who threatens it. If a state defines itself by universal ideals, it denies this distinction and pretends to rise above politics, Schmitt argued. The friend/enemy distinction also assumes a severely homogeneous notion of “the nation” or “the people,” such that many residents of a state are themselves enemies of the people and are subject to the denial of basic rights.
Long before the Trump era, this was the vision of syndicated columnist, presidential candidate and veteran of both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, Pat Buchanan. In his hard nativist campaigns for the Republican nomination in 1992 and 1996, Buchanan put forward the notion that American ideals were only as good as the DNA that carried them. “If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia,” he asked on a TV show in 1991, “what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?” Those ideas kept Buchanan on the margins of the Republican Party, and even until very recently, the right has been loath to abandon the idea that America’s exceptionalism is owed to the Enlightenment ideals of its founders. We are now seeing a turning away from that conceit.
Understood this way, Trump’s social media declaration of war on Chicago isn’t un-American. Rather, loving the smell of deportations of nonwhite immigrants in a multiracial, “blue” city with a Black mayor is patriotic. What could be more purgative, more exhilaratingly American to his base than avenging the nation with racial warfare in Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, New York and other cities where Trump has vowed to impose martial law?
A nation founded on Enlightenment ideals like liberty and equality, and also forged in Black enslavement and Indigenous genocide, has always experienced internal tensions between democratic and authoritarian political traditions. The modern right understands that racial visions of nationhood have always underwritten antidemocratic political imperatives. Like the ongoing attack on diversity, equity and inclusion; the racialized assault on history and memory in public schools and national museums; and the merciless roundups and expulsions of nonwhite immigrants; the depiction of multiracial cities as enemy territory to be militarily vanquished is a key strategy. Thus, just as Trumpism abandons constitutional democracy for Caesarist rule, the American right abandons racially tinged exceptionalism for all-out racial nationalism.
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