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.
Afew 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.