Even if we only stick to pop culture—blithely sailing over the vast oceans of his ignorance on statesmanship, military strategy, economics, skincare, morality, etc.—the list of things Donald Trump fundamentally doesn’t understand is a hefty one. (Trump’s multi-tasking of pop incomprehension is impressive enough, for instance, that he can both misinterpret Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The U.S.A.,” and its creator’s utter loathing and contempt for him.) The List got a big, bold addition on Saturday morning, though, when Trump—whose proverbial shriveled-on is currently gorging itself on imagery of himself as a warrior, spurred on by all that (probably insanely expensive) “Department Of War” rebranding—posted an AI-generated image of himself dressed like Robert Duvall’s character from Apocalypse Now, captioned “Chipocalypse Now,” and with the non-quote “I love the smell of deportations in the morning” attached to it.
Now, fair play to whichever ghoul tossed this onto Trump’s desk and got him to nod a bit of bellicose approval before regurgitating it onto people’s screens: The text and subtext of the TruthSocial message were both pretty clear, in so far as the Trump White House is declaring war on the city of Chicago, and would like to generate mental imagery of the Windy City being engulfed in napalm. Unlike, say, a rival bit of Republican pop culture failure from earlier this week, when Louisiana GOP senator John Kennedy stood up on the Congressional floor and showed a picture of the chestburster from Alien and suggested we were all in danger of turning into it if we ate contaminated shrimp—a woeful misunderstanding of the well-documented Xenomorph lifecycle—the threat here is at least as clear as it is deeply horrifying.
But, woof, what a D- of a Film Studies post. We get it: That Coppola can be a tricky bastard, because it is very exciting to hear “Ride Of The Valkyries” blasting while big helicopters go vroom, as Coppola’s film indulges gleefully in the “little boys playing with their toys” appeal of military hardware. You have to watch the film for like 90 whole seconds, straight, before the camera cuts from all the bombast to the silence of the peaceful, untroubled village, full of children, that Duvall’s character is about to render into rubble and ash. These things can be hard to pick up on.
Even beyond the “You understand which side ended up losing this war” and “You noticed this is a war crime, right?” aspects of it all, though, Trump also doesn’t seem to grasp that Duvall’s Lt. Colonel Kilgore, who he’s cast himself as, is a deliberately pathetic and absurd figure. Yes, Kilgore walks around the battlefield shirtless, radiating Duvall’s inherent hardass charisma. But he’s also a ridiculously whiny fanboy, essentially blowing up an entire village because he’s obsessed with impressing his surfer hero Lance (Sam Bottoms). The punchline of the entire “napalm in the morning” sequence (bulked up in deleted scenes) is that Kilgore never gets to realize his hero worship surfing fantasy because a) Lance is repulsed by him, and b) the napalm he’s so enamored with has killed the waves that were the entire point of the venture. Or, to put it another way: The character has expended huge amounts of manpower, money, energy, and human suffering simply to impotently indulge his own ego and oh hey wait a minute, maybe Trump really does get Apocalypse Now. Wonders never cease!
