Trump Keeps Casting Himself as the Bad Guy
From Apocalypse Now memes to a re-named War Department, the second Trump administration is in love with authoritarian aesthetics.
President Donald Trump surely succeeded in his aim of riling up the libs when he posted a meme of himself as Lt. Col. Kilgore from Apocalypse Now dropping napalm on Chicago.
"I love the smell of deportations in the morning. Chicago is about to find out why it's called the Department of War," reads the text of the Truth Social post. The White House X account promptly reposted the meme with a few helicopter emojis.
???????????? pic.twitter.com/6LSUCBcDQK
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 6, 2025
As a politician—and as an entertainer before that—Trump has always made liberal use of provocation. Getting his political enemies angry and fearful is something he clearly enjoys and has a talent for.
Even by his standards, tweeting out a meme of himself as a military officer burning America's third-largest city to the ground and implying he'll use the military to deport the survivors is a dark escalation of tone and rhetoric.
Anyone who's seen Apocalypse Now will know that Lt. Col. Kilgore is not supposed to be a heroic character. The name alone (a play on "kill" and "gore") should make that clear.
And while the Ride of the Valkyries scene is admittedly awesome, its point in the film is to show that Kilgore's gung-ho warrior spirit ultimately brings just senseless killing and violence.
I doubt the president missed this point. More likely, he and his staff absorbed the point and are reveling in it.
The meme is part of a trend. In his second term, Trump and his communications staff keep depicting the president as the bad guy doing bad things.
To take a slightly less bloodthirsty example, people might recall that on this past May 4—the informal Star Wars holiday—the White House posted an image of Trump as a jacked red lightsaber-wielding Sith lord.
There are plenty of heroic good guys in the Star Wars universe that the White House could have depicted Trump as. They opted for the villain role instead.
The Trump team continues to not only post pop culture memes, but to depict their boss as the villain. pic.twitter.com/7XQXIYmR30
— Joe Lancaster (@JoeRLancaster) May 4, 2025
The Biden administration dabbled in this, too, with its embrace of the "dark Brandon" meme, albeit in a much more half-hearted and pathetic way. That wasn't very successful: Try as they might, there was just no amount of memeing that was going to make Joe Biden appear intimidating and badass.
Conservatives were nevertheless right to describe that effort as "creepy."
This White House has been much more successful at depicting its president as a dark figure, and the result—whether or not conservatives want to say so—is a lot creepier.
This is the motivating factor behind the administration's decision to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War.
There was always a healthy degree of hypocrisy and Orwellian obfuscation in calling the federal government's war machine the Department of Defense. Changing the name to the "Department of War" at least makes clear what its actual job is.
But the Trump administration isn't trying to change the Department of Defense's name because it thinks it's dishonest. They're changing the name because they think sticking to defending Americans would be a bad thing.
As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put it at the signing ceremony informally renaming the department, "We're going to go on offense, not just defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality."
"This name change is not just about renaming, it's about restoring… America First, peace through strength brought to you by the WAR DEPARTMENT." - @SecWar Pete Hegseth
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— The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 6, 2025
One might dismiss these examples as silly memes and canned pablum, but the administration keep casting itself as the villain in real life as well.
These past few months, Trump has taken particular delight in sending masked federal agents and uniformed troops to patrol the streets of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
When a drunk threw a sandwich at one of these officers in D.C., the White House posted a video on social media of masked, armed federal agents showing up at his apartment at night to rearrest him.
???? Nighttime Routine: Operation Make D.C. Safe Again Edition pic.twitter.com/ngZsbgBpcz
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 14, 2025
The administration likes the theater of armed, uniformed men marching around looking intimidating. They want the public to see the federal government as threatening and capable of exercising force at a moment's notice.
You might hope that stripping away the euphemisms means the administration is taking the government's war-making powers more seriously. Instead, it's taking them less seriously.
That's where the memes come in.
The administration is being quite explicit that not only does it see state violence and intimidation as a good thing, but also that it's willing to exercise that violence in a casual and trollish manner.
Reason's Matthew Petti wrote last week about how Trump's decision to blow up a boat of suspected Venezuelan drug smugglers was the last nail in the coffin of any real legal limits on the president's use of military force.
The memes of Col. Kilgore Trump signal this administration doesn't accept any tonal limits on its use of military force either.
As Vice President J.D. Vance declared on X, in response to someone saying that killing suspected criminals without due process was a war crime, "I don't give a shit what you call it."
I don't give a shit what you call it
— JD Vance (@JDVance) September 6, 2025
If the Trump administration doesn't give a shit about legal rights, you can be sure they don't give a shit about freedom either. They see themselves as the bad guys, and they're happy about that.
