In the wake of President Donald Trump seeming to declare war on Chicago in a social media post evoking the movie “Apocalypse Now,” the city is fighting back with its own campaign advocating civic love, not war.
On Thursday — two days before Trump’s “Chipocalypse Now” post showed helicopters flying past the city’s skyline ablaze — Choose Chicago fired off a preemptive social media strike as the president’s threatened military intervention and inflammatory rhetoric took aim at the city.
The campaign, dubbed “All for the Love of Chicago” by the city’s tourism arm, invites residents and visitors alike to post photos, videos and stories on Instagram and TikTok depicting Chicago in a more flattering light. The intent is to refute Trump’s dystopian urban narrative that “Chicago is a hellhole right now,” which the president proclaimed last week.
“The only way to kind of counteract some of that negative narrative that always seems to hover over the brand of our city is to completely flood the feeds and the streams with the positive things going on,” Kristen Reynolds, Choose Chicago’s new president and CEO, said Monday. “And we need the entire community to do it.”
Reynolds, who took the helm at Choose Chicago in May after previously serving in the same role at Discover Long Island, oversaw the launch of the city’s broader marketing campaign, “Never Done. Never Outdone,” in June.
Getting Chicagoans to promote their city on social media has been high on her inaugural to-do list as well. Trump’s recent messaging may have accelerated the campaign, Reynolds said.
“The negative narrative that is in the national news certainly adds to the urgency to make sure that we are proactively controlling our story and being able to talk about who we are as a community,” Reynolds said.
The Chicago social media campaign has generated more than 280,000 impressions and nearly 20,000 interactions to date, according to Reynolds. Meanwhile, Trump’s “Chipocalypse Now” message, originally posted on Truth Social, has more than 10 million views on X after it was reposted by the official White House account Saturday.
Chicago has been in Trump’s sights for weeks as he has threatened to deploy the National Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to the city as a show of force to crack down on crime and illegal immigration. On Monday, the administration announced the surge of immigration enforcement in Chicago was beginning.
Both Gov. JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson have denounced the federal intervention as unwarranted and unwanted. Pritzker has threatened to sue the administration if the National Guard is deployed, while Johnson has issued an order that Chicago police are not to cooperate with “any unlawful or unconstitutional actions” undertaken by federal law enforcement in the city.
“Once again, this isn’t about fighting crime,” Pritzker said in a social media post Monday. “That requires support and coordination — yet we’ve experienced nothing like that over the past several weeks.”
Trump’s social media post Saturday escalated the growing tension. In the post, Trump is outfitted like the fictional Lt. Col. Kilgore played by Robert Duvall in the 1979 Vietnam War movie, “Apocalypse Now,” who uttered the phrase, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
The Trump post changed the line to “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” adding the message, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
The reaction has been swift, with everyone from Pritzker to U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth and other Democratic leaders condemning Trump’s social media post. Challenged by a reporter Sunday, Trump pushed back on the backlash saying, “we’re not going to war, we’re going to clean up our cities.”
Chicago, meanwhile, is preparing for a surge in federal intervention and fallout from the president’s campaign to cast the city as a war zone.
“The governor’s office has received no formal communication or information from the Trump administration,” Matt Hill, a Pritzker spokesperson, said in a statement Monday. “Like the public and press, we are learning of their operations through their social media as they attempt to produce a reality television show. As Trump has said himself, this is not about seriously fighting crime or reforming immigration — it’s about Trump’s plan to go to war with America’s third-largest city.”
In a CNN interview Monday, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel offered his own take on the social media blowup.
“The president of the United States once mused just a couple weeks ago about going to heaven,” Emanuel said. “When you declare war on your own residents, my unsolicited advice is bone up on ‘Dante’s Inferno’ and the nine stages there, because this is insane.”
It may nonetheless be challenging for the city to make a dent in the potentially damaging national storyline Trump’s posts and unfolding initiative may have on Chicago’s image and its tourism business.
“Presidential Trump’s attack on Chicago certainly doesn’t help the city’s brand,” said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “It is critical to respond to all the negative attacks. Influencer marketing can be particularly influential at a time like this.”
Reynolds is counting on Chicagoans and the 55 million people who visited the city last year to help set the record straight.
“There is more to come with this campaign,” Reynolds said. “We’re going to be looking at many additional ways to flood the feeds and flood the streams so people can really understand what Chicago is all about, from people that know and love the city.”
rchannick@chicagotribune.com