What happens when democracies use military force to occupy their own territory?

Consider This from NPR

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🗓️ 7 September 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Over the weekend, President Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as a character from the war film “Apocalypse Now” and, in that same post, seemingly threatened “WAR” in Chicago; later, the president indicated that sending in troops would be to clean up cities, not to go to war. But weeks of talk of sending federal troops into Chicago has set the city on edge.

NPR's Scott Detrow speaks with Dr. Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who has studied political violence for 30 years, and who worries his city could be a powder keg.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	On Saturday, President Trump posted an image of himself on social media as a character from the Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now.
0:08.7	I love the smell of night pump in the morning.
0:11.2	This is a character played by Robert Duval who orders an airstrike that kills civilians and Viet Cong alike.
0:17.3	Trump wrote in that same social media post, quote,
0:20.3	I love the smell of deportations in the morning.
0:23.7	The president has promised for weeks now to deploy federal troops in the National Guard in Chicago.
0:29.5	Here he is in the Oval Office on Tuesday.
0:31.4	There's no place in the world, including you can go to Afghanistan, you can go to places that you would think of.
0:38.8	They don't even come close to this.
0:41.0	Chicago is a hellhole right now.
0:43.2	This post was a dramatic escalation of rhetoric against the country's third largest city,
0:48.4	and it comes just days after Trump signed an executive order to restile the Department of Defense.
1:00.2	We won the First World War. We won the Second World War. We won everything before that and in between.
1:05.9	And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to Department of Defense. So we're going Department of War.
1:10.3	In Saturday's social media post with the Apocalypse Now image, Trump wrote, quote,
1:14.3	Chicago is about to find out why it's called the Department of War.
1:22.4	Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker responded by saying, quote, the president of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city.
1:24.9	This is not a joke. This is not normal.
1:28.7	Trump backtrack just a bit on Sunday afternoon.
1:29.9	We're not going to war.
1:31.5	We're going to clean up our city.
1:34.9	We're going to clean them up so they don't kill five people every weekend.
	...

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