Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Trump’s obsession with violence is more than a grotesque fixation on power and cruelty; it is a commentary on politics as pathology, a grim theater in which authoritarianism reveals its inner logic. What he offers is not governance but the intoxication of destruction, the fetishization of cruelty, and the performance of violence as ritual. On the individual level, it is the grotesque display of a delusional mind that can only feel alive through the embrace of terror, that finds its emotional register only in the language of threat and annihilation. This is obvious in his AI-generated meme on Truth Social where he targets Chicago by threatening that he will go to “WAR” with the city. The image posted on September 6th “depicted him as Robert Duvall’s character Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now.”

In the doctored image, Trump not only cast himself as a cinematic icon of militarized madness but paired it with a menacing caption. The post invoked his plan to unleash the National Guard on Chicago, echoing his earlier militarization of Washington, D.C., and underscored his desire to rebrand the Department of Defense as the “Department of War.” The caption’s most telling moment, however, was a grotesque parody of Duvall’s infamous line from the film. Transforming “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” into “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” Trump collapsed cinematic war fantasy into his ongoing campaign of immigration terror, turning the language of mass suffering into a punchline of authoritarian bravado.

What emerges from this spectacle is more than a provocation; it is a declaration that cruelty is both pleasure and policy, a gleeful admission that state violence has become theatre, and that politics itself has degenerated into necropolitics: a regime in which sovereignty is measured by the power to decide who suffers, who is dispossessed, and who is left to die. This grotesque performance exposes the pathological core of an authoritarian war culture, where cruelty is transfigured into pleasure, violence becomes the grammar of belonging, and politics is reduced to a performance of derangement. In Trump’s hands, deportation is stripped of its bureaucratic disguise and reimagined as an ecstatic ritual of exclusion — a celebration of malignant aggression that reveals the fascist subject in its most naked form, finding joy........

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