US President Donald Trump on Saturday amplified his promises to send National Guard troops and immigration agents to Chicago by posting a parody image from "Apocalypse Now" featuring a ball of flames as helicopters zoom over the nation's third-largest city. "'I love the smell of deportations in the morning'," Trump wrote on his social media site. "Chicago about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR."

The president offered no details beyond the label "Chipocalypse Now", a play on the title of Francis Ford Coppola's dystopian 1979 film set in the Vietnam war, in which a character says: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." In response to the post, Illinois Governor J B Pritzker, a Democrat, called Trump a "wannabe dictator". Trump on Friday signed an executive order seeking to rename the Department of Defense the Department of War, after months of campaigning to be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize. The renaming requires congressional approval.

The illustration in Trump's post shows him against a backdrop of the Chicago skyline, wearing a hat matching that of the movie's war-loving and amoral Lt Col Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall. Trump's weekend post follows his repeated threats to add Chicago to the list of other Democratic-led cities he's targeted for expanded federal enforcement. His administration is set to step up immigration enforcement in Chicago, as it did in Los Angeles, and deploy National Guard troops. In addition to sending troops to Los Angeles in June, Trump has deployed them since last month in Washington, as part of his unprecedented law enforcement takeover of the nation's capital.