Trump amps up rhetoric toward Chicago as Democrats prepare for showdown

President Donald Trump is intensifying his rhetoric toward Chicago as Democrats in Illinois prepare for a potential National Guard deployment to the city. The move would mark the administration’s next effort to fight crime in a major American city over local officials’ objections.

“Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the World, by far,” Trump wrote Tuesday in a social media post. “(Illinois Gov. JB) Pritzker needs help badly, he just doesn’t know it yet. I will solve the crime problem fast, just like I did in DC. Chicago will be safe again, and soon.”

Trump has not detailed any plans for Chicago yet, but Democrats there have been on alert since he said last month that the city would be “probably next” after he deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C.

“I don’t want to mention when, but it’s going to be happening there,” Trump told conservative radio host Scott Jennings on Tuesday, a sentiment he repeated to reporters hours later at the White House while decrying Chicago as a “hellhole.”

Pritzker, a Democrat and potential 2028 presidential candidate, has told the administration “do not come” to Chicago, and the city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson (D), signed an executive order Saturday preparing for the possibility. The order instructed local police not to cooperate with troops or federal agents if Trump ordered such a deployment.

“We do not want or need military occupation in our city. We do not want or need militarized immigration enforcement in our city,” Johnson said during a news conference with Pritzker on Tuesday. While officials did not shy away from the city’s serious gun violence problem, Johnson and others said Trump should be using his authority to stem the flow of illegal guns from surrounding red states like Indiana.

Pritzker said he believes National Guard members and federal immigration agents who were deployed to Los Angeles are already being staged outside the city, citing intel from “patriotic officials” working in the administration and “well-sourced” reporters. Pritzker said he also expects the military presence in the city will last about a month before it moves elsewhere.

But during a potential military presence in the city, Pritzker urged Chicago residents to look out for their neighbors and speak out.

“Know your rights. Film things you see happening in your neighborhoods and streets and share them with the news media. Authoritarians thrive on your silence. Be loud for America,” Pritzker said.

The Washington Post reported last month that the Pentagon had already spent weeks preparing a military deployment to Chicago. One option under review was sending at least a few thousand National Guard troops to the city as soon as this month, The Post reported.

Trump faces a different set of legal questions in Chicago than he did in Washington, where the president serves as commander in chief of the National Guard because the District is not a state.

Trump sent National Guard troops to California earlier this year in response to protests against immigration raids. A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the use of troops to carry out domestic law enforcement actions violated federal law. The judge said, however, that the ruling was “narrowly tailored” and did not require the administration to pull back the 300 troops still stationed in Los Angeles. But he blocked them from certain actions and stayed his ruling until next week.

Chicago has long dealt with significant crime levels, although statistics show that the problem is not as severe as Trump portrays it to be. Like other major U.S. cities, Chicago has seen a decline in crime since the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, and by mid-August, the city’s violent crime had decreased 23% compared with the same period last year, according to Chicago Police Department figures.

In another social media post Tuesday, Trump labeled Chicago the “MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!” Other U.S. cities, let alone cities abroad, regularly rank as having higher homicide rates than Chicago does.

As the nation’s third-most-populous city, Chicago typically has the largest number of annual homicides, but when measured by its murder rate, it falls outside the top 20 U.S. cities, such as Jackson, Mississippi; Birmingham, Alabama; and St. Louis, which all have higher rates.

In one of his Tuesday posts, Trump cited reports about the number of shootings in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend. At least nine people were killed and 52 others were injured, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, which described it as the city’s “most violent holiday weekend of the summer.”

Though the figures are more than double the total from last year’s Labor Day weekend, city officials have stressed that Chicago is experiencing a sharp downward trend in violent crime, including a reduced number of homicides that is putting the city on pace for its lowest homicide rate in half a century.

Trump has hailed his National Guard deployment to Washington as a success and praised the city’s mayor, Muriel E. Bowser (D), who has taken a more measured tone toward the administration than Illinois Democrats have.

“Wow! Mayor Muriel Bowser of D.C. has become very popular because she worked with me and my great people in bringing CRIME down to virtually NOTHING in D.C.,” Trump wrote Monday on his Truth Social network, despite polls showing that residents in the heavily Democratic city overwhelmingly oppose his efforts there.

Pritzker has made clear he would be less conciliatory than Bowser if Trump sent the National Guard to his state.

“I’ve been standing up to Donald Trump, and I’m going to do everything I can to stop him from taking away people’s rights and from using the military to invade states,” Pritzker said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

In the days since The Post reported on the Trump administration’s plan to send troops to Chicago, residents and local leaders have denounced the idea and rejected the president’s characterization of the city as a bloody, lawless hellscape.

At Monday’s Labor Day rally on the city’s West Side, more than 1,000 people gathered to show solidarity with unions and to protest the possible deployment as they held signs stamped with “No Troops in Chicago.”

“Chicago is a city of communities, and in our own communities, we protect each other. We don’t need troops here,” said Jo Michelle Hale, a 55-year-old home health care worker who marched in the rally alongside colleagues from the SEIU Healthcare union.