\u201cThings People are Begging for: 1. Cheaper groceries 2. No Medicaid and SNAP cuts 3. Release of the Epstein Files,\u201d Pritzker wrote. \u201cThings People are NOT begging for: 1. An authoritarian power grab of major cities.\u201d<\/p>\n
The swift rebuke from both Johnson and Pritzker came as Trump answered questions in the Oval Office about the controversial deployment of 2,000 National Guard members in Washington as part of his purported crusade against big-city crime. Seemingly almost as a side thought, Trump said that \u201cprobably\u201d Chicago would be the next city where he\u2019d try to deploy troops to crack down on crime.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter we do this, we\u2019ll go to another location \u2026 Chicago is a mess. You have an incompetent mayor, grossly incompetent, we\u2019re going to straighten that out,\u201d Trump said. \u201cProbably that\u2019ll be our next one after this, and it won\u2019t even be tough. And the people in Chicago \u2026 they\u2019re wearing red hats. African American ladies, beautiful ladies, are saying, \u2018Please, President Trump, come to Chicago.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump, who routinely makes threats<\/a> he doesn\u2019t follow up on and who would face much tougher obstacles deploying troops into Chicago than he did in Washington, didn\u2019t indicate anything substantive beyond his remarks. Still, Johnson said he took the president\u2019s statements \u201cseriously,\u201d before adding that the city \u201chas not received any formal communication from the Trump administration regarding additional federal law enforcement or military deployments to Chicago.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s order earlier this month to send troops to the nation\u2019s capital was panned by local officials and Democratic leaders who said the federal intervention was unnecessary \u2014 particularly as crime has dropped there and in other major cities. They also said the move could bring about dangerous clashes with civilians. But the White House maintains the crackdown has led to hundreds of arrests and made Washington safer.<\/p>\n The president also singled out New York City as the next target after Chicago. Earlier this summer, his administration sent nearly 5,000 federal troops to Los Angeles during protests over federal immigration raids. That deployment triggered a legal standoff with Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom over the federal government\u2019s authority to activate troops. The courts initially sided with Newsom, but an appeals panel later blocked that order.<\/p>\n U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly, who is running to succeed retiring U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, made a pointed reference to Trump\u2019s comments about \u201cAfrican American ladies.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou have no authority to claim what Black women want,\u201d said Kelly, who is Black. \u201cBlack women have lost sons and daughters, spouses, fathers and mothers to gun violence \u2014 and experienced the horrific trauma of gun violence and domestic violence themselves \u2014 yet you have done nothing to save Black lives. In fact, bringing the National Guard into Chicago threatens Black communities that have already been overpoliced and under-invested in for generations.\u201d<\/p>\n Kelly is facing U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi and\u00a0Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, who is also Black, as major candidates in the Senate race. Both also hammered Trump\u2019s suggestion and vowed to stop any such effort.<\/p>\n The focus on Chicago being the next target for troop deployment comes as no surprise after the nation\u2019s third-largest, strongly Democratic-leaning city has been in the White House\u2019s crosshairs<\/a> since Trump took office again in January. His administration has attacked the mayor and governor\u2019s leadership throughout the last several months, and Chicago\u2019s reputation among conservatives as a punching bag would make images of a National Guard deployment easy bait for his base.<\/p>\n Trump in June said Pritzker, who is mulling a 2028 run for president, is \u201cprobably the worst in the country\u201d and recently called Johnson \u201ctotally incompetent\u201d while hinting that a federal takeover of policing was necessary in Chicago, which he deemed a \u201cdisaster.\u201d The governor and mayor, for their part, have blasted<\/a> Trump\u2019s crackdown on Democratic cities and warned that he would have no authority to do the same in Chicago.<\/p>\n However, Pritzker and Johnson have not revealed much about how they would handle a federal troop deployment. Last week, Johnson did not say what his plan would be if that happened besides, \u201cLegal action will be on the table.\u201d<\/p>\n Johnson was himself singled out by the White House when the president\u2019s border czar, Tom Homan, threatened to arrest him days before Trump\u2019s inauguration, and when the U.S. Department of Justice opened<\/a> an investigation into City Hall hiring practices within a day of Johnson publicly emphasizing how many Black people he\u2019s hired in his administration. Earlier in January, Homan was joined by the TV personality Dr. Phil in a blitz of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids<\/a> in Chicago.<\/p>\n Trump disparaged Chicago throughout his first term as president too, saying the city\u2019s violence was worse than Afghanistan. The enmity is mutual; Trump got just 21% of the vote in Chicago during last November\u2019s election against Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.<\/p>\n But a potential federal crackdown would be Trump\u2019s biggest escalation yet. It would come after Chicago has seen multiyear declines in violence after a historic crime wave that coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and civil unrest over George Floyd\u2019s murder.<\/p>\n Chicago leads the nation in homicides, surpassing both Los Angeles and New York City combined, while its per capita rate is far below that of smaller cities such as St. Louis and Memphis.<\/p>\n So far this year, shootings\u00a0in Chicago\u00a0are down 36% and homicides 31% after peaking in 2021 to levels not seen in over two decades, according to Chicago Police data.<\/p>\n Johnson attributes that progress to the leadership of his handpicked Chicago police Supt. Larry Snelling, as well as his administration\u2019s spending on youth employment and anti-violence programs. Those programs lean on federal grants that are in jeopardy under Trump.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just hours after President Donald Trump suggested Chicago would be the next location for a federal troop deployment…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":167513,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[20174,960,69,5386,1818,12084,7090,15037,2058],"class_list":{"0":"post-167512","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-brandon-johnson","9":"tag-chicago","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-illinois","13":"tag-jb-pritzker","14":"tag-national-guard","15":"tag-troops","16":"tag-washington"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115074639159946172","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167512\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"National](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/ctc-232927294.jpg\")
National Guardsmen patrol near the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 22, 2025, in Washington. (Rahmat Gul\/AP)<\/p>\n