{"id":233125,"date":"2025-09-17T06:06:30","date_gmt":"2025-09-17T06:06:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/233125\/"},"modified":"2025-09-17T06:06:30","modified_gmt":"2025-09-17T06:06:30","slug":"gov-jb-pritzker-says-president-donald-trump-is-losing-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/233125\/","title":{"rendered":"Gov. JB Pritzker says President Donald Trump is ‘losing it’"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump again vowed to deploy the National Guard to Chicago \u201cagainst\u201d the opposition of Gov. JB Pritzker, prompting the Democratic governor on Tuesday to label the president\u2019s latest comments a possible sign of \u201cdementia\u201d after a month<\/a> of on-and-off<\/a> threats by Trump<\/a> to mobilize the military to the city.<\/p>\n

Trump, speaking Tuesday to reporters on the White House lawn as he prepared to depart for a state visit to the United Kingdom, once again recounted a meeting he held with Jim Vena, the CEO of the Union Pacific railroad, who is seeking federal approval to merge with Norfolk Southern. Vena told the president, \u201c\u2018Sir, you have to save Chicago,\u2019\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I\u2019m going to go to Chicago early against Pritzker. Pritzker is nothing. If Pritzker was smart, he\u2019d say, \u2018Please come in,\u2019\u201d Trump said, before reciting crime statistics and mocking local authorities by saying, \u201cIf they lose less than six or seven people a week with murder, they\u2019re doing a great job in their opinion.\u201d Crime rates in Chicago are down from previous years, according to data from the Chicago Police Department<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Citing his federalization of law enforcement and the National Guard in Washington, D.C.<\/a>, and his order Monday to mobilize the Guard and a federal task force to Memphis, Tennessee<\/a>, backed by Republican Gov. Bill Lee, Trump said, \u201cChicago is a death trap and I\u2019m going to make it just like I did with D.C., just like I\u2019ll do with Memphis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump said Vena told him, \u201c\u2018Chicago is a great city. You can save Chicago, sir. Don\u2019t let Chicago die.\u2019 This is the guy telling me, with great knowledge and stuff, he said, \u2018Don\u2019t let Chicago die soon. It\u2019s dying. Don\u2019t let it die.\u2019 I\u2019m going to Chicago next.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Pritzker said Trump\u2019s latest comments were a reminder \u201cthat you can\u2019t take anything that he says seriously from one day to the next.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s attacking verbally, sometimes he attacks, sending his agents in, sometimes he forgets. I think he might be suffering from some dementia. The next day, he\u2019ll wake up on the other side of the bed and stop talking about Chicago,\u201d Pritzker, an ardent critic of Trump and a potential 2028 White House aspirant, said of the president.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I\u2019ve never really counted on anything that he said as real. When he said that he wasn\u2019t coming to Chicago, I didn\u2019t trust that. When he says he is coming to Chicago, it\u2019s hard to believe anything he says,\u201d Pritzker said. \u201cI think he\u2019s losing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pritzker said the Trump administration\u2019s \u201cOperation Midwest Blitz<\/a>\u201d mobilization of immigration enforcement that began a week ago was a pretext for presidential mobilization of the National Guard by sending U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on raids to \u201ccause challenges and mayhem on the ground, and you\u2019re seeing that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe harder the ICE agents come in, the more people want to intervene and step in the way of them. And when that happens, and when there\u2019s any kind of, well, touching or engagement with those ICE agents that involves actual potential battery, well, that\u2019ll be the excuse,\u201d Pritzker said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s wrong, by the way. They are causing it. It is the president. It is (Department of Homeland Security Secretary) Kristi Noem.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"PresidentPresident Donald Trump speaks with reporters before departing on Marine One from the South Lawn of the White House, Sept. 16, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Alex Brandon\/AP)<\/p>\n

Trump has sought to use the National Guard and immigration enforcement as part of a political effort to portray Republicans as the law-and-order party in advance of next year\u2019s critical midterm congressional elections.<\/p>\n

But a presidential mobilization of the National Guard to Chicago, overriding Pritzker\u2019s authority as commander in chief of the Illinois Guard as well as state sovereignty, would likely set up a legal battle that the governor has already threatened.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s vacillation over mobilizing the National Guard in Chicago followed a federal judge\u2019s ruling<\/a> in San Francisco that said the president\u2019s June deployment of the Guard and Marines to Los Angeles in response to anti-immigration enforcement protests was illegal under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which sharply limits what the U.S. military can do on domestic soil.<\/p>\n

While Trump had put Chicago in his sights for weeks as a Guard deployment target, he instead ordered military mobilization to Memphis. The move had been thought to be prompted by legal issues over deploying the Guard to a state over a governor\u2019s opposition.<\/p>\n

In Memphis, the state ACLU criticized Trump\u2019s move as \u201canother effort to expand his power and stoke fear,\u201d and called the federal task force sent to the city \u201cregressive policing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis latest step makes clear that the Trump administration is claiming a sweeping mandate to patrol, arrest and detain people in Memphis, and will bring back the same failed policing tactics that caused widespread constitutional violations for decades,\u201d the ACLU said.<\/p>\n

But the White House promoted what it called \u201cTrump\u2019s bold action to deploy federal resources to Memphis\u201d and touted supportive comments for it from \u201cresidents, business owners, and area lawmakers as a transformative step to reclaim the city from violent crime and chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n

Originally Published: September 16, 2025 at 4:58 PM CDT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump again vowed to deploy the National Guard to Chicago \u201cagainst\u201d the opposition of Gov. JB…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":233126,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5295,51,1818,409,1370,108,50,80,52],"class_list":{"0":"post-233125","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-crime-and-public-safety","9":"tag-headlines","10":"tag-illinois","11":"tag-immigration","12":"tag-latest-headlines","13":"tag-national-news","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-politics","16":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115218139380974372","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233125","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=233125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233125\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}