No they aren’t…
Trump’s planning to send troops into major American cities for no reason. He’s already doing it in two of them. Now he’s getting ready to do it in a third. More to come for sure.
Sending the National Guard into another Democratic-led city would be another escalation in the president’s pledge to “make our country safe” and his willingness to stretch the bounds of presidential authority.
- D.C. residents overwhelmingly opposed Trump’s takeover of the District’s police and the mobilization of Guard members and federal law enforcement, according to a recent according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll.
But less than two weeks after Trump’s announcement, the White House has touted a successful operation — and now, the president claims that Chicagoans, including “African American ladies,” are “screaming” for him to target their city.
- Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) has pushed back, saying there is “no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the Illinois National Guard, deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders.”
He says he’s going after New York too. But Chicago has been on his mind from the start. It’s a very blue city, like Los Angeles and DC. It must be punished.
The Washington Post first reported that the Trump administration has been planning a deployment to Chicago for weeks. CNN also confirmed those preparations.
- A Defense official declined in a statement provided to Axios to “speculate on further operations, saying, “[t]he Department is a planning organization and is continuously working with other agency partners on plans to protect federal assets and personnel.”
- Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a Friday statement that the city had not received any formal communication regarding federal law enforcement or military action, slamming Trump’s approach as “uncoordinated, uncalled for, and unsound.”
- Asked Friday if there had been concrete steps taken by the administration to target Chicago, Trump said “when we’re ready, we’ll go ahead” and slammed Johnson as “grossly incompetent.”
Mobilizing the Guard to Illinois would be reminiscent of the president’s operation in Los Angeles earlier this year, when some 4,000 National Guard personnel and 700 Marines were deployed against the will of state and local leadership.
Trump said this morning in his post about Wes Moore and Baltimore see my earlier post) that it’s the liberal states and cities that are fudging the numbers. He claimed that we are are overrun with violence and cowering in our beds begging for the president to rescue us. He may even believe it. He no longer exists in any kind of reality.
The people around him, however, like Stephen Miller and JD Vance, have lots of neat ideas about how to take advantage of the president’s addled mind and make this fascist takeover stick. What we have to watch out for is the frog in slowly boiling water phenomenon. (Yes, I know it’s not a real thing.) Are we getting used to this stuff? Is it becoming as normalized as all the other Trump atrocities? That’s a real danger.