President Trump on Sunday attempted to downplay his social media post that appeared to threaten to declare war on Chicago, saying that he merely wanted to “clean up” the city.
Speaking to reporters before he departed the White House for the U.S. Open, Mr. Trump addressed his post from Saturday in which he invoked his newly rebranded name for the Pentagon with an image that included helicopters, billowing flames and the Chicago skyline. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” read the post, titled “Chipocalypse Now,” a reference to the 1979 war movie “Apocalypse Now.”
On Sunday, when asked whether he was “threatening to go to war with Chicago,” Mr. Trump responded: “We’re not going to war. We’re going to clean up our cities.”
The post was an alarming escalation in Mr. Trump’s quest to continue deploying the military on U.S. soil in the name of cracking down on crime and illegal immigration. For weeks, Mr. Trump has attacked Chicago and other cities led by Democrats that he has assailed as “hellholes” because of crime, and floated sending federal agents and National Guard troops to cities throughout the country. Mr. Trump deployed the military to Washington, D.C., in August and Los Angeles in June.
His post on Saturday drew a fierce rebuke from Democrats, including Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, who in his own social media post blasted Mr. Trump as a “wannabe dictator.”
“The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city,” Mr. Pritzker wrote. “This is not a joke. This is not normal.”
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said that the words in the post were “taken out of context,” when asked whether the president planned to go to war in Chicago.
The post, he said, was intended to convey that the administration is “going to war with the criminal cartels; we’re going to war with illegal aliens, public safety threats,” and cited previous operations in the city that nabbed violent criminals in the country illegally.
Mr. Homan said federal action in Chicago, including the deployment of the National Guard, could come as soon as this week, but he declined to say how many National Guard troops would be sent.
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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