President Donald Trump on Monday continued to take aim at Chicago as the city braces for potential federal intervention.
“We’d love to go into Chicago and straighten it out,” Trump said as he delivered remarks at the Museum of the Bible.
Earlier Monday, Trump wrote on his social media platform that the people of Illinois should “band together and DEMAND PROTECTION” from what he has said is a crime problem in Chicago, despite police data showing murders and shootings down this year compared to last.
“I want to help the people of Chicago, not hurt them. Only the Criminals will be hurt! We can move fast and stop this madness,” Trump wrote in the post.
The comments come after a war of words over the weekend between Trump and Illinois leaders following a controversial post from the president referencing the newly rebranded Department of War.
“Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” Trump wrote in a post on Saturday that included a manipulated image and a caption reading, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” a nod to the often-quoted line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” from the war film “Apocalypse Now.”
Trump later downplayed the threat, telling reporters on Sunday: “We’re not going to war. We’re going to clean up our cities.”
Democratic leaders in Illinois slammed Trump’s rhetoric, and protests unfolded throughout Chicago on Saturday against the president’s threat to increase immigration enforcement and dispatch National Guard troops.
“‘I want to help people, not hurt them,’ says the guy who just threatened an American city with the Department of War,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker wrote on X on Monday.
While Trump on Monday said that he wanted to “fix” Chicago, he also signaled his administration may not send in troops without a request from state and local officials, saying his administration is “waiting for a call from Chicago.”
“I don’t know why Chicago isn’t calling us, saying, please give us help when you have over just a short period of time, 50 murders and hundreds of people shot. And then you have a governor that stands up and says how crime is just fine. It’s, it’s really crazy, but we’re bringing back law and order to our country,” Trump said.
Pritzker has made clear he will not be making such a request, telling reporters last week: “When did we become a country where it’s okay for the U.S. president to insist on national television that a state should call him to beg for anything, especially something we don’t want?”
Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Monday launched an expanded operation dubbed “Midway Blitz,” that will “target the criminal illegal aliens who flocked to Chicago and Illinois because they knew Governor Pritzker and his sanctuary policies would protect them and allow them to roam free on American streets,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a post on X.
Trump, touting his administration’s federal takeover of Washington, suggested on Monday the same be done in other American cities.
“We could do the same thing in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles,” Trump said in his remarks at the Museum of the Bible.
“We saved Los Angeles, we saved Los Angeles,” he said.
The Trump administration deployed thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June, over the protests of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. A federal judge recently ruled the use of federal troops in the California city was illegal.
New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch earlier Monday said she is “revolted” by the presence of the National Guard on big city streets.
“As a lifelong New Yorker, I am revolted by the idea of the militarization of our streets,” Tisch said during a breakfast at the Citizens Budget Commission. “I will be very clear with anybody, all of you, the attorney general, anyone who wants to talk to me about this that the NYPD, we’ve got this. We don’t need or want the federal government’s help here in that way.”
ABC News’ Aaron Katersky and Michelle Stoddart contributed to this report.
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