Okay, J.B. Pritzker, you’re up. Donald Trump is coming after Chicago next, now that he’s “solved crime” in Washington, D.C., And since the mayor of Chicago is kind of a joke—that’d be Brandon Johnson, whose approval rating is 26 percent, which (on the bright side) is up from the 7 percent approval he enjoyed earlier this year—most eyes will be focused on you, the governor of Illinois and a tier-one 2028 presidential contender, to take charge of the counter-argument.
First, let’s state some numbers. Crime in Chicago, like crime in nearly every major city, is down. Through the first half of 2025, the homicide rate is down 33 percent. There were 289 murders in the first half of 2024, and 192 in the first half of this year. Yes, 192 is still 192 dead people. No one celebrates that. But a 33 percent decrease? That is real, too—and really good. Overall crime complaints are down 14 percent as well. Certain categories of theft are up since the pandemic, but overall, Chicago is hardly out of control.
It’s been sickening to watch Trump tell lie after lie about the city he lives in most of the time but clearly knows nothing about. Yes, Washington went a week without a homicide since Trump’s National Guard deployment. Good. Great, even. But he talked about that as if it had never happened before. “That’s the first time in anybody’s memory that you haven’t had a murder in a week,” he said.
Well, that’s true—for people whose memories go back only to mid-May. If your memory goes back any further than that—like all the way back to January 1, say—then you might recall that this is the fifth week this year without a homicide. The others include February 25 to March 4, March 5 to March 12 (yep, that was two weeks in a row), April 11 to 18, and May 4 through 11. But the right-wing media repeat Trump’s garbage, and his idiot backers believe it.
Likewise, that toxic nonsense about how nobody ever went out to a restaurant out of sheer terror, but now, his friends tell him they’ve gone out four nights in a row. (Must be nice! For most people, prices are going up.) I don’t doubt that his sycophantic courtiers did that and made sure to tell him about it. In fact, restaurant bookings in the District are down since Trump’s police hit town, and dramatically so year-over-year: more than 30 percent. He’s constitutionally incapable of telling the truth about anything.
But it’s worse than his fudging of numbers, because at the heart of Trump’s lies is his unswerving and poisonous racism. He’s not really trying to solve crime in the District of Columbia or anywhere else. He’s trying to scare white people. To divide the country; to make people in suburban, exurban, and rural America believe that the places where lots of nonwhite people live are war zones.
Also, he’s trying to demonize places with “Democrat” mayors and governors. The city with the highest crime rate in America is Memphis. The mayor of Memphis, Paul Young, is a Democrat (although elections are nonpartisan), but the governor and both senators and eight of its nine House members are Republican, and Trump carried the state by 30 points last fall. So, what do we think the odds are that Trump will declare Memphis a “hellhole,” which is what he called Washington last week?
The National Guard incursion into the nation’s capital also provides cover for what ICE agents are doing there, which is getting less attention. Crime is down only moderately since the National Guard hit town. Meanwhile, ICE has rounded up more than 300 immigrants since August 7. If we could be sure that all of them had arrived in the United States illegally and had criminal records beyond their method of entry, even I might applaud that. But ICE’s track record this year gives us every reason to think that such is not the case, and as we’ve seen in numerous polls, the American public does not support rounding up people who may be undocumented but who’ve otherwise lived blameless lives.
So, back to Chicago. Pritzker has already come out swinging, having tweeted on Saturday: “There is no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the
@IL_Natl_Guard, deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active-duty military within our own borders.” Good. I hope he keeps at it. Gavin Newsom’s social media fusillade these last couple weeks should have taught Democrats something. You must—must!—take the fight to Trump. Don’t wait for Trump to attack and then respond. No matter how clever or cutting, a response is always just that: a response. Newsom turned the tables and attacked first. That had Trumpworld reacting and certain Fox News hosts freaking out, trying to pretend that Newsom wasn’t being effective.
Everything with Trump is the law of the jungle. It’s hit or be hit. It’s amazing that it’s taken the Democrats a decade to figure out something that was obvious back when Trump was steamrolling his way through Jeb (or Jeb!), Ted, Little Marco, and the rest of his hapless Republican primary opponents who stood by thunderstruck waiting for some ref to call foul on the marauder in their midst.
Well, for one Democrat to figure it out, anyway. Newsom, after a sketchy spring when he had some right-wingers on his podcast and used one of those broadcasts to pander to a right-wing talking point on transgender athletes, has raised his stock price these last two weeks by taking the fight to Trump. Pritzker—who has been far less cuddly with MAGA right-wingers and their talking points—will now have a chance to do the same.
This is not going away. The American people believe that Trump probably wants to send the Guard to a number of cities. And now we learn that most of the 2,200 Guard troops in Washington are armed, as of Sunday evening. This was Pete Hegseth’s great idea. That’s exactly what America needs, for a white Guard member from a Trumpy-red state to shoot a Black kid. What are these people thinking?
Crime is still too high in American cities, sure, and anyone who’s a victim of a carjacking or armed robbery doesn’t care about the impressive statistics. But it should not be hard for Democrats to say that and still point out what Trump is really doing here. Where D.C. officials have been making progress after a woeful 2023, Trump is only scaring and dividing people with his lies and his noxious, and completely gratuitous, rhetoric. So come on, Chicago. You’re a city of both Bears and Cubs. Show us your claws.
The post Trump’s Next “Hellhole”: Chicago. Democrats, Get
Ready for a Fight. appeared first on New Republic.
