By threatening to call in the National Guard to Chicago, the president has picked his target, frozen it, and personalized it.
P eople sometimes ask me if I feel like I miss a step, as a commentator, being located out here in the Midwest — away from “the action” in New York or Washington, D.C. And I say no, because I’ve lived in Chicago for nearly 20 years now and have come to realize that we truly are America’s Second City: All I have to do is sit here, and the nation’s news will always find its way to my front doorstep eventually.
As the New York Times reports:
President Trump said on Friday that he planned to target Chicago and New York for his next federal crackdown on crime, suggesting he was willing to use active-duty troops on city streets.
At an event in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump credited his federal takeover of Washington’s police force and the deployment of the National Guard with cleaning up the city. . . .
Mr. Trump then called Chicago “a mess” and said, “We’ll straighten that one out.”
“Probably next, that will be our next one after this, and it won’t even be tough,” he said, adding, “I think Chicago will be our next and then we’ll help with New York.”
It will be a lot tougher than he thinks. Rick Blaine famously warned Major Strasser that there were certain sections of New York he wouldn’t advise him to try to invade. Chicago is easily worse: There are entire geographical quadrants of our city (south, west, etc.) where our own police largely choose not to go, unless it’s to grudgingly respond to the third call or record a homicide. Good luck, guardsmen!
To be clear, this may all just be Oval Office bloviation from Trump. Lord knows what the man will get up to, especially if some other crisis wends its way down the river to distract him before he’s had the time to task his team with this one. But I’m sure many are already thrilling to the idea of the National Guard being called into Chicago for only the third time in modern history — the first two were the 1968 DNC riots and the 2020 George Floyd meltdown — and patrolling the streets of the Windy City. I am not.
National politics has its own internal logic, which nowadays is only glancingly related to either the law or corporeal reality. Therefore, Trump is contemplating moving on from his temporary (and entirely predictable) publicity success in nationalizing law enforcement in Washington, D.C., to an ostensibly similar idea: doing the same thing here in Chicago, and in (what is soon to be) Zohran Mamdani’s New York City. As a matter of national politics, it is a brilliant play. As a matter of constitutional law, it is objectively objectionable. And as a matter of my own humanity as a resident of Chicago, it is impossible not to feel a bit shabbily used.
But first to the politics of it all. One of the dawning realizations I have had over Trump’s first half-year of his return to office — and which unavoidably surfaces in the context of Chicago — is that in his second term (and despite the immensely rich historical irony at play) Donald Trump has become our first truly unapologetically Alinskyite president, at least in terms of tactics.
I am not kidding about this. Remember Saul Alinsky? I invite readers to carefully peruse all twelve of the Chicago activist’s infamous Rules for Radicals — once the topic of nearly every episode of Glenn Beck’s show during the Obama era — and not tell me that Donald Trump (or, more accurately, his strategic id Stephen Miller) has internalized every one of them. Run down the twelve-point list and you can find resonances. (“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense.”) But in the context of the current mess, it’s the famous final rule that applies most here: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it.”
The target chosen this time — serendipitously, via the random attack by a gang of youths on DOGE employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine — is urban violence. Nobody likes it, either those who, like me, live with it or those who view it vicariously from the safety of their phones and computer monitors. Only repulsive progressive types make excuses. It is frozen largely in blue states already opposed to Trump on a political party level. And it has been devastatingly personalized in the form of America’s most reckless and hapless progressive mayors: Karen Bass, Brandon Johnson, and Zohran Mamdani. (Don’t bother telling me Mamdani hasn’t even won the election yet — he is already mayor of the media’s heart, and both sides are framing their coverage in anticipation of an inevitable November outcome.) So why not strike while the iron is hot?
Well, because it’s illegal and unconstitutional. Take notice of the mission drift (the “sleight of hand,” if you will) at play in this newest development. Trump has called the National Guard into U.S. cities twice now, and each time for different reasons. In Los Angeles, he justified calling in the Guard over Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass’s objections by invoking national emergency powers — citing the anti-ICE protests that were preventing the federal government from executing deportation raids. In Washington, D.C., Trump invoked a very different logic: That was justified by mere criminal mischief. In Washington, though, Trump had the ability to intervene for such “local” reasons only because the District of Columbia is and has always been a ward of the federal government, and he sits at the head of it with a compliant Congress.
Chicago is not, for better or worse, a ward of the federal government. Chicago is Illinois’s problem, not Trump’s. His private will to power cannot overcome the constitutional composition of our republic, which grants police powers to the states as opposed to the federal government. You might think it nice if we lived under a different structure of government, but I myself do not want Donald Trump to act from the Oval Office as if we do.
The fact that Illinois politicians — the worthless likes of Governor JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson — can offer no solution to the problem of violent crime in Chicago is a commonplace of Midwestern politics. We’re in deep trouble, and it has gnawed away at our souls for decades now. (The entire state of Wisconsin refers to people like me as “F.I.B.s” for this reason alone.) And yet it’s our problem to deal with or depart from as we so choose. “Love it or leave it,” they always say — and don’t be surprised if I leave it at some point. Trump, meanwhile, could shred constitutional limits on federal versus state power for mere cosmetic positioning in the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections. It won’t change a thing here. No thanks.
Now, to end on my personal qualms, on why this development irks me in a way Trump’s temporary takeover of Washington did not. Remember: I think it’s a brilliant stroke of national politics — big Democratic cities really are irreparably broken, and holding them up to the spotlight as “What Not to Do” examples of blue-state dysfunction in this way is a genius Alinskyite maneuver. On the downside, I think it’s blatantly unconstitutional as well. (As it turns out, I weight the second criterion more heavily than the first.)
But most of all, I cannot escape feeling used. Donald Trump isn’t likely to get after the real sources of Chicago crime. The kind of crime that got “Big Balls” beaten is almost entirely seasonal here in Chicago (as I suspect it also is in the District) — it comes during summer months from large numbers of bored urban teens roaming the streets. Calling in the Guard, to locations in the Loop or other touristy areas of the city, actually probably would have marginally helped stave off such situations, at least temporarily.
But Washington, D.C., is not Chicago. I mean this not only in the sense that the District is essentially a federally controlled appanage and not properly independent of Congress like Chicago is, but also in the sense that D.C. is the size of a torn postage stamp. Chicago is emphatically not: our “downtown region” here is only slightly smaller than “your entire city.” And our violent crime predominantly happens not in the heart of the city — absent youth razzias or massive civil unrest — but rather on our South and West sides.
Would the Guard be headed there? Without police powers or arrest powers? Of course not. They will be stationed at El stops and on the Magnificent Mile, maybe even in my neighborhood. They won’t (because they cannot and never could) be patrolling the places where Chicago’s crime both originates from and proliferates in. It would all be temporary street theater, and unconstitutional street theater at that. Trump’s point here is not to make my city safe, but rather to get pundits, internet commentators, and cable news journos buzzing about the name “Trump” next to the idea of “law and order.”
Brilliant branding though it is, it remains a branding exercise, no more and no less. And once the time for such branding has passed, JB Pritzker and Brandon Johnson will remain, and we Chicagoans will still have to live here. I well understand that the entire point of Trump’s move is to expose the intractable progressive mulishness of blue-state Democratic politicians — that is why I can still tip my cap to their strategic brilliance despite the insuperable legal objections.
But I still feel cheaply used, a means to an end that serves Donald Trump, and not my city, community, or family in the long run. Nothing will improve here — there will be only retrenchment. The “resistance” will only burn ever brighter in states like Illinois and California and New York (if for no other reason than due to the national pretensions of their politicians), and good people will be caught in the political crossfire.