Our mayor knows that whatever financial shortfalls and challenges his administration may face, it’s reliably someone else’s fault.

It has been a while since I’ve updated readers on the state of Brandon Johnson’s mayoral misadventures in the city of Chicago, and not really for lack of news to report so much as lack of will to report that nothing has really improved at all around here except for the weather. (It’s a lovely, albeit erratic, spring so far in the Windy City.)

In December, Brandon Johnson pressured a reluctant city council to approve his $17.1 billion budget, which includes $165 million in tax hikes for the city. Johnson had sought property tax increases as well — after running his 2023 campaign on the promise not to raise them, mind you — and complained bitterly that the budget had “not gone far enough.” (Meanwhile, Johnson handed the store away to his true masters, the Chicago Teachers Union, in a new union contract tentatively approved earlier this week by 85 percent of members.)

Now he’s back to reveal that — oops! — the city has a massive $1 billion budget gap that just sort of came out of nowhere. “Our city is truly at a crossroads right now,” Johnson said on Monday. “We essentially need to do more with less.” Well then.

I guess that’ll happen in the world of Chicago government accounting, but our mayor — last seen sporting an impressively historic 6 percent approval rating and utterly doomed in his hopes for reelection in 2027 — is obviously in a pretty bad mood these days, and he’s looking for someone to blame.

The last time this happened, Brandon Johnson got fairly creative in deciding whom to blame for Chicago’s woes. You might have expected Trump, or his predecessor Lori Lightfoot, or “institutional racism,” but as it turns out, Johnson understood that Democrats had to fight the real enemy: Richard Milhous Nixon. Facing the humiliating budget shortfall after years of financial mismanagement, on Tuesday Johnson was even more inventive in his choice of a malefactor to blame: former mayor Rahm Emanuel (last in office in early 2019).

“The playbook that Donald Trump is running is the playbook Rahm Emanuel executed in the city,” Johnson said. “We didn’t get here because we just happened to have a tyrant in the White House. We got here because someone gave him the script. Shutting of schools, the firing of Black women, the privatizing of our public education system is why the system is as jacked up as it is today.”

The year Rahm Emanuel took office, 2011, was also the year Johnson, then a Chicago Public Schools teacher, became an organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union.

In 2012, Johnson helped organize a massive teachers’ strike. In 2013, Mayor Emanuel closed 53 CPS schools — mainly on the South and West sides.

I included those last two lines from the news story because it saves me an enormous amount of time in explaining the real dynamic here, for those unfamiliar with Brandon Johnson’s political origins and motivations The twin formative crucibles of Brandon Johnson’s political worldview have demonstrably been his work lobbying for the CTU during the ’10s and his Black Lives Matters activist turn in the wake of the George Floyd riots. In both lines of work he fine-tuned his instincts as a spendthrift eager for scapegoats.

Rahm Emanuel is an easy enough target for a man like Johnson, and not merely because he organized a labor strike against Emanuel. It is because, even though absence tends to make the heart grow fonder, Emanuel is still an immensely controversial figure in Chicago. By remarkable chance, the first piece I ever wrote for National Review as a freelance essay nearly a decade ago was a story about the Laquan McDonald shooting and cover-up that destroyed Rahm Emanuel’s second mayoral term almost immediately after he had won reelection and laid the groundwork for two successive failed mayorships. Emanuel left office wildly unpopular, and it’s equally important to realize that he was already toxically unpopular — so much so that when he won his reelection against a joke candidate (Chuy Garcia) it was, until then, at least, the tensest race in Chicago mayoral history. No race had been forced into a runoff since the new system was installed in 1999. (Tellingly, the next two races in 2019 and 2023 would be even narrower.)

Emanuel is not the answer, and Johnson singles him out for particular disdain because he remains easy enough to villainize: The man had his chance, and the only person interested in Rahm Emanuel’s return to Chicago politics is Rahm Emanuel. Our bumbling fool of a mayor, however, knows that whatever financial shortfalls and challenges his administration may face, it’s reliably someone else’s fault — whether the damage was done half a decade or half a century ago.