He the proverbial man without a plan.

I’ve been writing about Brandon Johnson ever since the spring of 2023, when he shocked sane society by winning the Chicago mayoral election against moderate Democrat Paul Vallas, and at this point I’m out of adjectives to describe his incompetence. But I’m resolved to keep trying anyway, because it really is quite impossible to either over-emphasize or fully articulate just how demoralizingly stupid the man running my city is.

The stories of Johnson’s idiocy are so many, so varied, and so improbable that they have taken on an aspect of Paul Bunyanesque folklore. (“Gather round children, and let me tell you a tale from an age when giant failures strode the earth.”) Yes, Brandon Johnson’s name, much like his fellow Illinoisan Abe Lincoln, belongs to the ages now: He’s a legend, but not in a good way. The city of Chicago currently faces a yawning $1.2 billion budget shortfall, driven by Johnson’s spendthrift profligacy, and that arguably ranks as only the fourth biggest mistake he’s made in the last twelve months alone.

But little has made Chicago residents more disgusted with Mayor Johnson than his pathetically helpless, rhetorically vapid response to gun crime and the related seasonal surges in youth violence which have rocked Chicago over the past several post-Covid years. (To be fair, this has always been a low-level issue around here; it is the technological advances of recent years — the newfound ease of coordinating large numbers of people on an iPhone — that have proven the accelerant in spreading the problem.)

When guns are the issue, he blames Indiana and the deep South, even as he removes ShotSpotter technology from high-crime neighborhoods because he believes it to be “structurally racist.” When the subject is gangs of black youths brutally beating tourists in the Loop for fun, he makes excuses for “kids” who just “need more opportunities.” (It’s his go-to line, and it is infuriating.)

Our mayor gets up before the cameras on a semi-regular basis to tell the city’s voters that our decaying safety situation is everybody’s fault except for the people committing the actual crimes. Not everybody’s fault, actually — everybody’s fault except for Brandon Johnson’s. Keep in mind, Brandon Johnson is a man who once found a way to blame Richard Nixon for gun violence during the 2024 July 4 holiday weekend — he is that stubbornly creative in finding ways to avoid admitting responsibility himself.

Which brings us to the present moment. You have likely already heard that Trump is now promising to move on from his National Guard experiment in D.C. policing — which looks to have been precisely as effective as I expected it to be — to even greater triumphs: sending the Guard into Chicago, over the objections of Governor (and undeclared presidential candidate) JB Pritzker and Mayor Johnson. Constitutional objections? Forget it, Trump’s on a roll, who cares about a scrap of paper?

After a Labor Day weekend here in Chicago featuring 54 shootings and seven fatalities, Trump reiterated his intentions yesterday afternoon at a White House press conference, adding, “We’re going in, I didn’t say when.” (If Trump’s public handling of the Fordow strike is anything to go by, this means that APCs will be rolling down Michigan Avenue by Friday afternoon.)

It’s all part of Trump’s blitzkrieg political style, starting national political wars on every possible front. I have very complicated feelings about Trump’s announcement myself, but I covered all of those a week ago, when he first floated this idea. Short version: The Constitution is more than a mere scrap of paper to me, as a conservative; Donald Trump cannot override it, no matter how delightful he thinks the political optics would be. My real suspicion is that if and when a federal intervention comes, ICE raids will be used as a pretext, a constitutional fig leaf. But the problem is that Trump has framed this as a policing matter, and the president of the United States will never have the right to those sorts of local police powers.

But I’m more interested in Brandon Johnson’s helpless response to all of this, precisely because local politics govern here, far removed from the blustering winds of Washington, D.C. I want you see to how pathetic this man is. Click on this link to Johnson’s press avail yesterday, in response to Trump’s threats. Watch the two minute clip of Johnson at the podium. See for yourself, with your own eyes, exactly what kind of blubbering, cow-eyed manchild we are led by in Chicago:

Chicago will continue to have a “violence problem” as long as Red states continue to have a gun problem. The endless flow of illegal guns into Chicago can be traced to Red states like Mississippi, Indiana, and Louisiana. It is up to the federal government to step up and stop interstate gun trafficking networks.

Do you want solutions? Are you looking for constructive approaches? My mayor offers you instead a counsel of despair. Leave aside the patent nonsense of his argument, which focuses exclusively on what every state except Illinois does. (Illinois’s currently hyper-restrictionist gun-control laws might work were Illinois located on an island, and not in the center of the United States; they would then find themselves in the position of the U.K., currently banning kitchen knives.) What Johnson is also saying here is, “I have no answer and never will, things will never get better, and it will never be my fault.” He the proverbial man without a plan, the leader who will never bear responsibility for his city’s fate because the rest of the world is simply too cruel and indifferent to help him out. Brandon Johnson wants you to know that Chicago will never save itself — or at least that it’s beyond his imaginative capacity to fix — so he needs the rest of the country to change instead, to save us from ourselves.

And now you know why he’s so popular here in Chicago.