Chicago – The governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, launched a campaign against federal intervention in his state more than a week ago.
Before immigration agents descended to Chicago and the threat of a deployment of the National Guard, there was Pritzker, which showed the city on social networks and in television interviews. An interview He presented him walking along a path illuminated by the sun along Lake Michigan, and another had sitting in a restaurant in the small neighborhood of the city town. This week, he organized a press conference in front of a Chicago River full of summer tourists and the prominent Trump hotel in the background.
Pritzker and his team were presenting an intentional visual record. Its strategy was to store national media with images of a typical day in Chicago to demonstrate that it was far from being the “worst and most dangerous city in the world”, such as President Donald Trump has proclaimed on his real social platform.
“The president’s absurd characterizations do not match what is happening in the field here. He has no idea what he is talking about,” Pritzker told journalists this week. “There is no emergence to guarantee the deployment of troops. Insulting the people of Chicago calling our house a hell, and anyone who takes their word to the letter also insults the Chicago.”
Pritzker’s tactics is the last employee by Los Angeles Democratic leaders to Washington, DC, Baltimore Those who have become the goal of a White House that has threatened to send, or has already sent, national guard troops to their states.
In Chicago, Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson have made it clear that the Trump administration cut the public security funds, including the cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies, with specific impacts on anti-violence programs in the city, even when it asks that the ladder of the law. Johnson also criticized the red states by the lax laws that, according to him, allows the flow of weapons to his city.
Johnson presented Chicago examples working with the alcohol, tobacco office, firearms and explosives to get weapons from the streets.
“My question is: Why did Trump reduce $ 468 million from the ATF budget in his unpleasant signature bill? Why did he reduce the funds for the agency responsible for getting the weapons out of our streets by almost 30%?” Johnson said at a press conference.
Although the crime has fallen into the cities that Trump has attacked, the Democrats have faced the unpopular perspective to seem to minimize the problem and reject federal assistance. But as clashes have intensified in recent weeks, democratic leaders have adjusted their messages.
This week, Trump suggested that he could send National Guard troops to New Orleans, noting that Louisiana Republican governor would comply. Some Democrats saw that as a sign that their Trump approach only aimed at the blue states was working.
“You see our governors leading and going back with the right approach,” said Josh Marcus-Blank, a Democratic strategist. “None of them says that the crime is fixed.”
In the case of Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has no jurisdiction over the city in the way a governor does so on a state, has dedicated himself to a delicate act of balance of collaborating with the Trump administration while reassuring a town hall that disapproves that he had not stayed with him.
Bowser cooperated with the White House when the National Guard troops arrived. She acknowledged that the crime fell after the deployment and pointed out that she and the city “greatly appreciate the increase in officers.”
Sometimes his position was seen as Sidling towards the Trump administration, but Bowser clarified in subsequent comments that he was trying to find an exit strategy for the occupation of the National Guard.
“Our North Star is protecting the home rule and district autonomy,” he said. “What has not worked, in my opinion, and has not been efficient and is not in the mission, the troops of the National Guard, especially of other states.”
DC is now challenging the Moving of the White House on the courts.
Democratic strategist Mike Nellis said Bowser’s situation stood out from those of other mayors.
“To thank Donald Trump is like thanking Tony Soprano for his protection he never asked. But he is in a very precarious position,” Nellis said. “Playing and keeping your city safe is the most intelligent movement for it: he and the Republican Congress can reduce what they want.”
It is not clear what the next Trump movement is, given a judicial decision earlier this week calling its deployment of the National Guard and the Marines in illegal angels.
“We are going to enter,” Trump told Chicago journalists, even after the ruling in Los Angeles.
That legal fight was only a way in which the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has combined Trump deployment of the Federal Police in his city since June.
After launching aggressive immigration incursions that brought clashes with the public, Trump declared an emergency, deploying the National Guard and the Marines of the United States. Soon, burnt vehicle scenes and dominated television coverage looting.
“If we didn’t send the National Guard, Los Angeles would be burning right now!” Trump insisted on Truth Social at that time. The clashes occurred in approximately five blocks, or 0.01% of Los Angeles County.
Newsom made his own campaign against Trump, accusing the president of participating in authoritarianism, challenging him in the Court, publishing photos of members of the National Guard that sleep on the floor and ensuring that the public knew he was paying the bill of $ 120 million for deployment.
At an outstanding moment, Newsom addressed the Californians in a formal speech that was taken live. He exposed how the situation collapsed, citing immigration raids, the protests that followed and the deployment of the National Guard, whose use of rubber bullets and flash-base grenades, said he only served to intensify everything.
“What is happening at this time is very different from anything we have seen before,” said Newsom at that time. “This shameless abuse of power by a acting president inflamed a fuel situation, putting our people at risk, our officers and the National Guard.”
There were immediate signs of a hunger for the recoil. According to the governor’s office, publications on social networks of the full nine -minute discourse of Newsom were seen in less than a week, according to the governor’s office.
While preparing for what follows in his state, Pritzker has tried to portray Trump’s imminent action as overreach, including the president’s statement that Pritzker should call him and ask that the National Guard be called to Chicago to take care of violence.
“When do we become a country where a president of the United States insisted on national television that a state should call it to pray for something? Especially something that does not want,” said Pritzker this week, referring to a possible deployment of the National Guard as an “invasion.” “Have we really lost any sense of sanity in this nation that we treat this as usual?”
For Pritzker, reality has faced its strategy. Just after recording an interview with “Face the Nation” of CBS News in Little Village, two people were shot in that strongly Latin neighborhood, one fatally. And during the weekend of Labor Day, almost 60 people were shot in the city, again attracting the types of holders loaded with violence that the governor and the mayor of Chicago were trying to avoid. However, crime was significantly reduced this year. A Wbez analysis found that this summer, Chicago had the least amount of murders since 1965.
“I do not want to hear another damn word of any of them that is fine, that we can handle this on our own,” said the member of the City Council of Chicago, Raymond López, about Pritzker and Johnson. “Because what I am listening to from them is that they have an acceptable loss of lives that is expected of the Chicago with whom I do not agree.”
Brian Hopkins, who directs the Public Security Panel of the City of Chicago, said the city would prosper with an impulse in federal resources and the agency’s coordination. But he said that sending the National Guard troops would not succeed.
“It should be obvious to anyone involved that their true intentions are not to help us, but ashamed. They must write down political points to our coast, and they are using the tools of application of the law as a pawn in their game,” said Hopkins. “It is despicable, offensive and unconstitutional and incorrect.”
