How Illinois Democrats are pre-emptively combating a Chicago crackdown by Trump

Chicago – The Governor of Illinois JB Pritzker sparked a campaign against federal intervention in his state more than a week ago.

Before immigration agents descend to Chicago and the threat of a deployment of the National Guard is looming, there was Pritzker, showing the city on social networks and in television interviews. An interview Featured him by walking on a sunny path along Lake Michigan, and another made him attend in a restaurant in the district of Little Village in the city. This week, he organized a press conference in front of a chicago river teeming with summer tourists and Trump hotel in the background.

Pritzker and his team established an intentional visual record. Their strategy consisted in storing the national media with images of a typical day in Chicago to show that it was far from being “the worst and the most dangerous city in the world”, as President Donald Trump proclaimed him on his social platform of truth.

“The President’s absurd characterizations do not correspond to what is happening on the field here. He has no idea what he is talking about,” said journalists this week. “There is no emergency that justifies the deployment of troops. He insults the inhabitants of Chicago by calling our house a hell – and whoever takes his word at his nominal value also insults the Chicagoans. ”

Pritzker’s Tack is the last employee by Los Angeles Democrats in Washington, DC, Baltimore Who have become the target of a white house that threatened to send – or already sent – troops of the National Guard to their states.

In Chicago, Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson clearly indicated that the Trump administration had reduced public security funding, in particular by canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in grants, with specific impacts on anti-violence programs in the city, even if he calls for climbing the police. Johnson has also criticized the red states for lax laws which, according to him, allow the flow of firearms in his city.

Johnson presented examples of Chicago working with the alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives office to remove firearms.

“My question is: why did Trump reduced $ 468 million in the ATF budget in his unpleasant signature bill? Why did he reduce the financing of the agency responsible for withdrawing firearms by almost 30%? ” Johnson said at a press conference.

Although crime has broken down in the cities that Trump has targeted, the Democrats have been faced with the unpopular perspective to seem to minimize the problem and reject federal aid. But as the clashes have increased in recent weeks, democratic leaders have refined their messages.

This week, Trump suggested that he could send national guard troops to New Orleans, noting that the Republican Governor of Louisiana would be in conformity. Some Democrats have seen this as a sign that their concentration on Trump only targeting blue states worked.

“You see our governors carrying out and repelling with the right approach,” said Josh Marcus-Blank, a democratic strategist. “None of them says the crime is corrected.”

In the case of Washington, DC, the mayor Muriel Bowser – who does not have jurisdiction about the city in the way a governor is in relation to a state – is committed to a delicate balance of collaboration with the administration of Trump while reassuring a disapproving municipal council that she was not going to this.

Bowser cooperated with the White House when the national guard troops arrived. She recognized that crime had dropped after deployment and noted that she and the city “greatly appreciates the boom of officers”.

Her posture was sometimes considered to be up to the Trump administration, but Bowser clarified in the following remarks that she was trying to find an exit strategy for the occupation of the National Guard.

“Our northern star protects the rule of the house and the autonomy of the district,” she said. “What did not work, in my opinion, was not effective and is not on a mission are the troops of the National Guard, in particular other states.”

DC now challenges the move of the White House before the courts.

The Mike Nellis Democrat Stratège noted that Bowser’s situation stood out from those of other mayors.

“Thank Donald Trump, it’s like thanking Tony Soprano for protection you have never asked for. But she is in a very precarious position,” said Nelis. “Playing and keeping your city safe is the most intelligent decision for itself – Him and the Republican Congress can simply reduce what they want.”

We do not know what Trump’s next decision is given a court decision earlier this week, calling for his deployment of the illegal Los Angeles Navies and the Navies.

“We are entering,” Trump told Chicago journalists, even after Los Angeles’ decision.

This legal struggle was just a way in which California Gavin Newsom has fought the deployment by Trump of the federal police forces in his city since June.

After launching aggressive immigration raids that attracted clashes with the public, Trump said an emergency, deployed the National Guard and the US Marines. Soon, scenes from burning vehicles and looting dominated television coverage.

“If we have not sent the National Guard – Los Angeles would burn now!” Trump insisted for social truth at the time. The clashes took place on approximately five blocks, or 0.01% of the County of Los Angeles.

Newsom participated in his own campaign against Trump, accusing the president of engaging in authoritarianism, of challenging him in court, of publishing photos of members of the national guard sleeping on the ground and of ensuring that the public knew that this was approaching the bill of $ 120 million for deployment.

In a prominent moment, Newsom approached the Californians in a formal discourse that was carried live. He explained how the situation collapsed, citing the immigration raids, the demonstrations that followed and the deployment of the National Guard, whose use of rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades, according to him, only allege everything.

“What is happening right now is very different from everything we have seen before,” said Newsom at the time. “This cheeky abuse of power by an exercise president ignited a fuel situation, putting our people, our officers and the National Guard in danger.”

There were immediate signs of hunger repression. The publications on the social networks of the full speech of Newsom nine minutes have been seen more than 40 million times in less than a week, according to the Governor’s office.

While relying on what is happening in his state, Pritzker sought to portray Trump’s imminent action as excessive, including the president’s assertion that Pritzker should call him and ask that the National Guard is called to Chicago to deal with violence.

“When we have become a country where it is normal for an American president to insist on national television that a state should call him to ask anything? Above all something you don’t want,” said Pritzker this week, referring to a potential deployment of the National Guard as an “invasion”. “Have we really lost all sense of mental health in this nation that we are dealing with this as normal?”

For Pritzker, reality faced its strategy. Just after having recorded an interview with “Face The Nation” from CBS News to Little Village, two people were shot dead in this highly Latin district, one mortally. And during the Labor Day weekend, nearly 60 people were slaughtered in the city, again attracting the types of headlines loaded with violence that the governor and the mayor of Chicago were trying to avoid. Crime, however, is considerably decreasing this year. A Wbez analysis revealed that this summer, Chicago has had the least murders since 1965.