President Trump doubled down on his vision to make Chicago the next city his administration’s targets as it attempts to use crime as a cover for occupying and exerting control over the Democratic elected officials of blue cities and states around the nation.
On Friday Trump hinted that the country’s third largest city was next on his agenda for a military-style occupation like the ones he’s carried out in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., calling Chicago “a mess.” During comments to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump reiterated his baseless denigration of the city, calling it a “disaster” and “a killing field.”
“We go in, we will solve Chicago within one week, maybe less,” Trump told reporters Monday morning. “But within one week we’ll have no crime in Chicago, like no crime in D.C.”
“We may go in and do it,” he said.
As has been obvious since the moment he sent National Guard troops into D.C. to do things like patrol tourists on the National Mall, Trump is using decades-old right-wing propaganda — focused on fear mongering around the country’s supposedly lawless urban hellscapes — to justify bringing the military in to Democrat-run cities. It’s become an opportunity for Trump to flex power despite the objections of elected-Democrats and a vehicle he can use to carry out his retribution. As my colleague Josh Marshall noted today, it’s an action that allows him to “deprive those states and localities of their liberty and right to self-government. Because he wants that power for himself.”
After Trump first floated the possibility of sending guardsmen into Chicago next, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker described the political stunt in similar terms: as “an authoritarian power grab of major cities.” Trump responded by calling Pritzker “corrupt” and “a slob.”
He then signed an executive order that will, in theory, make his vision of occupying more and more blue cities even easier. In the order, he tasks Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with creating a quick reaction force within the National Guard “that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment.”
Speaking of Hegseth
Speaking to reporters again in the Oval Office Monday, Trump also foreshadowed he and the Defense Secretary’s plans to macho up the Department of Defense with a name change back to what it was before World War II.
“We won World War I, World War II, it was called the Department of War. And to me, that’s really what it is,” Trump told reporters as he sat alongside South Korean President Lee Jae Myung Monday. “Everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War. Then we changed it to Department of Defense.”
Reverting the name might not be as simple of a process as Trump envisions, but when has that ever stopped him. Per Politico:
The president suggested the rebranding was imminent. But the Pentagon would likely need any name change approved by Congress since the department was established by a decades-old law.