Speaking in the wake of news coming out that the Trump Administration is at least considering sending National Guard troopers to Chicago to crack down on the city’s massive violent crime problem, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson called on the residents of his city to “rise up” against the president, a seeming call to potential violence that angered many on the right.
As background, the situation began with President Trump, commenting on the situation in DC and where will be targeted next, saying, “To me, D.C. is very exciting and a lot of people say, ‘Whoa, where’s he going from there?’ Well, I have calls from politicians begging me to go to Chicago, begging me to go to New York, begging me to go to Los Angeles.” He added, “Chicago is a mess. You have an incompetent mayor, grossly incompetent, and we’ll straighten that one out probably next.”
Adding to that, he claimed that Chicago’s residents are calling for him to take that momentous step and solve their city’s massive crime problem. He claimed, “That’ll be our next one after this, and it won’t even be tough. And the people in Chicago … are screaming for us to come … so I think Chicago will be our next and then we’ll help with New York.”
Mayor Johnson, responding to the general situation and speaking about what he thinks the appropriate response would be to President Trump taking a federal crackdown approach to crime in the city, said, “The city of Chicago does not need a military-occupied state. That’s not who we are.”
Then, adding to that by praising the far-left mayor of Los Angeles for hre response to the federal crackdown on illegal immigration and related crime in her city, he said, “And I commend the work of Mayor Bass, my colleague and, you know, all the folks in Los Angeles who stood up and fought, you know, against this, you know, authoritarianism. Here’s the bottom line: they don’t have police power. There’s nothing they can do.”
Adding to that, the mayor bizarrely insisted that the National Guard troopers don’t have “police authority” because they are trained differently than the normal police, saying, “You know, these are federal troops. They do not go through the training that our police officers go through. So they cannot even enact police authority.”
Yet more bizarrely, the Chicago mayor insisted that the hugely successful crackdown on crime in DC shows President Trump doesn’t know what he is doing, writing, “But the President has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to what, arrest nine people in DC? You know, that is, clearly he’s demonstrated that he doesn’t have a level of consciousness to understand what it takes to run cities, not to mention an entire country.”
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Then, concluding with his threat of seemingly government-encouraged riots and violence, he said, “And so, you know, look, we’re going to remain firm. We’ll take legal action, but the people of this city are accustomed to rising up against tyranny, and if that’s necessary, I believe that the people of Chicago will stand firm alongside of me as I work every single day to protect the people of this city.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video