This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 26 episode of “Deadline: White House.”
On Monday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker fired back at Donald Trump after the president threatened to expand his federal takeover and send National Guard troops into Chicago, which he referred to as a “killing field.”
I urge people to read the transcript or watch the video of Pritzker’s speech, because frankly, that is the way it’s done.
Pritzker didn’t dismiss concerns about crime in the city. “Not one person here today will claim we have solved all crime in Chicago, nor can that be said of any major American metro area,” he said. Instead, the governor turned those concerns on Trump, listing the ways the president and his fellow Republicans have made Chicago less safe for its residents:
If Donald Trump was actually serious about fighting crime in cities like Chicago, he, along with his congressional Republicans, would not be cutting over $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants nationally, including cutting $158 million in funding to Illinois for violence prevention programs that deploy trained outreach workers to de-escalate conflict on our streets; cutting $71 million in law enforcement grants to Illinois, direct money for police departments through programs like Project Safe Neighborhoods, the State and Local Antiterrorism Training Program, and the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative; cutting $137 million in child protection measures in Illinois that protect our kids against abuse and neglect.
Pritzker put it succinctly: “Trump is defunding the police.”
Not only is that true, it’s great messaging — and Democrats should follow the governor’s lead. Democrats must make it clear to the American people that they take crime very seriously. But they also have to show voters what’s happening in Chicago and that what will likely happen in other Democratic-run cities across the country isn’t really about crime. It’s about the performative retribution of Trump — it’s about politics.
This is a president who is acting as if he has no limits. He is destroying constitutional guardrails and violating the norms of democracy almost daily. The question now is: How much damage can he do before he’s stopped?
One of the major problems that we’ve faced in dealing with Trump has been a failure of imagination. How far would he go? How bad could it get? What would he do with the unchecked powers of the presidency?
In real time, we are seeing what he is capable of doing. We’re seeing it play out in Washington, D.C., and we may soon see it in Chicago. Trump is giving us a brutal reality check about how fragile our constitutional republic really is.
Which brings me to another important line from Pritzker’s speech: “If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”
We must understand the magnitude of the moment. All of this may feel like some sort of dystopian nightmare, but it is literally the times that we are living in, and every American must open their eyes and see what’s happening.
