The city of Chicago saw an uptick in violent crime over Labor Day weekend, and, predictably, President Donald Trump is using the news to bolster his threats to deploy National Guard troops to the Windy City, despite the fact that crime is down in Chicago overall.
According to Newsweek, 52 shootings happened throughout the city over the three-day weekend, resulting in seven fatalities. Last year, during Labor Day weekend, five people died and another 31 people were injured in shooting incidents. Trump, as usual, reported inaccurate numbers — confusing the number of shootings with the number of shooting victims, and still being off by two — and just plain lied about the present state of general crime in the city.
“At least 54 people were shot in Chicago over the weekend, [eight] people were killed,” Trump wrote Tuesday on his social media platform Truth Social. “The last two weekends were similar. Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the world, by far.” (Trump pulled that line about the “last two weekends” being “similar” completely out of his rust-tinted hind parts while presenting no statistical evidence that it’s true.)
If only data and reality didn’t keep getting in the way of Trump’s propaganda.
From Newsweek:
However, fatalities were down this year compared to gun-related in deaths in 2023, where ten people were killed, and in 2022 where eight deaths were reported, according to the Chicago Sun Times. Another 56 were injured in shooting incidents in 2022 while 34 were hurt in 2023, according to local reports.
So, Chicago had a violent weekend, including several mass shootings that reportedly occurred, but that doesn’t change the fact that violent crime is down in Chicago by 21.6 percent, according to new year-to-date crime statistics released by Mayor Brandon Johnson, who, along with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, has said repeatedly that the city neither wants nor needs Trump to weaponize the National Guard against it under the guise of cracking down on crime, as the president has also threatened to do in Baltimore, NYC, San Francisco and other democratic cities where crime is on the decline. (And Trump made those threats while all but admitting he’s a wannabe dictator.)
“We may see militarized immigration enforcement,” Johnson said in a statement Monday of Trump’s threats. “We may also see National Guard troops. We may even see active duty military and armed vehicles in our streets. We have not called for this. Our people have not asked for this, but nevertheless, we find ourselves having to respond to this.”
Besides the fact that Trump is, as usual, lying about crime being on the rise, dismissing crime data that indicates the opposite is true, he’s also, once again, planning to deploy troops into cities without even bothering to consult the city’s leaders, which Pritzker pointed out in a statement of his own at a press conference last week.
“If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor, or the police?” the governor asked rhetorically.
It’s worth mentioning that, on Tuesday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the Trump administration broke the law when it deployed military troops into the streets of Los Angeles to help out with ICE raids, and barred the DHS from doing so again anywhere in Southern California.
It’s almost as if nobody wants Trump to behave like a dictator except Trump, his administration and millions of Republicans who once claimed they were against tyrannical governments.
Go figure.
