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Trump’s “War on Chicago” Is Political Retribution Masquerading as Crime Prevention [1]
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Date: 2025-09-07
By targeting Democratic cities with federal force, Trump is reviving the oldest authoritarian playbook: using fear to weaken opponents and consolidate power.
A Dangerous Spectacle
Donald Trump has long thrived on political theater, but his latest declaration that Chicago is a “war zone” requiring the intervention of his newly branded “Department of WAR” is not just one of his latest social media meltdowns. It is a dangerous escalation. The plan to deploy federal troops into Illinois, over the objections of Governor JB Pritzker, is not a strategy to reduce crime. It is a spectacle of retribution, aimed squarely at Democratic governors and mayors who have stood against him.
To understand this moment, we must cut through the rhetoric and look at the facts: Chicago’s crime rate has been declining, and cities in red states consistently post higher homicide rates than the Democratic strongholds Trump demonizes. This is not about law and order. It is about punishing political opposition.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Sources: FBI Uniform Crime Reports, The Guardian (2025), Axios (2025), White House (2025). (I tried to find as many verifiable sources as possible. Different sources gave slightly different numbers)
Chicago recorded a homicide rate of 17.5 per 100,000 residents in 2024, according to FBI data. The figure is serious, but far lower than Jackson, Mississippi (78.7), Birmingham, Alabama (58.8), or St. Louis, Missouri (54.1). All three are located in Republican-controlled states.
Overall, red states had an average homicide rate of 12.9 per 100,000 in 2023, compared to 7.8 in blue states. Put bluntly, Republican-led states are more violent on average than Democratic ones.
If the goal were truly to address violent crime, Trump would have trained his attention on states where the crisis is worse. Instead, he points to Chicago, a city whose crime rates are improving, to justify a military-style show of force.
Even within Illinois, the city of Rockford had a higher homicide rate than Chicago in recent years. Yet Trump has not threatened to send troops to Rockford. Nor has he targeted Memphis, New Orleans, or Tulsa, despite their higher per capita violence. The selective outrage betrays the truth: his fixation is political, not statistical.
A Historical Playbook
Trump’s “war on cities” is not unprecedented. In the late 1960s, Richard Nixon pioneered the “law and order” campaign, exploiting public fears of unrest to woo suburban and Southern voters. George H.W. Bush’s infamous Willie Horton ad in 1988 cast Democrats as weak on crime.
But what Trump is doing goes much further. Unlike Nixon or Bush, he is not content with rhetoric alone. He is deploying federal power into cities without consent, as he did in Portland in 2020, where federal agents in unmarked vans detained protesters. Judges ruled those actions unconstitutional.
Governors like Pritzker have called Trump’s plan “illegal and authoritarian,” warning that it violates state sovereignty. They are right. When the federal government overrides locally accountable leadership to settle political scores, democracy itself is at risk.
Authoritarian leaders abroad have used the same playbook. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro invoked crime to justify military policing of favelas. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán used fears of violence to expand state surveillance. Trump’s threats to Chicago echo these strategies: amplify fear, delegitimize opponents, and present yourself as the sole source of order.
Revenge Politics in Action
Trump’s targets reveal the true motivation. He has singled out California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’s JB Pritzker, and Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson, all of whom are Democrats and vocal critics. These leaders represent policies Trump despises: abortion access, immigrant protections & “sanctuary cities”, and environmental regulation.
By labeling their cities “lawless,” he reframes their leadership as illegitimate. It is a strategy of punishment. Los Angeles was subjected to federal deployments earlier this year despite crime levels below the national average. Washington, D.C., was threatened with military occupation after peaceful protests. Now Chicago, a city that rejected Trump by overwhelming margins in 2020 and 2024, is the latest target of his vengeance.
Human Costs
We have seen this before. In Portland in 2020, unmarked federal agents clashed with protesters, leaving behind images of tear gas clouds and chaos. In Los Angeles, residents described feeling as though they were “living in a war zone” — not safer. In Kenosha, federal and paramilitary interventions deepened distrust between law enforcement and residents already reeling from police violence.
For Chicago residents, especially those in vulnerable communities, militarized interventions mean heightened fear and distrust. Neighborhoods already grappling with structural poverty and systemic racism are unlikely to benefit from armored vehicles and federal troops on their streets. What they need are investments in housing, education, and violence prevention programs instead of political theater. These neighborhoods need resources, not rifles. They need mental health clinics, not Humvees.
A Constitutional Line is Drawn
The Posse Comitatus Act has long limited the use of the military in domestic law enforcement. National Guard deployments typically require cooperation with governors. By threatening to override Pritzker’s authority, Trump is testing constitutional limits. If allowed to stand, such actions would normalize federal interventions against political opponents a hallmark of authoritarian governance.
This is why Pritzker called Trump’s plan “illegal and un-American.” It is not only a fight about crime policy. It is about whether a president can wield troops as a weapon of partisan revenge.
What makes Trump’s “war on Chicago” even more alarming is his willingness to disregard judicial authority. A federal judge has already ruled his earlier deployments to Los Angeles unlawful, yet he now threatens to repeat the very same actions in Chicago. This pattern is not new. As president, Trump routinely ignored or defied court rulings on immigration, including attempts to block asylum seekers and restrict entry based on nationality. Each time Trump openly disobeys the orders of a federal judge, the foundation of checks and balances weakens. A system put in place to specifically prevent one branch, or one person, from having too much power. When the executive branch treats the courts as obstacles whose decisions are “optional”, the country moves closer to the rule of a dictator, not the rule of law or our constitution. That is the hallmark of authoritarianism, and it poses a grave threat to American democracy.
Democracy Requires Us to Fight Back!
Democracy demands that we resist this framing. Chicago does not need a “war.” It needs federal investment in housing, jobs, and education. It needs collaboration, not occupation. Most of all, it needs leaders who recognize that public safety cannot be built on fear and retribution.
Trump’s “war on Chicago” is not a war on crime. It is a war on his political enemies, disguised as policy. The real danger is not the violence on Chicago’s streets; the danger is a presidency that seeks to rule not by law, but by punishment. And if we continue to let him get away with it, we are letting one man overthrow over 200 years of American democracy. This is no longer political theater; the show is real, and it has real consequences.
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[1] Url:
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