Chicago responds to Trump threat of attack

It’s way too easy to point out the ironies here — that in the actual late 1960s, a cowardly Trump was claiming bone spurs on his feet as an excuse not to fight in Vietnam, or that Apocalypse Now was a deep dive into the utter insanity of war, not a celebration of military might. But the president of the United States making a martial threat against a large city led by the opposition political party must be taken both literally and seriously.

The implications of Trump’s Saturday morning threat against Chicago are almost beyond belief: That a city that was once the epitome of American economic hustle and might at the peak of the Industrial Revolution is now considered hostile territory by the U.S. government, dehumanizing its citizens as the enemy.

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The White House’s Chicago maneuvers are right on the fulcrum between hype and reality, and what plays out in the flat, sprawling metropolis over the coming days and weeks is likely to determine just how far Trump can take his experiment in American dictatorship.

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We’ve seen our biggest institutions — Congress, the Supreme Court, university presidents, white-shoe law firms, and Big Media — cower and kowtow to a man who would be king, but Illinois’ top Democrats have so far given a master class in what high-level resistance is supposed to look like.

That’s especially true of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

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Pritzker’s boldness has been reinforced by Chicago’s progressive mayor, Brandon Johnson — who issued an executive order that federal agents within the city must wear badges but not masks, and deploy body cameras, while largely barring his own cops from cooperating with ICE — and Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who raised a clenched fist at a Chicago protest against the ICE presence.

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While it’s fascinating to imagine the prospect of Pritzker dispatching an endless convoy of Illinois state troopers — ripped from the climax of The Blues Brothers — to Cairo to blockade the Texas National Guard, it’s unlikely we’ll see the first battle of Civil War II. At least not yet.

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[I] t’s not hard to imagine that even a Republican-appointed judge might strike down either the federalizing of troops without any emergency — with crime, the supposed pretext, falling dramatically in Chicago — or the wildly unconstitutional notion of Guard members invading from another state such as Texas. Yet the regime has also shown an ability to delay or even defy court orders in its first eight months, making it unclear if the judiciary can truly save Chicago.

But what Pritzker and his allies have actually accomplished is something arguably more powerful. They have sent the message to everyday Chicago residents that acquiescence to authoritarianism is not an option, and that someone will have their back if and when they resist.

Just hours after Trump’s warlike threat, incredible scenes took place across Chicago. Thousands of Latinos and their allies turned out for Mexican Independence Day parades, and ICE — thanks, perhaps, to Pritzker’s advance warning — did not show up to disrupt the day. With the September sun setting behind the city’s towering skyscrapers, thousands more came downtown for a massive protest march against ICE’s presence.

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Despite our well-documented flaws, a passion for democracy still burns brightly for millions of Americans that can’t easily be extinguished. Nowhere is that more true than in a city of light called Chicago. If Trump’s “Department of War” is serious about staging its first battle on the shores of Lake Michigan, it picked the wrong fight.

  Philadelphia Inquirer

Link courtesy Will Bunch