President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to send active-duty military personnel into America’s third-largest city to quell what he described as out-of-control crime at the hands of a liberal mayor and Democratic-run city and state governments.
Speaking in the Oval Office during a question-and-answer session with reporters alongside FIFA president Gianni Infantino, Trump was boasting of positive crime numbers in the District of Columbia since he seized control of the capital’s police department earlier this month.
He claimed the national guard soldiers tasked with patrolling some of Washington had been doing an “incredible job working with the police” and said his solution for the capital — uniformed soldiers and roving patrols of federal agents who have largely been conducting immigration arrests of delivery drivers according to government statistics — would soon be sent to “another location” to “make it safe.”
“We’re going to make our cities very, very safe. Chicago is a mess. You have an incompetent mayor, grossly incompetent, and we’ll straighten that one out, probably next that’ll be our next one after this, and it won’t even be tough,” Trump said.
He then claimed that the Windy City’s Black population, including “African American ladies, beautiful ladies,” were “screaming” for him to “please” come to Chicago.
“So I think Chicago will be our next and then we’ll help with New York,” he said.
The president also threatened to “bring in the regular military” for law enforcement purposes — an action that would be illegal under the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law limiting the military’s ability to conduct civilian law enforcement or enforce domestic policy in the United States.
The law was enacted in response to the occupation of former confederate states after the American Civil War during the Reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877.
Although each state has a National Guard that can be employed for law enforcement in emergency situations at the behest of a state’s governor, National Guard soldiers can’t be used for law enforcement if commanded by federal authorities.
Asked whether he’d spoken with Brandon Johnson, the Democratic politician who is the incumbent Chicago mayor, Trump said he hadn’t done so. But he vowed to press on with his plan nonetheless.
“Now, when we’re ready, we’ll go in and we’ll straighten out Chicago, just like we did DC. Chicago is very dangerous,” he said.
