The president sat in the Oval Office Friday, praising the National Guard. In mid-August he deployed the DC guard to Washington, where they patrol the National Mall, keeping a careful eye on tourists — what tourists there are, considering visitors to the U.S. are down by 22%, a loss of $12.5 billion, thanks to America’s performative hostility to foreigners.
Fresh from that triumph, he said that Chicago is next.
Why us? Why are we so fortunate?
“The people in Chicago …” the president said, “are screaming for us to come.”
They are? Did I miss that? Who in Chicago, exactly, is screaming?
The president gave hints. Chicagoans who “are wearing red hats, just like this one.”
He himself was wearing a jumbo baseball cap emblazoned “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!” Part of his new line of Trump merchandise that includes “Trump 2028′ and “4 More Years” hats. There are photographs.
“They are wearing red hats,” the president continued. “African American ladies, beautiful ladies, are saying, ‘Please, President Trump, come to Chicago, please.”
They are? I was about to laugh this off as mere mendacity. But for all the slander directed at the media, we still do that truthy-facty thing. Before I could ridicule the notion of Black Chicago women begging for troops to frisk them at bus stops, I had to go looking.
I quickly found Danielle Carter-Walters, a personal fitness trainer. She indeed has been pleading for precisely this.
“We knew he had been listening to us,” said Carter-Walters, a co-founder of Chicago Flips Red, a local group of Trump supporters. “When I saw it, I said, ‘Oh wow.’ We’ve been asking for it in our videos. Now he’s doing it.”
So, I asked: She sincerely believes Chicago will benefit from the National Guard patrolling its streets?
“Yes, I do,” said Carter-Walters, who lives in Marquette Park. “Our communities are out of control. The destruction. The devastation of what’s happening. We are being displaced out of our homes by illegal aliens. I stay on the South Side of Chicago. I’m living the experience. You can’t sit in your car without worrying about being robbed, mugged, shot, carjacked. We definitely need something to be done.”
She said her group has only eight members, but more are out there.
“There’s a lot of us, thousands, silently supporting us,” she said. “People think that Black women can’t be MAGA. People are starting to see there’s a lot of us.”
I did not start writing today’s column intending to platform a Trump fan. But the story led me there.
Bottom line: The soldiers are coming. Our news story Saturday referred to the president’s “efforts to crack down on crime.” I believe that is a mischaracterization of what’s happening. The president says he is cracking down on crime, just as he says the immigrants being snatched off the street are criminals.
But is the president targeting immigrants and Chicago because of his concern about crime? Or is he tarring those he wants to harass as criminals?
Chicago is not a particularly violent city. It’s not even listed on the most recent U.S. News list of the 25 most dangerous places in the United States. But the National Guard is not being called out to Birmingham or Little Rock, two red cities on the list.
This is not about fighting crime. It is a display of power. Democratic cities, like prestigious universities, are centers of resistance and protest, and thus must be broken.
We already live in a country where masked police snatch people off the street with no legal authority and dispatch them to secret prisons. Now we will be a country where fake emergencies are cited to send the military into city streets.
While I had Carter-Walters on the phone, I asked her to explain the appeal of Donald Trump to someone who might not see it.
“Trump is a person that means what he says,” she replied. “He’s unapologetic for it. He loves America and he loves the people, so he’s listening to what the people want and doesn’t care how he has to do it to get America back.”
That is true. He certainly doesn’t care what means he uses to achieve his ends — violate the Constitution, erode free speech, skew the education system, subvert voting rights. All on the table.
“Liberal Democrats are going to paint him out to be Satan,” she said. “But he’s going to take all those darts. We’re standing in the front line. In the end, we know what what’s best for the people.”
I don’t view the president as Satan. I don’t hate him or even particularly blame him anymore. He’s only doing what we’re letting him get away with.