Telegraph – The US president surely has both the legal right and a good reason to intervene in the Windy City.
“Chicago is the murder capital of the world,” Donald Trump declared on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday. Over the Labor Day holiday weekend alone, 58 people were shot in the city – eight of them fatally – in 37 separate incidents. Those grim statistics contribute to the total of 278 murders in the Windy City so far this year.
According to the Chicago’s mayor’s office, that should be counted as some sort of success. Yes, it’s a reduction on 2024’s even bloodier homicide figure, but it remains high enough to put the city on track to be one of the most dangerous in the United States for yet another year. Crime rates in other categories also remain high in Chicago. Motor vehicle theft rates, for example, are almost double what they were in 2019.
Ever since Trump announced his plan to federalise law enforcement in Washington last month – a highly successful measure that, as of Thursday, had resulted in 1,841 arrests and the removal of much urban blight – Chicago has been in the president’s sights. Even before he took over Washington’s police and sent in federal law enforcement and the National Guard, he had repeatedly singled out Chicago as his next target for supplemental policing measures.
This week, however, he intensified the pressure. On Saturday, before the appalling weekend statistics were released, Trump warned JB Pritzker, Illinois’s Democratic Governor, that he had better “straighten it out, FAST, or we’re coming!”
“[He] needs help badly”, Trump said of Pritzker in a post on Tuesday, adding: “He just doesn’t know it yet. I will solve the crime problem fast, just like I did in DC.” Later on Tuesday, speaking in the Oval Office, Trump confirmed “we’re going in” to Chicago, which he called a “hellhole”.
Pritzker and Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s Democratic mayor, have predictably denounced Trump’s plan in hyperbolic terms. Pritzker has called it “unprecedented and unwarranted”, “illegal”, “unconstitutional” and “un-American”. Johnson, for his part, promised “immediate, drastic action to protect our people from federal overreach” and last week issued executive orders effectively calling for legal resistance to the Trump administration and non-cooperation between city authorities and federal agencies.
It’s true that Trump’s law enforcement surge in Washington has been controversial, with critics curiously claiming that it is both an ineffective media stunt and a dangerous authoritarian threat to democracy. Yet there has been little question of its legality. The District of Columbia has a special legal and constitutional status that provides for greater executive authority than anywhere else in America. Muriel Bowser, Washington’s Democrat mayor, has even signed an order formalising cooperation with federal forces.
Nevertheless, some argue that transferring the same methods to other cities could be problematic. On Tuesday, a Democrat-appointed federal judge coincidentally ruled that Trump’s June 2025 deployment of National Guardsmen and US Marines to address civic unrest in Los Angeles was illegal. That ruling, however, came nearly three months after the fact and will not take effect until Sept 12, to accommodate the appeals process.
The judge, moreover, shakily based his ruling on a 19th century law originally intended to prevent the federal government from using military force to counter segregation laws imposed by southern states. Congress could authorise further domestic military action that would preempt his ruling, an eventuality that is certainly possible given Republican control of both Houses. If he wished, Trump could even invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which authorises the president to deploy federal forces on his own initiative if local conditions obstruct federal law enforcement or constitutional provisions.
In other words, Trump surely has ample legal means to address Chicago’s crime issue. More importantly, he has every reason to do so. It’s a disastrous city where hundreds of citizens are killed every year while many more are terrorised by violence. The American Left will caterwaul in its increasingly strange and unpopular determination to protect violent criminals and illegal immigrants but, in a great example to the world, Donald Trump is moving to make America’s cities great again.