Former Chicago mayor and Barack Obama White House chief of staff/hatchet man Rahm Emanuel is probably running for president in 2028. I was as shocked as you to discover that this was A Thing™, but in a race where California Gov. Gavin Newsom is the putative frontrunner, falling upwards is definitely a real phenomenon.
What’s more amazing about this is that Emanuel — again, the former mayor of arguably America’s most dysfunctional major city and the guy who basically helped set the course for Obama’s first term as president — is running as the candidate of sanity, which tells you precisely where the party has gone since Emanuel left his last elected office in May of 2019, handing the Windy City over to Lori Lightfoot.
For instance, on transgender policy: “Stop talking about bathrooms and locker rooms and start talking about the classroom,” Emanuel told Politico in June. “If one child is trying to figure out their pronoun, I accept that, but the rest of the class doesn’t know what a pronoun is and can’t even define it.”
Now, forget about the fact that 15 years ago, any politician talking about a child “trying to figure out their pronoun” would be institutionalized, not hailed as a pragmatic choice to lead the Democratic Party away from woke ideology. Alas, bienvenidos a 2025, where pronouns in bio are still a thing for some lefties, and where Chicago’s politicians really think they have crime under control and don’t want President Donald Trump to send the National Guard into the murder capital of the Midwest.
Emanuel, again trying to venture into the arena of reality, has a different message for the Trump administration: “partner with us” in Chicago, he says.
This comes after Trump said on Friday that Chicago was “a mess” and promised to “straighten that one out.”
“Probably next, that will be our next one after this, and it won’t even be tough,” he said, according to The New York Times. “I think Chicago will be our next and then we’ll help with New York.”
This comes after Trump federalized Washington, D.C.’s police department and sent in the National Guard. While federalizing the police departments of cities that aren’t Washington is pretty much impossible — remember, D.C. is ostensibly under the control of the federal government; even if it retains some power to self-govern under the Home Rule Act of 1973, that power can be stripped of it in certain respects, which is how Trump managed to put the Metropolitan Police Department under administration control — sending in the National Guard or federal agents certainly isn’t.
But naturally, Illinois politicians that are in office don’t want him to deal with the city’s murder problem.
Should Trump deploy the National Guard to help other Democrat-run cities, or should he leave them on their own?
“There is no emergency that warrants the president of the United States federalizing the Illinois National Guard,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, another possible 2028 presidential candidate, remarked. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who somehow has managed to come across worse than former Mayor Lightfoot, said “Chicagoans don’t want a military occupation of our city,” and one Chicago alderman described it as “fascism.”
Chicagoans don’t want a military occupation of our city. We want our federal tax dollars sent back to us so we can continue building a safe and affordable city by investing in our communities. @GovPritzker pic.twitter.com/24mELHcfkN
— Mayor Brandon Johnson (@ChicagosMayor) August 25, 2025
“We Must Defeat Fascism”: Chicago Alderman on Trump’s Threat to Deploy Troops to City https://t.co/9R5TlvzeEd
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) August 26, 2025
Emanuel, meanwhile, sounded open to it — provided it was done correctly, he told CNN.
“Is he going to try to put National Guard around Michigan Avenue or downtown, or is it going to go into Englewood or other parts of the city that do have a crime problem and do have to be approached?” he said on Sunday, according to the Washington Times.
“My guess is, when you look at what he did in D.C., he’s not going to actually deal with crime.”
“Partner with us,” Emanuel added. “Don’t try to come in and act like we can be an occupied city.”
There are parts of this statement, of course, that are mindless political posturing. (The statistics don’t bear out Emanuel’s claim that what Trump did in Washington, D.C., had no effect, for instance; if this were true, why are crime rates falling precipitously in concert with the federal government’s interest in how the capital polices itself?)
However, getting out ahead of any announcement from Trump by telling him to “partner with us” to deal with the higher-crime areas of the city is savvy on Emanuel’s part — and he has a decent point, inasmuch as Chicago is a much larger city geographically than Washington, with a crime problem centered around particular neighborhoods which can often seem distant from the city’s more stable areas. (This is something Emanuel misses about D.C. As anyone who’s ever lived there can tell you, you’re always one wrong turn or one missed Metro stop away from being in your own personal version of “The Bonfire of the Vanities.”)
In other words, he recognizes there’s a problem and that this isn’t “fascism,” but common sense. Guess which part The New York Times — now basically reduced to the daily newsletter of the purple-haired laptop-warrior left — chose to print in an article titled “Democrats Criticize Trump’s Push for National Guard in More Cities”?
Rahm Emanuel, the former mayor of Chicago, said on CNN on Sunday that Mr. Trump’s threat was more a reflection of the president’s animus toward Chicago’s Democratic leadership and desire to crack down on immigration than a considered strategy to take on crime.
“When you look at what he did in D.C., he’s not going to actually deal with crime,” Mr. Emanuel said. “This is an attempt to deal with cities that are welcoming cities, known as sanctuary cities, and deal with immigration.”
That’s where it begins and ends. Apparently, the part where he acknowledged that dealing with the city’s crime problem via partnering with Chicago might not be the worst idea didn’t seem all that important to them.
And we somehow wonder how Rahm Emanuel became the candidate of relative liberal sanity in 2028.
Of course, it’s worth noting that Rahm is merely hoping to take some credit once Trump comes to town. But it’s more proof that victory has a thousand fathers while defeat is an orphan — and that the Democrats have done nothing but create orphans.
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