President Donald Trump appeared to waver Monday on whether he would attempt to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago, saying Gov. JB Pritzker should be asking for the help — a request the second-term Democrat has made clear isn’t forthcoming.

“We may wait. We may or may not. We may just go in and do it, which is probably what we should do,” Trump said. “You know, I hate to barge in on a city and then be treated horribly by corrupt politicians and bad politicians like a guy like Pritzker,” Trump said, mocking the Illinois governor’s weight and labeling him “a disaster.”

Trump’s comments came as he signed an executive order targeting Illinois and other jurisdictions that have adopted policies eliminating money as a consideration in determining whether someone charged with a crime should be released from jail while awaiting trial. On Friday, Trump raised the idea of using the Guard in Chicago, as he previously did in Los Angeles and currently is in Washington, D.C., and The Washington Post reported late Saturday that the Pentagon has been working on such plans for weeks. The Friday comments and the media reports drew swift rebukes from Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Trump said Monday he was rethinking the deployment because “I have a slob like Pritzker criticizing us before we even go there.”

“I made the statement that next should be Chicago, because, as you all know, Chicago is a killing field right now, and they don’t acknowledge it, and they say we don’t need them. ‘Freedom. Freedom. He’s a dictator. He’s a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’ I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator,” Trump said.

“I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person, and when I see what’s happening to our cities, and then you send in troops, instead of being praised, they’re saying, ‘You’re trying to take over the Republic.’ These people are sick. But I’m really saying, and I say this to all of you in a certain way, we should wait to be asked, because they have cities that are so under control, out of control. So we go in and fix it. They take the full credit for it,” said Trump, who noted Pritzker’s possible White House aspirations.

As he seeks a third term as governor, Pritzker wasted little time in responding to Trump’s comments, with his campaign sharing a post of the Oval Office remarks on social media with the message: “I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again and again: We don’t have kings or wannabe dictators in America, and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one.”

Pritzker, Johnson and other officials were scheduled to hold a news conference in downtown Chicago later Monday to offer a fuller response to the president’s rhetoric.

Over the weekend, Pritzker and Johnson emphasized that crime is dropping in Chicago from its post-pandemic peak and that there is no justification for deploying the Guard or other troops to the city. Neither the governor’s office nor City Hall has had any formal communication with the Trump administration about federalizing the Illinois National Guard, officials said.

“There is no emergency that warrants the president of the United States federalizing the Illinois National Guard, deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active-duty military within our own borders,” Pritzker said in a statement after The Post’s initial report Saturday night.

Later, the White House issued its version of a police blotter using local news headlines to back up its contention that Chicago has a serious crime problem.

In an interview Monday with NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Johnson said using troops in the city would do nothing to address the causes of crime.

“The National Guard and federal troops will not drive unemployment down. It will not put food on the table,” Johnson said.

“The way we build safe communities is that we actually invest in them and make them affordable. That’s what I’m doing here in Chicago,” Johnson said. “We are on pace to build over 10,000 affordable homes. We’re hiring young people. We’ve revamped our detectives bureau so that we can actually solve crime. Clearly, our work is working. This president has no intentions on working with cities across America. He’s looking to test how far his power can go with the attempt to undermine our democracy, to shred our Constitution and, of course, to create anxiety and fear and division within our communities.”

Chicago has been a favorite target of Trump throughout his political career, particularly on issues related to crime and illegal immigration.

In the early months of his first term, for example, Trump proclaimed in a social media post that he would “send in the Feds!” in response to gun violence in the city. Then-police Supt. Eddie Johnson told the Tribune at the time that the president’s statement was “so broad” that Johnson had “no idea what he’s talking about.”

The executive order Trump signed Monday, in addition to a separate order aiming to end cashless bail in Washington, D.C., orders the attorney general to identify other jurisdictions that have “substantially eliminated cash bail as a potential condition of pretrial release from custody for crimes that pose a clear threat to public safety and order” and directs other agencies to identify grants and other federal funds those jurisdictions currently received that “may be suspended or terminated, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law.”

At the White House, Trump deputy chief of staff Steven Miller called cashless bail policies “a key driver of the disorder we see on city streets all over America” and said “Illinois would be a great example.”

In fact, Chicago’s crime rate has declined since the state’s cashless bail system went into effect nearly two years ago. The decline is in line with the trend in other major cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

State Sen. Robert Peters, a Chicago Democrat who championed the policy in the state legislature, said it isn’t a coincidence Trump signed an executive order targeting cashless bail as he’s raising the specter of sending troops to the city.

“These two things aren’t separate. He’s attacking the Pretrial Fairness Act and threatening to send troops. They’re literally tied together,” Peters said.

_____

©2025 Chicago Tribune. Visit chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.