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 added, mocking the Illinois governor’s weight and labeling him “a disaster.”

Following the president’s comments, Pritzker indeed made it clear he wasn’t inviting Trump to send the National Guard.

“Earlier today, in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, ‘Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?’” Pritzker said during a news conference overlooking the Chicago River downtown. “Instead, I say: ‘Mr. President, do not come to Chicago.'”

Emphasizing that there is no ongoing emergency that would justify deploying the Guard, the governor said such an action would infringe on Illinois’ sovereignty.

“This is exactly the type of overreach that our country’s founders warned against, and it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances,” Pritzker said.

Still, Pritzker and other officials acknowledged there are few, if any, steps the city or state could take to head off a deployment if the president were to choose that route.

Trump’s comments signaling he might be hedging his position about sending Guard personnel to Chicago 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 doing in Washington, D.C. In addition, 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.

Should Trump move forward with deploying Guard personnel to Chicago, it remains unclear how exactly that would work. Unlike Washington, where Trump has faced fewer legal challenges in deploying the National Guard, Chicago is not subject to federal oversight. Whether Trump acted with proper legal authority when federalizing the California Guard earlier this summer in response to protests over his immigration policies is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit.

Pritzker on Monday delivered his own personal attack on Trump, saying the president’s “remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.”

Johnson and Pritzker, who is running for a third term as governor, have highlighted that crime is dropping in Chicago from its post-pandemic peak, seeking to undercut Trump’s pretext for sending 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.

So far this year, shootings in Chicago are down 36% and homicides 31% after peaking in 2021 to levels not seen in over two decades, according to Chicago police data. Johnson has attributed that progress to the leadership of his handpicked Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling, as well as his administration’s spending on youth employment and anti-violence programs.

Attempting to counter that message, the White House on Monday issued its version of a police blotter using local news headlines to back up its contention Chicago has a serious crime problem, including that Chicago has repeatedly had more annual homicides than New York City and Los Angeles. Many other cities, however, have higher homicide rates per capita.

At the riverfront news conference, Pritzker, Johnson and the state’s two U.S. senators sought to portray a unified presence against a Trump troop deployment, backed by a large swath of the city and state’s business, civil rights and community leaders. During the event, the mayor said Trump is fixated on Chicago because the city has fought his agenda.

“We are being targeted because of what and who we represent,” Johnson said, referring to the city’s history of being pro-working class, pro-immigration and pro-labor.

However, the mayor did not directly answer questions about what instructions Chicago police would receive should federal troops touch ground, other than saying, “We’re going to use every tool at our disposal.”

“So the Police Department is under direction of my leadership, my superintendent, Superintendent Larry Snelling,” Johnson said. “We have our own autonomy in terms of how we protect our city.”

Pritzker also didn’t provide many details when asked what the state would do to stop Trump’s efforts. The governor did vow that the state would “use every lever at our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights” as he also acknowledged that Illinois National Guard members could face legal consequences if they refused the call to duty.

“The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have,” Pritzker said. “We will see the Trump administration in court.”

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, whose office has been involved in dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration, said there isn’t any preemptive legal action the state could take to stop the president from federalizing the Guard or sending troops to Chicago.

“We don’t know exactly the exact circumstances in which the deployment would take place, so a preemptive lawsuit … couldn’t be targeted to a specific targeting of the military, so we don’t anticipate that,” Raoul said.

Johnson, meanwhile, repeated a line he used earlier this summer, accusing Trump of “terrorism.”

“Any attempt to intimidate our people from being able to live their lives, that is the quintessential example of terrorism, and we will not bend, break or bow to that type of tyranny,” the mayor said, while also asking Chicago protesters to “do it in a very peaceful way” because “the Trump administration, they are trying to incite and provoke violence.”

Along with several other speakers, Johnson said that if the federal government wants to combat crime in Chicago, it could begin with restoring $158 million in violence prevention funding for the city and increasing spending on affordable housing and schools.

“As the mayor of this city, I can tell you that Chicagoans are not calling for a military occupation,” Johnson said. “They are calling for the same thing that we’ve been calling for for some time, and that’s investment.”

Pritzker also issued a warning “to Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: We are watching and we are taking names.”

In response to a reporter seeking to clarify those comments, Pritzker said, “It simply means that people who are breaking the law, who are acting in unconstitutional fashion,” including White House staff members, “will be held accountable — must be held accountable.”

Illinois’ moribund Republican Party, still without a prominent candidate to challenge Pritzker or most other Democratic statewide officeholders for reelection, firmly sided with Trump in a fundraising email.

The state GOP compared Chicago to “a war zone” and said, “If Illinois Republicans don’t step up, the national media and Democratic machine will spin this as an ‘attack’ instead of the lifesaving mission it is.”

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 Superintendent Eddie Johnson told the Tribune at the time that Trump’s statement was “so broad” that Johnson had “no idea what he’s talking about.”

When the president of the United States called in the military domestically

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 Stephen 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.

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