President Donald Trump continued his relentless attacks on Chicago on Monday, saying, “Can you imagine if the country was run like Chicago and like New York and like some of these other Democrat super radical left cities are run? “You wouldn’t have a country for very long.” Trump’s focus on crime in Chicago goes back to his 2016 campaign, says the Chicago Sun-Times. His references to Chicago are frequent, coming as the city continues to struggle with shootings. During the past weekend, at least 64 people were shot and 13 died, victims of gun violence. Over the previous July 4th weekend, 79 people were shot and 15 died.
Trump co-mingled his grievances against the Democrats who govern Illinois and New York at a roundtable to highlight positive, even heroic encounters several grateful people have had with local law enforcement personnel. They were in the East Room, seated around a sign on a video that read, “red, white and the blue.” Trump said, “In recent weeks, our country’s police officers have been really under siege,” adding, “radical politicians want to defund and abolish the police from our nation.” No one has suggested abolishing police. Under the “defund police” umbrella, there are discussions of whether police should be in schools – and whether some taxpayer police dollars should be redeployed to fight crime in other ways. In criticizing New York for the city’s spike in shootings, Trump referred to the “Black Lives Matter” letters painted in front of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue last week, saying, “They ought to spend their time doing something else.”