Have a president and a city ever hated each other as much as Donald Trump and Chicago?
The relationship between them can best be described as follows:
A. A dead end of mutual hatred.
b. An unbridgeable abyss of disgust.
A. A hatred deeper than that between the Bears and Packers.
D. A rocky place where mutual affection can find no place.
In an attempt to understand why there is so much animosity between our former president and our beautiful city, I wrote him a letter and mailed it to Mar-a-Lago. I am republishing it here.
Donald J. Trump
Mar-a-Lago
Palm Beach, Florida
Dear Mr. President,
You’ve been badmouthing our city for over a decade now, and I’m trying to figure out why. I mean, what have we ever done to you? We let you build a skyscraper along the river and plaster your name on it in 10-foot letters, so that everyone who walks downtown knows it’s owned by Trump. Sure, we like to take pictures of ourselves raising our finger, but that’s just a little fun for us on Instagram. It’s nothing personal against you. I’m sure you’ve made a lot of money from your condo and hotel here. One of our council members, Ed Burke, even won you a big tax break. Ed was recently convicted of several felonies and will be going to federal prison, but we don’t blame you for being associated with a corrupt Chicago politician. We know that’s how business is done in this city.
Our last mayor, Lori Lightfoot, told me that you used Chicago as a “punching bag.” Well, we get it. That’s how you do politics. Ever since you got on the escalator and blamed immigrants for crime and murder, you’ve been looking for enemies to galvanize your supporters and tie them to your cause by raising the threat they pose to the American way of life. At Tuesday’s debate, immigrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. Many of your supporters live in houses so small that even John Mellencamp wouldn’t write a song about them. (Which is a little strange, since you’re a New York real estate mogul and a Hollywood TV star.) You need to scare them with scary stories about life in the big city, so they’ll be glad they don’t live here. Obviously, you wouldn’t choose New York, because it’s your hometown, or Los Angeles, because you like the celebrity lifestyle there, so you choose Chicago. We’ve made ourselves an easy target, because we have more murders than either of those big cities. Still, some of your rhetoric is inappropriate. When I came here in 2019, for an international conference of chiefs of police, I called our city “an embarrassment to us as a nation” and said that “Afghanistan is a safe place by comparison.” As a guest, that was rude. Check your facts, Mr. President: More people die violently in a single month in Afghanistan than in a single year in Chicago. We haven’t had a war here since 1812, when the Potawatomi massacred a group of settlers at the Battle of Fort Dearborn. But your running mate, J.D. Vance, didn’t mention that when he called Chicago a “war zone.”
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You may still be upset that we stopped your rally at the UIC Pavilion in 2016. No other city has ever stopped a Trump rally, but Chicago knows how to organize. This is the birthplace of community organizing, as you may have heard from your predecessor. One protester brought a sign that read, “Trump puts ketchup on hot dogs.” Don’t take it personally, either. We tell all the out-of-towners that we know. And when the Wiener Circle sold three-inch hot dogs called “Trump Footlongs,” it had nothing to do with your sausage. “We know there’s no problem there,” she told us during a debate.
Do you hate us because only 15 percent of the city’s voters voted for you? Don’t take it personally. We’ve always voted Democrat. Voting Democrat is a local tradition, like cheering for the Chicago Cubs or the Chicago White Sox. Chicago never voted for Ronald Reagan. Or Richard Nixon. We voted for Abraham Lincoln, but that was a long time ago. But the cops in Mount Greenwood and Edison Park voted for you. They love your stance on law and order. So did the Orthodox Jews in West Rogers Park. They love your support for Israel. So you can leave those neighborhoods out the next time you attack Chicago. We haven’t even elected a Republican mayor since 1927. I’m sure that’s another reason you’re talking about us. You want to tell your supporters that “Democrat-run cities” are crime-ridden wastelands that can only be cured by Republican policies. That's why I sent the FBI, the DEA, and the U.S. Marshals here and took credit for the murder rate going down, even though it was already going down before they got here.
The list of insults you have leveled at us is endless. We are a “shooting disaster.” “Crime is out of control.” “A massacre.” We hope you don’t get a platform to insult us for another four years, but if you do, find another city to criticize. Like Cleveland. Their murder rate is much higher than ours. They are used to being the butt of jokes.
