(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Monday said he is still prepared to order National Guard troops to American cities besides the nation’s capital, but that he wanted local officials to request his help.
The comments come after Trump threatened Chicago as the next city he would target after his administration’s federal takeover of Washington, prompting pushback from Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, who on Monday afternoon called the proposed actions “un-American.”
“They should be saying, ‘Please come in,'” Trump told ABC News Correspondent Jay O’Brien as he took questions from reporters the Oval Office after signing executive orders.
Trump still railed against Chicago, which he called a “disaster,” and Pritzker, who he said was a “slob.”
“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 him. Freedom. Freedom. He’s a dictator. He’s a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying ‘maybe we like a dictator.’ I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person,” the president said.
“But I’m really saying, and I say this to all of you, in a certain way, we should wait to be asked,” Trump continued.
Trump went back and forth repeatedly on Monday over whether the government should wrest control or wait to be asked.
“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. “The problem is, it’s not nice when you go in and do it and somebody else is standing there saying, as we give great results, say, ‘Well, we don’t want the military.'”
Meanwhile, Pritzker and Chicago officials are speaking out against Trump’s threat to deploy 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?’ Instead, I say, ‘Mr. President, do not come to Chicago,'” Pritzker said at a news conference in Chicago on Monday afternoon.
“What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American,” the governor added.
Crime statistics from Chicago’s Police Department show murders year to date and robberies are down 31% and 33% respectively compared to the same period in 2024. Overall, the statistics show crime in the city is down 13% year to date compared to 2024.
“There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention,” Pritzker said on Monday. “There is no insurrection. Like every major American city in both blue and red states, we deal with crime in Chicago. Indeed, the violent crime rate is worse in red states and red cities.”
ABC News Senior Political Correspondent Rachel Scott pressed Trump on whether he would send troops to Republican-led states and cities experiencing high crime. Trump said yes but appeared to brush off that it would ever be necessary.
“Sure,” Trump responded. “But there aren’t that many of them.”
Trump continued to focus on Democrat-led areas and railed against cashless bail policies, though a report from Axios that analyzed FBI crime data showed 13 of the 20 U.S. cities with the highest murder rates were in Republican-run states.
The president on Monday defended the first 11 days of his administration’s takeover of Washington, which includes more than a thousand National Guardsmen deployed to the nation’s capital, some permitted to carry weapons for personal protection.
As part of his crime crackdown, Trump signed an executive order aimed at ending cashless bail in Washington and threatening to revoke federal funds for other areas around the country that have similar policies.
The president also signed an order directing the Justice Department to investigate instances of flag burning for possible charges, despite a 1989 Supreme Court ruling that the government cannot criminalize destruction of an American flag when done as an act of expression.
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