Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is crowing on late night TV shows that he is re-branding his city as “the city Trump will never sleep in” even as his streets run red with the blood of the city’s youth and his budget drowns in red ink.
Emanuel, who was Barack Obama’s chief of staff, appeared on the left-wing “Late Show” and told host Stephen Colbert that he wants Chicago to be a “Trump free zone,” The Hill reported.
The Windy City mayor specifically noted that Chicago is a “sanctuary city” that gives illegal aliens preferential treatment. Emanuel also criticized President Donald Trump over his decision to pull out of the U.N.’s Paris global warming pact as well as Trump’s desires to reverse the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
“Donald Trump is driving forward looking through the rearview mirror, and I’m not going that way,” Emanuel told Colbert. “I think what he’s doing is wrong for the direction of the city.”
Emanuel also insisted that Trump’s views on immigration are “driving a wedge and a difference between communities and the police departments.”
Meanwhile, as the mayor yucks it up on late night TV shows, many of his own citizens are also looking at Chicago “in the rearview mirror.” Under Rahm Emanuel, Chicago has become one of the worst cities for outward migration as citizens abandon the drowning city by the tens of thousands. Statistics show that Chicago and the county it is in have lost more population than any other area in the country.
The city is also suffering one of the largest increases in murder rates than any city in U.S. History. With murders already well past 600 deaths this year, the homicide rate jumped from 17.5 in 2015 to 27.8 in 2016.
“In the last 20 to 30 years of data we’ve looked at, we’ve never seen an increase that big for a large city,” Max Kapustin, a University of Chicago Crime Lab research director, told the Chicago Tribune in September.
In addition, Chicago has been deemed the city with the worst pension crisis in the nation, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. The paper reported that the “burden in Chicago is $12,427-per-person, double New York city’s $6,115-per-person.”
Finally, despite having somea of the highest property taxes in the nation already burdening the city’s homeowners, Rahm Emanuel in on record saying he wants to gouge homeowners with even higher rates. Indeed, his latest budget raises the city’s property taxes for the sixth time in seven years.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston
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