00:00Back off. That is the message to Donald Trump from the governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker.
00:05In a fiery speech, Pritzker slamming Trump's unprecedented crackdown on crime, as Trump calls
00:10it, and Trump's threats to send the National Guard to Chicago. This is not about fighting
00:17crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military
00:23in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political rivals. There is
00:30no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no
00:36insurrection. There is no insurrection. Mr. President, do not come to Chicago.
00:48You are neither wanted here nor needed here.
00:53OK, well, that's pretty loud and clear. Pritzker doesn't want the National Guard
00:56in Chicago. Well, that used to be enough to not get the National Guard sent to your city,
01:00but not anymore. Trump has been giving himself more powers to expand his use of force across
01:05the country. And right now, he has set his sights on Chicago.
01:11I made the statement that next should be Chicago because, as you all know, Chicago is a killing
01:15field right now. And they don't acknowledge it. And they say, we don't need him. Freedom,
01:21freedom. I mean, I see Pritzker saying, we don't want them. In the meantime,
01:24a city is being shot to hell. And they do that politically. And they probably do want it.
01:32Trump railing against the crime in Chicago. But just a quick, basic fact check of the situation.
01:37Chicago is a city that has seen a substantial decline in the number of homicides,
01:40something that Pritzker and the mayor of Chicago have pointed out.
01:4613 of the top 20 cities in homicide rate have Republican governors.
01:53None of these cities is Chicago. Chicago is not in the top 25 of the most dangerous cities
02:00in the United States. And these facts.
02:06These facts are indisputable and widely acknowledged.
02:12Another city seeing a decline in violent crime as of late is Baltimore.
02:16Yet Baltimore is also on Trump's radar.
02:20Baltimore is a horrible, horrible deathbed. It's a deathbed.
02:24He calls Baltimore a deathbed. And yet in the same breath, Trump then went on to tell a story
02:32about, I mean, this is an incredible story because he says that he met the governor of Maryland,
02:37Wes Moore, who by the way, infamously grew up in Baltimore, now the governor of Maryland.
02:40So he meets Wes Moore at a football game, an Army Navy game. And this is what Trump says happens.
02:48He came over to me, hugged me, shook my hand. You were there.
02:51He said, sir, you're the greatest president of my lifetime.
02:55Maybe if he'd gone a little shy of greatest, if he'd retold the story of he said you're doing a
03:00good job or something that might be more believable. But here's the thing.
03:04That's kind of hard to swallow. And a short time ago,
03:07Governor Moore responded to Trump's claims.
03:11I'm a person who takes my integrity very seriously. And I spent the past six months before that election
03:19campaigning as to why I did not think that he should be the next president of the United States.
03:25So when I say that that conversation never happened, that imaginary conversation never
03:31happened, I mean, that conversation never happened.
03:34More, Pritzker, Gavin Newsom, governor of California, all saying no to Trump on using the military in
03:44American cities. But their words don't seem to matter.
03:48What is increasingly becoming self-evident to anyone with eyes wide open in any level of
03:58objectivity, a private army for Donald Trump.
04:02Owing an oath only to him, not the Constitution of the United States.
04:09So Newsom says that. What's interesting is that is a claim that Trump does not
04:15seem to be shying away from at all.
04:18I'm chief law enforcement officer, believe it or not. You know,
04:23I don't like to go around saying that, but I am. That's the position.
04:27It's interesting to say, right? He's not talking about commander in chief,
04:30which isn't something one would usually just be out talking about as president anyway,
04:33but he's he's phrasing it chief law enforcement officer.
04:37Jeff Zeleny is out front live outside the White House beginning our coverage this evening.
04:40And Jeff, there are signs today from Trump that he plans to take this
04:44law enforcement takeover right in certain in certain Democratic cities even further.
04:53Well, the president signed a series of executive orders, Aaron,
04:55and one of them was designed to do just that. He's instructing his defense secretary to
05:01create specialized units, as he described them inside the National Guard for rapid nationwide
05:08deployment in areas that were law and order is needed. Of course, not many specifics on that.
05:14But look, the National Guard is used for emergencies. And the question here is,
05:19is this an emergency? But you would be mistaken if you thought that President Trump was concerned
05:24by any of this Democratic pushback. In fact, this is clearly one of the strategies at play here.
05:30Here we are nearing the end of August and President Trump has spent the lion's share of this month,
05:35at least talking about domestic matters, making the issue of law and order of crime and justice.
05:40And he has quite literally turned this into a new and nationwide issue. Yes, crime existed before,
05:46but he is proudly wearing that hat as the law enforcement commander in chief. That is what
05:52he wants to be seen as, wants to be known as. So he was bragging and crowing about what he says
05:58are changes in the Washington, D.C. crime statistics ever since he federalized the police. He was giving
06:05homicide statistics from the Oval Office. It's something we've really not seen before at all.
06:10But yes, he is going to at least think about discussing sending the National Guard to other
06:15cities. But there are limitations to what the National Guard can do in Baltimore. In Chicago,
06:20yes, they can protect the federal buildings. They can protect the federal assets, but they cannot
06:25serve as law enforcement officers. However, is this going to be a legal challenge? It certainly
06:30seemed that way from Governor Pritzker. But again, you'd be wrong if you think President Trump is
06:34bothered by any of the criticism. Erin? Jeff Zeleny, thank you very much. And of course,
06:39you start one place and you end in another. People don't push back. Everyone is here with me now.
06:44So, Lulu, you have obviously spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C. You were at Union Station today.
06:51National Guard's there, right? So they're stationed. And, you know, I mean, I remember seeing them in
06:55L.A. A lot of them are young guys. They're doing their jobs, right? So it's not about individuals.
06:59This is about the fact that they're just there in large numbers now. And you took some pictures
07:05that you have shared with us. So these are Lulu's pictures from today. So what was it like? What
07:11got to you there? You know, it's strange right now in D.C. because it feels like a city that's being
07:18strangled. Right now, the District of Columbia, which is home to, let me remind you, 700,000
07:25people, more than the population of two states, has the highest unemployment rate in the country
07:33because of what has happened with the federal workforce. Restaurant reservations are down some
07:3830 percent in some places. You can't get deliveries because so much of the enforcement has targeted
07:44delivery drivers that they are afraid to come out. The Latino community, the Latino community is
07:50afraid. And every conversation I have with people in D.C., they all say that it feels like an occupation.
07:57This is not a city that is welcoming what is happening. It is a city that is afraid of what
08:03is happening because it is very unusual in America to see armed military on the streets of an American
08:11city. And this isn't just any American city. This is the capital of this country. And so what does it
08:18say when you have federal forces on the streets of our capital city? You know, Democrats say it is a power
08:26grab. Donald Trump says it's about crime, but he wants to export it to other cities. What I can tell
08:31you from living in D.C. is that this is a very, very uncomfortable and people feel dangerous time.
08:39Yeah. Well, I mean, as you say sometimes when you see law enforcement everywhere and yet you don't feel
08:45safe at the truth, the truth, the true awkwardness of that moment that you're talking about, I think,
08:51Governor, what's your reaction to what Lulu is saying? Well, we should remember that Donald Trump
08:58campaigned on aggressively and boldly tackling the decay and danger that he saw in Americans major
09:04cities. And so this is a fulfillment of a campaign promise. I don't think he got into the details of
09:09exactly how he was going to do that, but directionally, that's what he said. Number two,
09:14you know, how much of an emergency do you need after years and decades of the high crime and danger
09:19in these cities without any real sustained period of turning it around? Yes, crime's down a little
09:24compared to a high base from a couple years ago, but still in our major cities across this country,
09:30public safety and not backing law enforcement is a major concern. And President Trump has boldly,
09:36maybe over the legal boundaries, we'll see, but boldly gone in to try a case study in D.C.
09:41And by the way, the early results for the first two weeks, per the D.C. police, it's working. There's
09:47a significant reduction in significant crime in D.C. since this started. Well, I know, Lulu,
09:53they were saying there had been a stretch here of what was it, two weeks or something. There was a
09:56longer stretch back in March where there hadn't been a homicide. I mean, what you're hearing from
10:01the wards where there is a lot of crime, what you're hearing from those wards is that the criminals
10:07are staying home because they're not going to go out in the streets for sure.
10:12There's not going to be a murder right now because they know that there's
10:15military out on the streets. But is this really a long-term solution to the crime problems in our
10:20cities? Is the federal government going to take over every city in America? And also,
10:25what does it mean when these people are beholden to this president and he's only targeting blue cities?
10:30I mean, as some of these democratic governors have pointed out, a lot of the cities are in red states.
10:36Why aren't they being sent there?
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