I've written on many occasions that you don't get to be president of the United States by being a mediocre politician. Presidents are almost always the best politicians of their generation.
Regardless of what you think of their ideology, their policies, or their personality, in order to get elected, a president must demonstrate extraordinary skill in a wide variety of fields, including fundraising, campaigning, coalition-building, and appealing to a broad range of voters.
Beyond that, a president must demonstrate an intrinsic sense of the times and his opponents' strengths and weaknesses. Only the most effective presidents can achieve all those metrics and succeed.
Donald Trump has the best political instincts of any politician since Bill Clinton. He has been playing the Democrats like a master fiddler since Inauguration Day. He has manipulated them into corners, forced them down dead-end streets, and continually kept them off balance, racking up policy victories that his opponents never thought he could achieve.
On top of that, his trolling of the left has led to Democrats concentrating more on warning America of Trump's "authoritarian" instincts than actually doing anything to effectively oppose him.
Now, the left is playing into his hands by trying to defend the idea that crime isn't so bad in Chicago and, therefore, the National Guard isn't needed. Some of the media headlines tell the story.
"Chicago sees its fewest summer murders since 1965, even as Trump cites high crime," reports WBEZ.
"Sorry, Trump: Chicago Is Not The ‘Murder Capital Of The World’ — Not Even Close, Data Shows," claims the Block Club of Chicago.
"Trump claims Chicago is ‘the world’s most dangerous city’. The four most violent ones are all in red states," sneers the Guardian.
And my favorite is from January 1.
"Chicago sees fewer than 600 murders in 2024 for 1st time since 2019; shootings, carjackings down," ABC 7 claims.
HOOOOORAY!
Yes, this is what Democrats are defending. There were 573 murders in 2024 compared to 648 in 2023 and 756 in 2022. The decrease in dead bodies was significant.
But did any Democrat notice that there were still 573 dead people who aren't going home to their families or able to grow up in Chicago? "Fewer than last year" is not a cause for celebration or a victory dance.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is elated that Trump has chosen Chicago for an immigration and law enforcement crackdown. Pritzker is running hard for the Democratic nomination for president and sees Trump's enforcement efforts as a way to demonstrate his "fighting" ability to the left-wing masses.
Trump “is threatening to go to war with an American city,” the governor claimed on X, adding that “Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”
“This is not a joke,” Pritzker wrote. “This is not normal.”
"Normal"? And 573 people shot dead in an American city is "normal"?
This is why Trump is winning and will continue to win on this issue. He has baited Democrats into defending an indefensible position. For the governor to use "normalcy" as a debating point while half the country thinks that 573 murders is abnormal and frightening shows just how much Trump has bamboozled and discombobulated the opposition.
President Trump’s recent floated proposal to deploy the National Guard to crime-overrun blue cities like Chicago and Baltimore has been met with howls of outrage from the usual suspects. For many liberal talking heads and Democratic officials, this is simply the latest evidence of Mr. Trump’s “authoritarianism.”
Yet such specious analysis and manufactured hysteria distract from what all parties ought to properly focus on: the well-being of the people who actually live in such crime-addled jurisdictions.
What’s remarkable is not just the specific policy suggestion itself — after all, federal force has been called in to assist state-level law enforcement plenty of times — but rather how Mr. Trump is once again baiting his political opponents into defending the indefensible.
He has a singular talent for making the left clutch onto wildly unpopular positions and take the wrong side of clear 80-20 issues. It’s political jiu-jitsu at its finest.
Trump is forcing Democrats across the country to show how they define deviancy down to attack him. It's a remarkable demonstration of a president taking control of a situation and maneuvering the opposition to fight on his turf while taking positions that ordinary people blanch at.
As a politician, Trump has no equal on the national stage.
