President Donald Trump turned this year’s White House turkey pardon into a political broadside, using the annual lighthearted ceremony to blast Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago’s leadership.
After formally pardoning the turkeys Gobble and Waddle, Trump shifted his remarks to Chicago, a city he has repeatedly depicted as a crime-plagued “hellhole” while floating the idea of sending in federal troops.
His latest comments came in the wake of a violent attack on 26-year-old Bethany Magee, who was set on fire by another passenger on Chicago’s Blue Line L train on Nov. 17. Trump cited the incident as further justification for his push to intervene in the city.
As he has in the past, Trump blamed Democratic leaders for the city’s violence, taking aim at both Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
“The mayor is incompetent, and the governor is a big, fat slob,” he told reporters. “He ought to invite us and say, ‘Please make Chicago safe.’ We’re gonna lose a great city if we don’t do it quickly.”
Trump then zeroed in on Pritzker, whose wealthy family has clashed with him for years — they even co-owned a hotel for 17 years before parting ways.
“I was going to talk about Pritzker in size, but when I talk about Pritzker, I get angry because he’s not letting us do the job. So I’m not going to tell my Pritzker joke,” Trump said, before hinting at it anyway.
“Some speechwriter wrote some joke about his weight. But I would never want to talk about his weight,” Trump continued. “I don’t talk about people being fat. I refuse to talk about the fact that he’s a fat slob, I don’t mention it.”
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He eventually added a self-deprecating aside: “I’d like to lose a few pounds too, by the way.”
Trump’s long-running focus on Chicago intensified in August, even before he followed through on sending federal forces to cities like Portland and Memphis.
“It won’t even be tough. The people of Chicago… are screaming for us to come. They’re wearing red hats, just like this one,” Trump said on Aug. 22, referring to his latest merchandise, a red cap emblazoned with “Trump Was Right About Everything.”
“African-American ladies, beautiful ladies, are saying, ‘Please President Trump, come to Chicago, please,’ ” he claimed. “I did great with the Black vote, as you know. They want something to happen.”
After several people were killed in shootings over Labor Day weekend, Trump again said Pritzker should call him for help. The governor publicly rejected that notion hours later.
“When did we become a country where it’s OK for the U.S. president to insist on national television that a state should call him to beg for anything — especially something we don’t want?” Pritzker said at a press conference. “Have we truly lost all sense of sanity in this nation, that we treat this as normal?”
He went on: “There is no emergency that warrants deployment of troops. He is insulting the people of Chicago by calling our home a hellhole, and anyone who takes his word at face value is insulting Chicagoans, too.”
Trump’s rhetoric escalated again days later, when he posted an AI-generated image of himself modeled after Robert Duvall’s Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore from the Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now. The image, labeled “Chipocalypse Now,” was accompanied by a menacing caption tying into his pledge to send the National Guard to Chicago and responding to Pritzker’s criticism of heightened ICE activity.
“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR 🚁 🚁 🚁 ,” the caption read in part, referencing Trump’s rebranding of the Department of Defense. It also twisted one of the movie’s most famous lines into: “I love the smell of deportations in the morning…”
In response to the post and Trump’s broader threats, Pritzker labeled the president a “wannabe dictator.”
