Chicago Joins the Ranks of Thermopylae, Waterloo, Lepanto, and the Normandy Beaches

The Windy City is now the decisive battleground for American freedom.

Illustration by Riley Levine

Donald Trump has smashed political norms, destroyed the institutions that might provide oversight, and claimed unprecedented powers for himself. This successful autocratic breakthrough in Washington now threatens the freedom of Americans throughout the country. Now his efforts to overturn the protections Americans have enjoyed since our founding have brought us to a crisis point.

Chicago is now the decisive battleground for American freedom. The crisis is here, it is now, and upon the outcome everything depends.

The democratic institutions and norms that have, since our founding, protected us from monarchical whims are nearly gone.

The federal government has become a subsidiary of Trump Inc., the laws that would prevent this takeover go unenforced. There is no investigation into the widespread corruption and self-dealing. The U.S. Supreme Court has said the president is above the law. The Congress of the United States will not even meet. The consequences are real, they are dangerous.

In the past days we have seen previously unimaginable examples of the power of the United States weaponized against political opposition. Today, the Justice Department ignores laws like the Hatch Act so that the Administration can use government websites for political propaganda. Here’s what the Department of Agriculture’s website says:

Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times not to fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.

This is, of course, both a lie and illegal. It is also common. Across government agencies during this shut down, government resources, paid for by taxpayers, are now vehicles for Republican propaganda.

Donald Trump has boasted about that he wants to see his enemies indicted. And, despite a lack of evidence and over the objection of career prosecutors, his Attorney General Pam Bondi is going down the list and making indictments. This week, congressional Republicans vowed to strip Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, of his citizenship and deport him.

Tyrants frequently threaten to strip rival candidates of citizenship and deport them. Until now, this would have been unthinkable in the United States. Today, Republican can make that threat with impunity. Tyrants use government resources for their own partisan purposes. Tyrants arrest their opponents. Now, the President of the United States does too.

Similarly, in the past few days we have seen the kind of self-dealing and corruption we used to expect only in autocracies like Russia. A convicted felon makes a $2billion Trump cryptocurrency transaction and gets a pardon. The Pentagon awards a major contract to a company financially linked to Don Trump jr. Trump himself asks his own appointees — his former personal lawyers — to approve a $230 million payout to himself.

The institutions and norms that long protected us from using the power of government for partisan ends and for using government for personal enrichment stand now in shreds. Even the White House itself is no longer protected, but treated by the government as the personal property of the President, who, without permission or notice literally took a wrecking ball to it.

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And now, in this dangerous moment, Trump seeks to militarize American cities. He is fabricating a crisis that could end American democracy. If he succeeds, our streets will be militarized, and our courts will become places for political show trials. That’s why what’s happening in Chicago matters to everyone.

Chicago is ground zero. The survival of American democracy is being decided here.

Trump is using Chicago as a test to establish his right to send in the troops. Not just here, but as a first assault, into Los Angeles, Portland, Washington, D.C., Memphis, and San Francisco. Cities where political opposition remains strong.

At the same time, Trump is using the resulting court battles to establish the primacy of partisan political truth over evidence and facts.

In the courts and on the streets, lawful Chicagoans are resisting. Recall that as soon as ICE and CBP agents arrived in Chicago, Trump claimed the city was too dangerous for the government to carry out its mission and ordered up national guard troops to protect them. Illinois and Chicago sued to block the troop deployment.

Meanwhile, ICE began what Chicagoans now know is an aggressive campaign to provoke violence. Protestors and journalists were thrown to the ground and tear gassed. They sued, claiming the government violated their Constitutional rights to protest and to report.

In court, the federal government said:

Rioters … shot at agents with commercial artillery shell fireworks… The mob of rioters grew more hostile and violent, advancing toward agents and began throwing rocks and other objects at agents, including one that struck Chief Greg Bovino in the head. Border Patrol agents repeated multiple warnings to back up and that chemical agents would be deployed if warnings were ignored. Riot control measures were deployed, including by Chief Bovino, and arrests were made. Agents properly used their training. The use of chemical munitions was conducted in full accordance with CBP policy and was necessary to ensure the safety of both law enforcement and the public.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs responded, in part:

The statement is a lie. The statement fits two patterns the Plaintiffs have highlighted repeatedly in this case. First, the government is inventing exigencies that do not exist to justify its actions. Second, the government is perpetrating extreme violence against peaceful and innocent American civilians in order to provoke a reaction that the government then uses as an after-the-fact justification for the violence is has already used.

For now, courts remain a place where disputes like these can be investigated, where the facts can be established. To weigh these competing claims, the judge heard sworn testimony and examined the evidence. The Trump administration’s lawyers told the court that several protestors were arrested on September 27 and that their arrest proves that ICE agents were in danger. In fact, all charges were dropped, and those arrested were let go because grand juries looked at the evidence and refused to indict. The government’s lawyers said the U.S. army attested that the National Guard was requested to secure a building, but under cross examination they retracted that statement. After hearing testimony and reviewing the evidence, the district court judge found the administration’s assertions to be false- in the polite language of the court, to be “unreliable,” and to reflect a “potential lack of candor.”

The court stayed the use of National Guard Troops in Chicago.

The Administration appealed. They lost. They appealed again, this time on an emergency basis, to the U.S. Supreme Court. In their filing before that court, the federal government repeats the claims that the District judge and the appellate court found to be not credible. Their filing reads, in part:

In recent weeks, federal officers in Chicago have been threatened and assaulted, attacked in a harrowing pre-planned ambush involving many assailants, rammed in their government vehicles, shot at with fireworks and other improvised weapons, injured and hospitalized, and threatened in person and online -including by a $10,000 bounty for the murder of a senior federal official. Violent agitators have repeatedly obstructed access to a critical federal immigration facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal law enforcement agencies have been forced to operate under the constant threat of mob violence and to divert resources from enforcement efforts to protect federal agents and property. Local forces have failed to respond, or unaccountably delayed their response, even when federal agents face life-threatening violence. DHS has also been forced to reallocate resources from enforcing the Nation’s immigration laws in other regions to protect personnel federal facilities and on the streets of Chicago.

The repetition of claims found to be false by a District Court and an Appellate Court is a tell. The Chicago case is not only about controlling our cities by military force. It is also about destroying what is left of judicial legitimacy.

With stakes so high, many organizations have filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court. One of those groups, The Steady State, was formed to uphold constitutional democracy over partisan politics. Its members are former U.S. national security professionals drawn from intelligence, defense, diplomacy and homeland security. Their brief focuses on the stakes of the decision. They wrote:

… indicators of illegitimate uses of power included situations such as leaders searching for reasons to stretch interpretations of the law, and the magnification or exaggeration of events to justify an overreach of power — the very same types of indicators we are now similarly witnessing within our own country today. Amicus’ members have directly observed this phenomenon and its negative aftermath in a variety of countries, including:

• Russia, where military-style police suppress political protests under the guise of national security;

• China, where the Peoples’ Liberation Army has historically been deployed against student demonstrators, most notably during the crackdown at the Tiananmen Square massacre;

• Taiwan, where minor incidents of violence led to a state-run suppression of anti government protests and became a pretense for decades of martial law, from 1949-87;

• Turkey, where domestic military deployments have been used to crush opposition following mass protests;

• South Africa, where apartheid security forces previously repressed political opponents; after the end of the apartheid government, post-apartheid reform emphasized oversight to prevent military use for partisan political agendas;

• The Philippines, where armed forces are employed in campaigns against civil society actors under the pretext of anti-drug or anti-terror operations; and

• El Salvador, where US-trained military death squads terrorized the population during the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s. For the past several years, under the current Bukele administration, the security forces have been re-politicized and used to support human rights abuses against the general population.

In each of these examples, authoritarian leaders justified their actions as necessary for public safety, while, in fact, using military force to erode political freedoms and dismantle or corrode institutional checks on executive power.

The clear message sent in this brief is that American is on the brink of losing what made it exceptional and on the verge of joining the ranks of the unfree.

Meanwhile, on the streets of Chicago a united population is holding the line. In defiance of a court order Trump administration continues to manhandle and gas peaceful protesters and journalists alike. According to one reporter, at least eight Chicago neighborhoods have been gassed in the past few days. On the ground, residents and journalists are documenting these attacks. The facts are getting out.

If the United States Supreme Court ignores the facts and the evidence to deliver a partisan result for the Trump Administration, the edifice of law crumbles and force becomes the only law of the land.

Here, now, we either stop them, or we fall to a long and dark tyranny.

Edwin Eisendrath hosts “It’s the Democracy, Stupid” on Lincoln Square and “The Big Picture” on WCPT820 AM/ Heartland Signal. He’s the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a long-time management consultant, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago’s public schools. You can follow him on BlueSky at eisendrath.net and Substack at “It’s the Democracy, Stupid.” Read the original column here.