Chicago has likely seen fewer shootings this year than in any other in nearly six decades, and was not even among the top 20 U.S. cities by homicide rate in 2024. But according to President Donald Trump, the city is “THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!”
Trump’s false Tuesday morning declaration after watching overheating commentary from Fox News’ Fox & Friends, which cited shootings over the weekend as evidence Chicago is a “war zone” and its elected leaders are sending the message that they “like the violence."
The president’s favorite TV show is helping to ease the country onto a glide path toward Trump’s authoritarian goal of putting troops on the ground in more U.S. cities.
Shooting and murders in Chicago have plummeted to near-record lows
Crime data analyst Jeff Asher reported Tuesday that while the scale of shootings and murders in Chicago represents a terrible toll inflicted on far too many city residents, “the available evidence suggests that Chicago has seen fewer shootings so far this year than any year since the mid-1960s.”
“The 1,264 people shot in Chicago through August 30 this year signifies far, far too many lives impacted by gun violence, but that figure is down 37 percent through this point last year and down nearly 60 percent from this point in 2021,” he wrote.
"Chicago is on pace for just over 400 murders in 2025 which could be the fewest murders there since 1965,” he continued. “Obviously, there’s a lot of time left in the year, but Chicago will almost certainly have way fewer murders in 2025 than it did in any year between 1966 and the early 2000s.”
Murders and shootings rend the fabric of communities, and the fact that they seem to have fallen to the lowest level in Chicago since the president was in college does not mean that the work of reducing crime is done. The data does, however, provide context for whether the state is facing an emergency that requires federal intervention.
But Trump’s worldview isn’t shaped by the thoughtful analysis of statistics — he cares about what he sees on his television.
Trump is responding to Fox & Friends lie that Chicago is “a war zone”
On Tuesday morning, Fox & Friends’ co-hosts were telling viewers that Chicago is in crisis and denouncing its elected leaders for saying that they oppose Trump surging federal forces into the city against their will.
“VIOLENCE GRIPS CHICAGO AS DEMS REJECT TRUMP’S HELP” was the chyron Fox & Friends aired at the top of the 7 a.m. segment.
“We’ve talked a lot about the crime in Chicago,” Ainsley Earhart said. “Fifty-six were shot over the Labor Day weekend. Eight people died in Chicago as a result of those shootings.” Fox & Friends aired a graphic displaying those figures while she spoke.
Earhardt contrasted those numbers with a video of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson saying at a rally on Monday, “No federal troops in the city of Chicago.”
“These leaders spend more time targeting the president of the United States than caring about the issues that matter to their community,” Lawrence Jones replied. He claimed that the weekend’s level of violence is “happening almost every other week in Chicago,” adding, “I think it is a war zone there.”
Co-host Griff Jenkins claimed that Johnson’s comments “have got to be offensive to the families and loved ones” of victims, adding that Democrats were “defending, essentially, the criminals by trying to resist federal assistance to bring it under control.”
Jenkins then aired a clip of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker saying in an interview that “no one in the administration” had reached out to him about federal intervention, which he said suggested they were planning “an invasion with U.S. troops."
“It's not an invasion,” Earhardt responded. “The reason that Donald Trump has to get involved is because the leaders of these blue states can't keep crime off their streets. They can't do anything about it. They are not trying to do anything about it. The message we hear is: We like the violence.”
Again, this is how the president’s favorite program is responding to crime in Chicago at a time when the city is seeing the lowest levels of shootings and murders in decades.
Trump often responds in real time to the shows he is watching from the White House and elsewhere — a phenomenon I’ve described as the Fox-Trump feedback loop — and that’s exactly what he did on Tuesday morning.
Roughly 40 minutes after the Fox & Friends segment, Trump posted to Truth Social:
At least 54 people were shot in Chicago over the weekend, 8 people were killed. The last two weekends were similar. Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the World, by far. Pritzker needs help badly, he just doesn’t know it yet. I will solve the crime problem fast, just like I did in DC. Chicago will be safe again, and soon. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Trump is trying to justify an authoritarian invasion of Chicago
Trump’s claim that Chicago is the “most dangerous city in the World, by far” is absurd. In fact, the city isn’t even among the top 20 cities with the highest reported homicide rates in the United States, according to an Axios analysis of 2024 FBI crime figures, while “eight of the top 10 cities with the highest murder rates and populations of at least 100,000 were in red states."
But Trump, according to many of his former top aides, is a fascist, and the president has repeatedly displayed his eagerness to put National Guard and even active-duty military on the streets of blue cities in blue states.
He lied about conditions in Los Angeles to justify a deployment there (which a federal judge on Tuesday said violated the law) and lied about crime in Washington, D.C., to do the same thing in the nation’s capital.
With Trump’s propagandists at Fox and elsewhere chomping at the bit for the president to order “full military occupation” of other “problematic cities,” Chicago may be next.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.
