President Donald Trump escalated efforts to broaden his “emergency” crime takeover of Washington, D.C. by threatening to send federal troops to Chicago, falsely branding the city the “Murder Capital of the World” in a Tuesday morning tirade. The remarks came just before a federal judge ruled that Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles was illegal and violated the Posse Comitatus Act, by effectively turning the military into a “national police force with the president as its chief.”

Decrying that eight people were killed in Chicago over the weekend, Trump falsely claimed, “Chicago is the worst and most dangerous city in the World, by far.”

He insisted that Illinois Democratic Governor JB 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.”

The president followed up those remarks by falsely declaring, in all-caps, “Chicago is the murder capital of the world!”

Other cities in the U.S. have a higher murder rate than Chicago’s 24 per 100,000 people, including Memphis, St. Louis, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Birmingham, and Philadelphia. Worldwide, currently, Colima, Mexico has been dubbed the “murder capital of the world,” with a rate nearly eight times higher than Chicago’s.

Just after Trump’s apparent bid to pave the way for a possible D.C.-style deployment into Chicago, a federal judge blasted the President.

“A federal judge ruled Tuesday that President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth violated federal law by using the US military to help carry out law enforcement activities in and around Los Angeles this summer,” CNN reported. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer “concluded that Trump’s use of thousands of federalized California National Guard members and US Marines to provide protection to federal agents during an aggressive immigration crackdown in the Los Angeles area ran afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th Century law that generally prohibits the use of troops for domestic law enforcement purposes.”

Politico’s Kyle Cheney, one of the first to report on Judge Breyer’s ruling, wrote that “Trump billed his deployment of troops to Los Angeles, starting in early June, as a way of bolstering immigration enforcement efforts amid protests in the city against the president’s deportation agenda. Though Trump has now withdrawn all but 300 of those troops, he is mulling sending troops to other major cities, such as Chicago.”

Responding to the Judge’s ruling, Fox News co-host Jessica Tarlov noted, “Get ready for this to happen when Trump deploys the Guard to Chicago.”

CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere observed, “this is a court win for Newsom that could have a wider effect as Trump looks at more National Guard deployments.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet