Peter Navarro, the senior White House counselor for trade and manufacturing, is calling on Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to "beg" President Donald Trump to deploy the National Guard in Chicago.
In a Substack article, shared without comment by Trump on his Truth Social page Saturday, Navarro framed the move as a necessary step to "restore order and protect the innocent."
"If Gov. Pritzker were serious about saving lives instead of playing red–blue shell games, he’d stop blaming 'red states,' reverse the soft-on-crime agenda, and beg President Trump to send in the National Guard to restore order and protect the innocent because that’s what real leadership looks like when citizens are in danger," said Navarro.
Navarro's call comes as Pritzker and Trump have traded public barbs over crime in Chicago and the broader debate over federal involvement in local law enforcement.
In recent remarks, Pritzker has pushed back on Republican messaging about crime in Democratic-led areas, saying the "worst crime is in red states," a line that Navarro has targeted as misleading.
In the post, Navarro contended that homicide totals are driven primarily by cities and not statewide partisan control.
He said many of the nation's most serious homicide "hot spots" are run by Democratic mayors, including cities located in Republican-led states.
Navarro said "policy is local," pointing to city-level decisions on policing strategy, prosecutors, budgets, and day-to-day enforcement.
In his post, Navarro included "two quick cuts" of 2024 homicide results, one ranking by raw homicides and another by per-capita rates.
He also listed the mayors' party affiliations, including a separate label for cities with nonpartisan elections.
He described Pritzker's "red state" talking point as collapsing under "basic math" and said that, under either ranking method, the highest-burden cities were "overwhelmingly blue-run," with some led by nonpartisan mayors.
"Democrats have spent years cheering on 'defund the police' experiments, pushing cashless-bail revolving doors, and shielding criminals behind sanctuary-city directives that refuse even to cooperate on deporting violent illegal aliens," Navarro wrote.
"The results are as tragic as they are predictable: Demoralized cops, repeat offenders back on the street, and neighborhoods living under a siren soundtrack," he added.
Navarro cited city police end-of-year releases and a multi-city working paper from the Rochester Institute of Technology's Center for Public Safety Initiatives and said his per-capita calculations used the Census Bureau's "Vintage 2024" city population estimates.
Pritzker, for his part, has said the National Guard is not needed in Chicago and has accused Trump of trying to inflame tensions for political advantage.
During a recent tour meant to counter Trump's crime claims, Pritzker said that Trump was "trying to inflame something that will cause a problem that he can then point at."
The White House and Illinois officials have continued to clash over the scope of federal authority and the role of state and local leaders in responding to crime, particularly in Chicago, where political leaders have defended their strategy and rejected calls for outside intervention.
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