Copyright The Daily Beast
President Donald Trump has threatened to deploy troops to Chicago over a distressed shopping center that does not exist. “The Miracle Mile Shopping Center in Chicago, once considered our Nation’s BEST, now has a more than 28% vacancy factor, and is ready to call it quits unless something is done about the murder and crime, which is prevalent throughout the City,” the 79-year-old president raged in a Truth Social post just past midnight on Tuesday. There is no “Miracle Mile Shopping Center” in Illinois’ largest city. While there are shopping districts with that name in California, Florida, New York, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, it would not appear the president plans to stage a military intervention in Chicago by dispatching personnel to other cities between 800 and 2,000 miles away. Trump likely intended to refer to Chicago’s famous Magnificent Mile shopping district in his late-night post, but he also appears to have muddled his source material. Trump seems to have drawn on a Nov. 8 article by the conservative site Just the News headlined “Chicago Blues: Downtown office space vacancy rate jumps to record high levels,” which outlines how over the past two years, businesses cutting their office space in Chicago’s Loop district have resulted in about 2.3 million square feet being vacated. That story makes no mention of crime rates as a driving factor behind the trend of increasing vacancies, instead attributing the changes to structural shifts in work culture following the COVID-19 pandemic, with more employers offering remote or hybrid roles. Under the second MAGA administration, the federal government has undertaken multiple deployments of law enforcement agents to Chicago in an effort to combat what Trump insists is an immigrant-driven crime wave in the Windy City. That claim is similarly unsupported by the facts. Statistics released by the Chicago Mayor’s Office indicate that violent crime over the past year is down 22 percent, including a 32 percent reduction in robberies and a 49 percent reduction in carjackings. Murders in the city this summer were at their lowest in more than 60 years. Trump has sought to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago, but has faced pushback from local Democratic leaders, along with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker. The president has already deployed troops to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Memphis, Tennessee. Trump’s administration has now apparently made plans for Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander who has led the MAGA administration’s anti-immigration blitz in Chicago, and a number of his agents to leave the city amid mounting outcry over what critics describe as an excessive use of force during arrests.
