Chicago’s a mess. You have an incompetent mayor—grossly incompetent. We have a governor that refuses to admit he has problems. Everybody knows how bad it is. This open borders nightmare flooded our country with fentanyl and with people that shouldn’t be here. Some of the worst people on earth and illicit drugs decimated American communities and left us with the largest law enforcement challenge in our country’s history.
…
They need help badly. Chicago desperately needs help. We don’t want to lose Chicago.… We want to save these places.… We’re not going to allow this kind of savagery to destroy our society anymore. We’re stopping it. Doing it one by one.
— President Trump narration
The propaganda / trolling video released by the White House followed the September 30 raid by federal agents, as described by PBS:
The music begins low and ominous, with the video showing searchlights skimming along a Chicago apartment building and heavily armed immigration agents storming inside. Guns are drawn. Unmarked cars fill the streets. Agents rappel from a Black Hawk helicopter.
But quickly the soundtrack grows more stirring and the video — edited into a series of dramatic shots and released by the Department of Homeland Security days after the Sept. 30 raid — shows agents leading away shirtless men, their hands zip-tied behind their backs.
Authorities said they were targeting the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, though they also said only two of the 27 immigrants arrested were gang members. They gave few details on the arrests.
The Daily Beast, spying palm trees, reported nearly two weeks ago that much of video content had been filmed last April in Florida, not Chicago. A week after the Daily Beast report, Agence France-Presse dug a bit deeper. In fact, the videos purporting to show the chaos in Chicago, were actually filmed in Texas, South Carolina, Nebraska, California, and Arizona, as well as Florida. There were a number of clips from Chicago as well, but those weren’t scary enough and couldn’t possibly match the Trump rhetoric (in the video) untethered to the facts on the ground and blind to the state sanctioned violence he has inflicted in Democratic cities.
Meanwhile, Tom Homan, White House Border Czar, is fine with police state violence at the hands of masked agents. But he’s upset about rhetoric, not from an administration directing militarized federal agencies, but from No Kings marchers.
“The bloodshed is not over if we don’t address the rhetoric.”
It’s a topsy turvy world in the Trump White House and the MAGA Republican Party.