Mr. President — you say you could make Chicago safe in one month. Aim higher: make it safe after the month is over. Here's what to do instead of the troops.

Good morning, Mr. President.

It is Orange June here — the month I spend writing letters about guns — and a few minutes ago I finished one to a deputy mayor in Chicago you have probably never heard of, a man named Emmanuel Andre. After the worst weekend his city has had in a while, he stood on the City Hall steps and asked for a permanent Department of Gun Violence Prevention. I told him to build it. This letter is to you, and it is the other half of that one. You looked at the same weekend he did and reached for a different answer. I want to make you a case for a better one — not because the troops are evil, but because they are temporary, and the problem is not.

Let me say first what we agree on, because it's real. Seven people are dead, almost forty are wounded, and a Friday-night crowd in Princeton Park got cut down in a few seconds. You looked at that and you were angry, and you wanted to do something big and do it fast. I don't doubt that for a second, and I won't pretend I do. A president who shrugs at a weekend like that would be worse than one who overreaches. So we start from the same place: this is intolerable, and somebody with power ought to move.

But here is the trouble with one month, sir, and you already know it in your bones because you are a builder. One month ends. Troops go home. The cameras that followed the convoy in follow it back out, and the week after the occupation lifts, the gun is still on the same corner it was on in June — because the gun never agreed to your thirty days. You cannot garrison your way out of a standing condition. The last time you tried to put the Guard into Illinois, the state took you to court, and you spent the month fighting the governor instead of the violence. Even if you'd won, you'd have won a month. The city needs a decade.

So here is what I'd do instead if I were holding your pen, and most of it only you can do. Stop offering Chicago an occupation it will sue to refuse, and offer it the one thing the federal government can give that a city cannot give itself: money that lasts. Andre and his people are trying to stand up a real institution — funded, staffed, answering the phone on the quiet Tuesdays, not just the bloody Sundays. That is exactly the kind of thing that dies in a city budget the first slow year. You could make it un-killable. A line of federal dollars, renewed past the next election, is something no mayor and no governor can guarantee on their own. You can. That is a power troops don't give you.

And then pick up the phone to Pritzker — not to win the morning, but to ask him a plain question: what does Chicago actually need that only Washington can send. You'll hate the first thing he says and he'll hate that you called, and it will still be worth more than every Truth Social post on the subject combined, because a phone call can't be sued and can't be voted down and doesn't expire in thirty days. You are better in a room than people give you credit for. Get in the room. The fight is free content; the call is the job.

I'll tell you the same thing I tell everyone in these letters, Mr. President, because it's the whole month in one line: the crowd is not the problem. People have gathered to celebrate since before there was an Illinois. What turned a Juneteenth block party into thirteen people on the ground in a few seconds is the gun that's in the mix now in a way it wasn't a generation ago. An army can clear a corner for a month. It cannot change that fact. Only the slow, boring, permanent things change that — the kind of thing a deputy mayor is begging for and a president could pay for.

You said you could make Chicago safe in one month. I believe you want to. So aim higher than the month. Anybody with enough soldiers can hold a city for thirty days; the country has watched a dozen of them try, here and overseas, and the thirty-first day always comes. Only a handful of people who have ever lived could write the check that keeps a prevention department alive for ten years, and right now you are one of them. That is the bigger flex, sir. That's the one they remember. Send the money, not the month.

— Michael

The Official Internet Press Secretary

Spotlight Dispatch · Orange June · June 21, 2026