White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller raged about a made-up “bloody killing field” in America during an appearance on Fox News.
After deploying thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles and seizing control of Washington, D.C.’s law enforcement, President Donald Trump has set his sights on Chicago for his next troop deployment on American soil.
The president and his deputies have been working overtime to convince Americans that Chicago is facing a public safety crisis—despite law enforcement data suggesting otherwise—that would supposedly justify the deployment.
Speaking to Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Monday, Miller called the Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization” and claimed Chicago had “shut down” its very much still-intact police department.
“They’ve handcuffed law enforcement. And as President Trump says, they have turned the streets of Chicago into a bloody killing field,” he ranted.
Killing fields are typically associated with the Cambodian genocide, when Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge government killed an estimated 3 million people between 1976 and 1978. Many of the mass murders were committed in rural sites, which the media-obsessed Trump has quite possibly only heard of thanks to the Oscar-winning 1984 film The Killing Fields.
Asked to elaborate on the “killing field” reference, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told the Daily Beast that, “Anyone with common sense knows that crime is out of control in Chicago – even the city’s residents complain about how out of control crime is,” and cited several news articles from the past year.
She also said Chicago has the highest murder rate of any U.S. city—a claim that is contradicted by FBI data, according to an analysis by Axios.
During a speech on Monday, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker disputed Trump and Miller’s claim that the state isn’t addressing crime, saying his state has dramatically reduced violent crime by hiring more police, giving them more funding, banning assault weapons and ghost guns, and investing in community violence intervention programs.
Speaking to Hannity, Miller nevertheless made similarly wild claims about Washington, D.C., being an actual war zone.
“Here in Washington, D.C., before President Trump launched the federal law enforcement liberation in D.C., there was a murder on the streets of this town every other day, body after body after body after body,” he said. “Residents were afraid to go to restaurants. They were afraid to go into entire neighborhoods. They were getting, right and left, robbed and beaten.”
Now, he said, the city has been homicide-free for two weeks, making it the “safest” it has ever been in its entire history.
In fact, violent crime in Washington, D.C., was already at a 30-year low, and there were weeks in the spring when no homicides were reported, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department data shows. The homicide rate in the nation’s capital isn’t even in the top 10 of cities nationwide, Axios found.
Instead, 13 of the top 20 cities were located in states with Republican governors, according to Axios. At the state level, eight of the top 10 states with the highest murder rates are red states, Pritzker said during his speech.
Chicago and Illinois do not appear on either list, he added.
Trump, however, hasn’t made any plans to deploy troops to cities in red states, nor has he worked with local governors or law enforcement agencies to plan to the operations. That suggests he’s not really interested in fighting crime or making America safer, the Illinois governor argued.
Miller, however, said Democrats should be “jumping up and down and saying, ‘Thank you, President Trump, thank you for saving our lives. Thank you for saving our cities.’’’
Instead, he complained to Hannity, “They’re saying, ‘President Trump, how dare you save our lives? How dare you save our children? How dare you save our city?’ The Democrat Party [sic], Sean, that exists today, it disgusts me.”
