Mayor Lori Lightfoot lashed out at First Daughter Ivanka Trump on Tuesday for shining a spotlight on Chicago’s “deadliest weekend of the year”— and, according to the mayor, getting all of her facts wrong.
“As we grieve over the evil mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, let us not overlook that Chicago experienced its deadliest weekend of the year,” Trump, a White House aide to her father, tweeted.
“With 7 dead and 52 wounded near a playground in the Windy City — and little national outrage or media coverage — we mustn’t become numb to the violence faced by inner city communities every day.”
With 7 dead and 52 wounded near a playground in the Windy City- and little national outrage or media coverage- we mustn’t become numb to the violence faced by inner city communities every day.
— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) August 6, 2019
Lightfoot was livid — and not only because the Twitter blast came on the day after the mayor accused President Donald Trump of “blowing every racist, xenophobic dog whistle….and when you do that, animals come out.”
The mayor’s fury stemmed from the fact that Ivanka Trump got her facts wrong and was spreading them like wildfire to her 6.8 million followers.
“That’s the danger of somebody with a platform and audience [that big who] doesn’t know what they’re talking about and getting the fundamental facts wrong that they could easily figure out if they had the decency to actually reach out to us if they wanted to be a constructive and engaged partner,” Lightfoot said, almost spitting out her words.
“She got the numbers wrong. She got the location wrong. That’s the danger of trying to governing via tweet. If they want to help, they should actually call us….and we would offer them specific ways in which the federal government could actually partner with us to help address the issues on the ground.”
Lightfoot said she reached out to Ivanka Trump, with whom she met personally during an inaugural trip to Washington D.C. in April. So far, there has been no response.
And where exactly did the president’s daughter stray from the facts?
“She said seven killed and 52 shot near a playground. That’s not what happened. She’s conflating the whole weekend activity into one incident,” Police Supt. Eddie Johnson said.
Lightfoot added, “It wasn’t a playground. It was a park. It wasn’t seven dead. It wasn’t 52 wounded in one incident, which is what this suggests. It’s misleading.”
The mayor said she has “no idea” whether or not Ivanka Trump is lashing back at her for laying the blame for mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton squarely at the president’s feet.
“What I’m focused on….is working hard every day with the superintendent and his leadership team to keep people in our city safe. I’m not gonna be distracted by nonsense tweets from people who don’t know what they’re talking about,” she said.
On Tuesday, Lightfoot held her weekly “accountability” meeting with police brass that follows every violent summer weekend.
She talked about two major incidents — both of them “gang-related, with some narcotics nexis,” as Johnson put it — that turned the West Side into a war zone. One of them was “literally a petty fight” that ended in retaliation, the mayor said.
“The day was peaceful until the late night on Saturday into Sunday. We know those are challenging times. From 11 p.m. to about 4 a.m. is when we’re seeing a lot of the shooting activity….It’s seemingly peaceful activities that mushroom into something else,” she said.
“We are looking again — not only at the police department, but other city resources to hone in our strategy to get people off the streets during that time. We are meeting with our street outreach partners and doing an all-hands-on deck approach because, what I call the gap time is where we’re seeing a lot of the danger.”
Lightfoot also intensified her running battle with Chief Cook County Judge Timothy Evans over the role judges have in gun violence. She held up photographs of automatic weapons and high-powered ammunition seized from offenders on Friday night who were subsequently released on $10,000 bond.
“These are custom automatic weapons. This is called a drum magazine that can hold 200-plus bullets. And they were caught with armor-piercing weapons. The only reason that you want to have armor-piercing weapons is that you want to kill police officers,” Lightfoot said.
“I need to understand from the judges who think that these people are not dangers to the community how I explain that to people on the West Side and on the South Side who, in many instances, are living in a war zone.”
Pressed on what would be appropriate for those offenders, Lightfoot said, “Detention with no bond.”
Anything short of that, she said, sends a message to residents of those neighborhoods that, “Nobody cares about them.”
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