Trump is threatening to occupy Chicago, and his “youth” chief Charlie Kirk is getting picture ops with the Cubs’ infielders.
The solar units over Wrigley Discipline throughout a recreation between the Chicago Cubs and the Milwaukee Brewers. Charlie Kirk posed with Cubs gamers Matt Shaw and Michael Busch on the sphere after that evening’s recreation.
(Geoff Stellfox / Getty Pictures)
In 1914, Carl Sandburg famously referred to as Chicago “the City of Big Shoulders.” The poet wrote, “Come and present me one other metropolis with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and powerful and crafty.” Greater than a century later, Chicago resides beneath the specter of army invasion by its personal nation, however Sandburg’s metropolis stays “Stormy, husky, brawling.” A Nationwide Guard sworn to defend the rights of its residents is poised, based on this nation’s commander in chief, to occupy the streets as the primary act of this regime’s newly branded Division of Warfare. The messaging by President Donald Trump and the dangerously dim-witted Pete Hegseth isn’t sophisticated: Their most urgent bogeyman isn’t China or Iran. It’s these preventing for justice in america, or as Trump described them throughout his marketing campaign, “the enemy inside.”
Those that refuse to kiss this man’s ring are actually successfully enemy combatants in their very own nation. In the event you’ve learn the more disturbing passages in Hegseth’s e-book American Campaign, you realize the secretary of protection goals not solely of defeating grammar and full sentences; he additionally thinks that accountable governance includes ordering police and the army to take sides towards “radical leftist” dissenters in a coming “civil warfare.”
Hegseth desires to see his “fellow Individuals” who suppose, act, and stay in another way from him subjected to army violence. Like Trump’s total royal courtroom, Hegseth doesn’t work for us. The GOP has lengthy stoked its base by feeding it racist caricatures of Chicago. Now the Republican Occasion is able to stay out discuss radio’s 40-year propaganda fever dream and stomp what Trump’s balding, 31-year-old “youth” chief Charlie Kirk calls “the cockroaches” of this exceptional metropolis.
Kirk, nevertheless, is greater than a boring racist with a penchant for old-school Nazi verbiage. He was raised in Arlington Heights, a gentle, tony Chicago suburb, which explains an incredible deal, together with why he’s a diehard Cubs fan. On August 20, after a 4–3 Cubs victory, Kirk was allowed to take the sphere and pose with two of the workforce’s stars, Michael Busch and Matt Shaw. Kirk wrapped his arms across the two gamers (each white). Shaw brandished a glad thumbs-up, and Busch grinned for the cameras. When Kirk posted the photo on-line, individuals in Chicago had been furious. Right here is that this suburban dork, petrified of the large, dangerous metropolis and thrilled on the considered the army on each nook, smiling subsequent to a pair of the town’s greatest baseball gamers.
The Nation spoke with Rory Fanning, a former Military Ranger and writer, who leafleted round Wrigley following Kirk’s go to. For the Cubs “to be related to this rabid white nationalist who’s entrance and middle on this [political] debate proper now,” units a horrible instance, he stated. Referring to 2 Latino gamers on the workforce, Fanning requested, “How does Miguel Amaya really feel? Willi Castro?”
Present Challenge
“You simply can’t let these things slide,” he added, “significantly on this local weather the place it appears like the correct is so emboldened.”
Fanning stated that the Cubs group first owes its followers an apology—“significantly the Black, brown, homosexual, transgender girls followers,” he stated. However he argues the Cubs ought to go even additional: “Charlie Kirk must be banned from Wrigley Discipline.”
That’s not more likely to occur beneath the possession of the Ricketts household, who has owned a 95 % stake within the Cubs and Wrigley Discipline since 2009. Paterfamilias Joe Ricketts was beneath fireplace in 2019 after a sequence of racist and Islamophobic e-mails had been leaked to the net publication Splinter. The subsequent yr, Todd Ricketts, the youngest of his 4 siblings, rose to prominence as Donald Trump’s chief fundraiser for his reelection marketing campaign in 2020, resulting in an outcry of protest from Cubs followers. (One may bear in mind Todd’s earlier work in 2010 when he went undercover at Wrigley for the tv present Undercover Boss and bought fired for not cleansing bathrooms correctly.) A June 2020 editorial within the Chicago Solar-Occasions requested: “What are you to do should you’re a fan of the Chicago Cubs however the workforce’s homeowners embody a man who’s main the hassle to reelect essentially the most divisive, damaging and incompetent president in fashionable American historical past? We’d say there’s at all times the White Sox.”
And but there was no such editorial outcry in 2025 about Kirk sullying the sacred areas of Wrigley Discipline. Fanning advised The Nation, “Wrigley is means greater than the Ricketts. Wrigley is means greater than these two doofus gamers who come out with Charlie Kirk.”
The Cubs are simply a part of Main League Baseball’s capitulation to the Trump regime. Along with ensuring to flatter their decaying Pricey Chief, groups and networks now run ICE recruitment adverts in between innings. Throughout a Mets recreation, you may see commercials that blare, “Be part of ICE. Catch the worst of the worst.” Provided that Main League Baseball is dependent upon immigrant labor from Latin America, its complicity with this regime is nauseating, particularly when contemplating that Venezuelans are the second-largest immigrant group within the MLB and an open goal of this administration. And nonetheless Kirk’s photoshoot at Cubs is very galling. It was like a pretentious Brit in jodhpurs overseeing colonized India and considering he represents progress. This suburban Illinois man-child, this strolling argument towards white superiority, doesn’t know Chicago exterior of Wrigley. 1000’s of courageous Chicagoans crammed the streets on Saturday refusing to stay beneath inside occupation in their very own nation. Kirk will bluster, however actually at a distance. He would by no means dare face the “Metropolis of Large Shoulders.”
Donald Trump desires us to simply accept the present state of affairs with out making a scene. He desires us to consider that if we resist, he’ll harass us, sue us, and reduce funding for these we care about; he might sic ICE, the FBI, or the Nationwide Guard on us.
We’re sorry to disappoint, however the reality is that this: The Nation received’t again right down to an authoritarian regime. Not now, not ever.
Day after day, week after week, we’ll proceed to publish really impartial journalism that exposes the Trump administration for what it’s and develops methods to gum up its equipment of repression.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Writer, The Nation
