Perennial political candidate Willie Wilson encouraged President Donald Trump on Wednesday to send the National Guard to Chicago, insisting that a military intervention could help curb violence while invoking the killing of his son in the south suburbs.
“It’s personal for me, from personal loss,” Wilson said at a news conference in the Loop. “But also personal for me as a citizen of Chicago.”
Wilson’s son, Omar, was shot and killed in July 1995 at a home in Hazel Crest. A businessman and political outsider who has lost three nonpartisan mayoral elections, Wilson opined Wednesday on Chicago’s intractable gun violence and said Democrats “haven’t been able to fix it.”
“People who happen to want to help, whatever the motive may be,” Wilson said, “I welcome it.”
Trump’s threats to send the National Guard to Chicago — despite a significant drop in crime — have been met with stiff opposition from Gov. JB Pritzker, Mayor Brandon Johnson and other Democratic lawmakers.
Wilson previously ran for president as a Democrat in 2016, when Trump won as a Republican, but later lost a race for Sen. Dick Durbin’s seat in 2020, running under the “Willie Wilson Party.”
Wilson told reporters he supported Trump’s decision earlier this summer to send thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell protests against immigration arrests that grew chaotic at times. Trump recently sent the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and has federalized the city’s police force.
“If [Trump] hadn’t done that in California, would it have been the same today?” Wilson asked. “I think not. I’m saying at all costs, protect people’s lives.”
However, the lack of an emergency could be a key difference between a National Guard deployment here and what happened in California in June.
Pritzker told reporters Monday: “First thing, we’re gonna take him to court because it’s illegal, unconstitutional, and frankly, it’s un-American to send troops into a city the way he wants to fight crime.”
Should federal troops be deployed in Chicago, it would mark the first time since 1968, when the National Guard was deployed after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and then during the Democratic National Convention.
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