I was going to start this article by providing yet another roundup of the horrific number of shootings in Chicago between Friday and yesterday, but tragically, at this point, that’s just pretty much another day at the office for the Windy City. Support from City Hall for the embattled police is thin at best and things have been spiraling further out of control. All of this has led the President of the local Fraternal Order of Police to sound the alarm and go over Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s head. He’s asked the President to send in the troops and help save them, calling the Mayor a “complete failure.” (CBS Chicago)

Chicago Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara Jr. issued a letter to President Donald Trump on Saturday, asking for help from the federal government to fight “chaos” in Chicago and calling Mayor Lori Lightfoot a “complete failure.”

The letter was posted on the FOP Lodge 7 Facebook page on Saturday, with a note that it would “get to President Trump’s desk one way or another.”

In the letter, Catanzara wrote: “I am certain you are aware of the chaos currently affecting our city on a regular basis now. I am writing to formally ask you for help from the federal government. Mayor Lightfoot has proved to be a complete failure who is either unwilling or unable to maintain law and order here.”

So how did Mayor Lightfoot respond to this obvious slap to her job performance? She described it as “a litany of nonsense.”

The mayor also slammed Trump for “a litany of nonsense” in a letter the White House recently sent her, urging her to “secure your city.”

The latest flare-up came after White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany accused Lightfoot on Thursday of not doing enough to tackle gun violence in Chicago, calling her a “derelict mayor.”

Lightfoot fired back on Twitter, saying “Hey Karen, watch your mouth.” Karen has become a stereotypical name to refer to rude and self-entitled middle-aged white women.

The Mayor may not be “backing down” as CBS put it, but that may not matter in a couple of days. FOP President Catanzara turned out to be a smart cookie. He’s clearly familiar with the way Donald Trump operates and knows that the President loves to be the guy to come riding to the rescue. Whether or not the FOP letter made its way directly to the Oval Office, Trump just announced that more than 150 federal officers are heading to Chitown to help restore order and the rule of law. (Associated Press)

The Department of Homeland Security was planning to deploy about 150 Homeland Security Investigations agents to Chicago, according to an official with direct knowledge of the plans who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity. Those agents generally do lengthy investigations into human trafficking, drugs and weapons smuggling and child exploitation, but they have also been deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border during the height of the crisis there to help.

The Trump administration sent federal officers in Portland, Oregon, after weeks of protests there over police brutality and racial injustice that followed the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Oregon’s governor and Portland’s mayor have expressed anger with the presence of the federal agents, saying that the city’s protests had started to ease just as the federal agents started taking action.

However, Trump, framing such protests in the nation’s large cities as a failure by “liberal Democrats” who run them, praised the officers’ actions and said he was looking to send agents to other cities.

Under more normal conditions, it would be nice if the President and the Mayor of one of our larger cities could be seen cooperating and working to solve problems like this together. Sadly, these are far from normal times. Lori Lightfoot is part of “the Resistance” and knows that she must be seen as opposing the Bad Orange Man no matter what he says or does. But at the same time, she’s allowed her city to crash out of control, with mobs ruling the streets in too many districts.

Neither she nor the ACLU really has any say over whether or not more DHS personnel show up in Chicago. They have offices there at federal buildings that are not under her control. The President can’t tell the Chicago PD what to do, but the Mayor can’t boss around the Department of Homeland Security. This isn’t any sort of standoff taking place. The Mayor doesn’t have a paddle to put in the water here.

What’s really a pity is the fact that Lightfoot can’t see the light, for lack of a better term. Help is on the way and her city is in desperate need of it. And yet, here she is, standing in the doorway and trying to prevent some relief from arriving to secure her streets and dampen down the rising tide of gun violence and gang warfare that has broken out under the cloak of the George Floyd protests. But as with all of the other large cities with liberal leadership, the fault for this lies first and foremost with the citizens of Chicago. They keep electing these people to office and now they are reaping what they have sown. It’s sad, but it’s true.