Chicago politicians get crash course on how Trump will govern

Members of Chicago's political class got a crash course Wednesday on how President Donald Trump will govern, as they fretted over an executive order on immigration that could cost the city millions in federal funding and scrambled to respond to a Twitter threat to "send in the feds" to fix the city's gun violence.

The Democratic response to the Republican president's moves was a unified one. On gun crime: Send us money to combat violence, but don't dare send in the National Guard. On immigration: Don't cut our funding, but if you do, we'll still protect immigrants from deportation and maintain our sanctuary city status.

For Trump, it was the latest example of the president placing whole swaths of the country — in this case, those who live in and represent urban America — on the defensive as he focuses on issues that got him elected as part of a get-tough-on-immigration and crack-down-on-crime agenda.

But if Trump was nodding to his political base, the moves also allowed Chicago Democrats to appeal to theirs: racial and ethnic minorities and progressives who long have advocated for immigration reform and sought crime-fighting solutions that don't violate civil rights.

Read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-rahm-emanuel-donald-trump-sanctuary-city-violence-20170125-story.html