Why Is MLB in Chicago Acquiescing to Trump?

September 10, 2025
By: Dave Zirin and Gus O’Connor

Trump is threatening to occupy Chicago while the Cubs are feting the far right.

In 1914, Carl Sandburg famously called Chicago “the City of Big Shoulders.” The poet wrote, “Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.” More than a century later, Chicago is living under the threat of military invasion by its own country, but Sandburg’s city remains “Stormy, husky, brawling.” A National Guard sworn to defend the rights of its residents is poised, according to this country’s commander in chief, to occupy the streets as the first act of this regime’s newly branded Department of War. The messaging by President Donald Trump and the dangerously dim-witted Pete Hegseth isn’t complicated: Their most pressing bogeyman isn’t China or Iran. It’s those fighting for justice in the United States, or as Trump described them during his campaign, “the enemy within.”

Those who refuse to kiss this man’s ring are now effectively enemy combatants in their own country. If you’ve read the more disturbing passages in Hegseth’s book American Crusade, you know the secretary of defense dreams not only of defeating grammar and complete sentences; he also thinks that responsible governance involves ordering police and the military to take sides against “radical leftist” dissenters in a coming “civil war.”