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For Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Labor Day weekend spewed out an inconvenient truth: Nine people killed and 52 wounded in the most violent weekend of the Chicago summer.

Too many gunmen did not get the message that Chicago had crime under control. That might not constitute a “killing field,” to use the frequent Trumpian parlance about our city, but it sure was a long way from a peaceful urban meadow for a holiday picnic.

We’ve said from the start that the nothing-to-see-here, murder-rate-is-down, crime-is-under-control, we-know-best argument from local politicians was a loser.

A total loser.

A tempting loser, for sure, given that impurity of the presidential motivations in sending federal forces to Chicago, an act that all rational beings know is motivated far more by Donald Trump’s thirst for an ego-boosting victory than genuine concern for the well-being of the nation’s third-largest city. If the latter were the case, he’d be arguing not for a hostile takeover but for a cooperative plan. But that would require the man to have some genuine empathy and depart from his usual zero-sum game. Not gonna happen, at least without some bowing and scraping before his imagined throne.

But the plan was a loser nonetheless. And it resulted in a trap sprung shut over the weekend by the city’s young gunmen, with both Pritzker and Johnson now yoked together in its steel teeth, surely to the chagrin of the governor’s political advisers. Not to mention the rest of us, huddled here, wondering what we should do now.

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