Mayor Rahm Emanuel met with President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday and according to al least one account it went “very good.” No, not Trump, from whom we’ve come to expect that level of analysis. That monosyllabic sentiment was shared by our beloved mayor during a brief assessment of the meeting he gave in the lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan.
“We had a range of issues that we talked about,” Emanuel told reporters. “[It was] a very good meeting with the president-elect, his incoming chief of staff and his incoming senior advisor.”
According to the mayor, the discussion (which I can only assume included a series of aloof utterances and affirmative proclamations by the president-elect) essentially boiled down to a one-sided dialogue on the meaning of the “American dream.”
“I was clear about where I stood and where other mayors stood on immigrants; that we welcome them because they are achieving and striving for the American dream,” said Emanuel, who added that he strongly defended the importance of so called sanctuary cities such as Chicago.
The mayor also hand delivered a letter signed by 17 additional mayors urging the President-elect to reverse his plan to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—a policy that allows undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children to work and study in the country on a temporary basis. “They’re trying to achieve the American dream; they are something we should hold up and embrace,” Emanuel said of DACA students.
Emanuel made no mention of Trump's campaign trail criticism of Chicago's gun violence at epidemic, which the President-elect once claimed, in an interview with Bill O'Reilly, he could solve in a week through the use of tougher policing tactics.
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