EXTRA: Second City certainly ain’t ‘Ground Zero’ of the DJT Fan Club

It shouldn’t be a shock that, as has been pointed out in many reports, that President Donald J. Trump didn’t actually say anything specific about Illinois when he made his first visit as president earlier this week to the Land of Lincoln.

A sunny Saturday in Chicago … 

Trump was on hand to tout the U.S. Steel plant that re-opened in Granite City (near St. Louis). Trying to take personal credit for it, he went out of his way to avoid saying anything that anyone in Chicago could construe as a positive.

NOT THAT SUCH acts should be shocking. It is Chicago that is the reason Illinois is solidly in the “blue” column when it comes to electoral support and is one place that can be counted on to give its Electoral College support in 2020 to whomever runs against Trump for president.

As was evidenced by the political rallying taking place Saturday in the Near North Side’s Washington Square Park. The one-time Bughouse Square where the radicals would gather and literally stand on soap boxes to rant and rage about whatever issue caught their fancy. Once a year, they try to recreate that ol' spirit.

I stopped by briefly and caught a bit of the rhetoric – a woman complaining that modern politicos are all for gentrification that tries to attract cutesy businesses like an Amazon.com facility rather than a steel mill. Which is true enough -- the steel mills where my grandfathers were employed are both long-abandoned, and generations of people who thought they would have life-time jobs there have had to come up with alternate schemes for life.

Not that she, or many others on hand Saturday, would have been inclined to look favorably upon Trump and the actions he has taken that he claims are the reason U.S. Steel was able to reopen their plant in the St. Louis. The park was also filled with lots of anti-Trump rhetoric.

INCLUDING THE BANNERS that I couldn’t help but notice hanging all around the park.

… wasn't a pleasant place for everyone. Photos by Gregory Tejeda

Not that it was all feisty rhetoric by people wanting to play “anarchist” for an afternoon. There were those making a point of walking their dogs through the park, and for all I know making sure their pets deposited their loads of poop by those people they most disagreed with.

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