Rahm Emanuel's mayoral record 'disqualifying' for a possible presidential contender, Johnson says

As former Mayor Rahm Emanuel revs up for a 2028 presidential bid, Mayor Brandon Johnson on Thursday described Emanuel’s eight years as mayor as “disqualifying."

Johnson did not identify Emanuel by name when he talked about the one Democrat in the crowded field of possible presidential contenders whom he would like to, as he put it, “x-out.”

But there was no doubt about whose potential presidential campaign Johnson was attacking, even before Emanuel has formally announced.

“I have very deep concerns about the former mayor of the city of Chicago. What he did in Chicago — from school closures to privatization to austere budgets,” Johnson said during his monthly appearance on WBEZ-FM’s “Ask the Mayor” program before a live audience.

“There was a boy who was murdered by a police officer and it was covered up," Johnson added. "That’s disqualifying for me.” Johnson’s cover-up allegation was a reference to the 2014 murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by now-convicted former Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke.

Dashcam video of Van Dyke shooting McDonald 16 times while the teenager was walking away from the officer with a knife in his hand was withheld by the city until a circuit judge ordered the city to release it 14 months after the shooting.

Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder and aggravated battery. He was released from Taylorville Correctional Center in central Illinois in February 2022 after serving less than half of his 81-month sentence.

In the furor that followed release of the video, Emanuel weathered weeks of protests and unprecedented demands for his resignation before ultimately choosing political retirement over the uphill battle for a third mayoral term. In an attempt to tamp down the controversy, he told the City Council a “code of silence” existed in the Chicago Police Department.

Johnson’s political broadside came a day after Emanuel appeared at a Wall Street Journal Live event in Washington and floated a 10% federal tax on online sports betting and prediction markets to boost revenue for science and technology. On Thursday, Emanuel refused to respond to Johnson's remarks.

“I’m not going to engage. Whatever,” Emanuel told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Former longtime Inspector General Joe Ferguson spent much of his tenure at loggerheads with Emanuel. He reiterated Thursday what he wrote to members of the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee who were deciding in 2019 whether or not to confirm Emanuel as U.S. Ambassador to Japan.

“That is not the fact” that there was a cover-up, according to “an evidence-based record that was developed from many forms of inquiry and investigation,” Ferguson said. “And we’re better served not relitigating controversies of the past."

Ferguson said he was not surprised by Johnson’s attack on Emanuel with just a few months to go before Johnson must decide whether or not to seek a second term.

“In a heightened political environment, we’re always going to hear things like this,” said Ferguson, who now serves as president of the Civic Federation. “The problems of the city are of such magnitude that it’s critically important that all attention be focused on them because we have work to do.”

A pragmatic centrist who has never backed down from a political fight, Emanuel has long been in the cross. hairs of Johnson and his fellow far-left Democrats.

As a paid organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, Johnson protested Emanuel’s decision to cancel teacher pay raises, triggering the 2012 teachers strike, as well as Emanuel’s decision to close 50 schools in one fell swoop.

Johnson talks often about having “taken an arrest” while protesting Emanuel’s decision to close Dyett High School.

Last year, Johnson accused Emanuel of having devised and “executed” the anti-Black, neoliberal “playbook” that Johnson says is now being followed by President Donald Trump.

Johnson said that he had watched an interview with Emanuel and was “incredibly bothered by his temerity.”

At the time, Johnson said there had been a “long, sustained movement” in Chicago to push back against the “neoliberal agenda” that Emanuel championed to “set up austere budgets” targeting African Americans and the “public accommodations” that support them.

“The playbook that Donald Trump is running is a playbook that Emanuel executed in this city,” Johnson said then. “We didn’t get here because we just happen to have a tyrant in the White House. We got here because someone gave him the script. ... The shutting of schools. The firing of Black women. Privatizing our public education system is why the system is as jacked up as it is today.”