Even fellow Democrats have turned on the mayor
When a politician is flailing, they lash out. And Brandon Johnson, ladies and gentlemen, is flailing like a panicked kid in a wave pool. Chicago’s mayor is underwater — and instead of grabbing a life preserver, Johnson is hurling rocks at people on the shore. Most recently? He’s gone full kamikaze against, of all people, Rahm Emanuel.
Yes, that Rahm Emanuel. The guy who hasn’t been mayor since 2019. The guy who’s been U.S. ambassador to Japan for the past few years. The guy whose track record on education, crime, and city finances now looks positively Churchillian compared to the dumpster fire Johnson ignited at City Hall. Yet somehow, in Johnson’s increasingly unhinged worldview, Emanuel is to blame for everything from school funding woes to Donald Trump’s White House playbook.
It’s not just conservatives who are wondering what Johnson is talking about. The mayor's own fellow Democrats are openly scorning him — and with good reason.
Picking a fight with Rambo
At his weekly City Hall presser last Tuesday, Johnson was asked a basic question about school funding and a pending $300 million high-interest loan weighing on Chicago Public Schools. Instead of answering, he launched into a tirade about Rahm Emanuel’s “temerity,” accusing the former mayor of writing the script that Donald Trump supposedly followed in the White House.
Yes, really. Johnson said, and we quote: “The playbook that Donald Trump is running is a playbook that Emanuel executed in this city.” He didn’t stop there. He accused Emanuel of executing an “anti-Black, neoliberal” agenda, of “firing Black women,” and of harboring “immense disdain” for Black and Brown children. He even claimed Emanuel once told late CTU president Karen Lewis that 25% of kids “won’t become anything.”
It was a wild, desperate rant that made Johnson look less like a mayor and more like a Reddit poster in a downward spiral. And it immediately raised one obvious question: Why Rahm?
Simple: Rahm Emanuel is everything Brandon Johnson isn’t: Disciplined, competent, pragmatic — and popular enough to win tough elections in a city that’s notoriously hard to govern. Emanuel closed nearly 50 underutilized schools in 2013, a move that enraged the left but preserved the city’s financial solvency. He cut budgets. He made tough calls. And now, seven years after leaving office, he remains a viable contender for higher office. Johnson, meanwhile, is polling somewhere south of contagious disease.
In short: Rahm is the ghost of mayors past — and Johnson can’t exorcise him.
Democrats aren’t buying it
Johnson may think demonizing Emanuel will rally the radical left to his side, but even that shrinking coalition isn’t taking the bait. His fellow Democrats aren’t playing along — they’re rolling their eyes.
Political strategist Peter Giangreco, a veteran Democrat, said Johnson’s Emanuel-bashing was a “false enemy” tactic meant to distract from Johnson’s real problem: His own performance. “When your approval rating is below 20%, I guess attacking someone else is how you try to pull yourself up,” Giangreco said. “But when Johnson makes the comparison to Emanuel, it just reminds people how much better the city ran under Emanuel.”
Ouch.
Democratic warhorse James Carville, never one to sugarcoat, put it even more bluntly: “Incompetent people are jealous of competent people,” he said, blasting Johnson’s stunt as pure deflection. “Brandon Johnson is a guy who has failed at his job and he’s very insecure about it.”
Carville, a longtime ally of Emanuel since their Clinton White House days, also offered a devastating reminder: “Chicagoans are going to ask themselves, whose judgment do they trust — Brandon Johnson’s or Barack Obama’s?” That’s not a great rhetorical question for Brandon.
The irony of trash-talking Rahm
The real kicker? By bringing up Rahm Emanuel, Johnson is reminding voters just how good they had it before the CTU bought themselves a mayor’s seat.
Emanuel — whatever his faults — was a numbers guy. He cut budgets, raised property taxes to shore up pensions, and invested in infrastructure. Under his watch, test scores went up, violent crime trended down, and cranes dotted the skyline.
Brandon Johnson, by contrast, is facing a billion-dollar-plus budget deficit. His school funding plan is a fantasy. His violent crime strategy is invisible. And when it comes to hard decisions, he waffles, dithers, or blames others. He’s turning Chicago into Portland with worse weather.
The real irony? Rahm was able to close those 50 schools because he had the guts to admit they needed to be closed. Declining enrollment, underused facilities, ballooning costs — it was a necessary move. The city’s black population was already shrinking, and school resources had to be consolidated to serve the kids who remained. Was it politically risky? Absolutely. But it helped keep the budget from spinning off into the fiscal Twilight Zone — where Johnson now resides.
When you’re losing Walter Burnett
Even Johnson’s allies in the City Council are struggling to back him up. Remember: Walter Burnett, alderman of the 27th Ward and chair of Johnson’s own Zoning Committee, once praised Emanuel in emotional terms, highlighting his support for public housing residents, the homeless, and returning citizens. “You’ve helped so many people. They come up to me on the street,” Burnett said tearfully during Emanuel’s final City Council meeting.
Compare Burnett's emotional tribute to Emanuel with Johnson’s track record: Handouts to illegal immigrants, war with the police union, and soaring public sector bills with no plan to pay for them.
An Emanuel confidante summed up the mood perfectly, calling Johnson’s remarks “an embarrassing attempt to distract from consistent leadership failures.”
Exactly.
Cory Booker cosplay
What’s the game here? Johnson seems to be trying to rebrand himself as a progressive warrior, a man of the people taking on The System — except the “system” in this case is a former mayor who hasn’t held local office in six years and who received glowing tributes from black aldermen when he left.
It’s Cory Booker cosplay. Bad cosplay. Johnson wants to be seen as a principled fighter battling corporate Democrats and institutional racism. However, Johnson is no Spartacus — he’s just a confused figure spinning conspiracy theories about dead political foes while his own administration burns.
The verdict
At the end of the day, this whole episode exposes the fundamental flaw of Brandon Johnson’s leadership: He’s better at picking fights than solving problems.
Instead of tackling the school budget crisis, he blames Rahm. Instead of finding new revenue streams, he stages press conferences. Instead of earning the public’s trust, he screams into the void, hoping someone on the far left will still like him.
Chicagoans are waking up. They’re seeing through the noise. And they’re realizing that while Rahm Emanuel may have been tough, technocratic, and occasionally arrogant — at least he kept the lights on.
Brandon Johnson? He’s turning out to be all smoke, with no fire escape.
