CHICAGO — President Donald Trump called for Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to be jailed Wednesday, a dramatic rhetorical escalation as he tries to flood the city with federal agents and National Guard troops against the wishes of the local elected officials.

“Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also!” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social.

Pritzker and Johnson quickly fired back with responses to Trump, as the country’s attention centers upon the city.

“I will not back down,” Pritzker wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?”

Pritzker went further later Wednesday in a live interview with MSNBC alongside a rally on Chicago’s Federal Plaza of unionized government workers affected by the ongoing shutdown in Washington.

Calling the president “unhinged” and “a wannabe dictator,” Pritzker turned to the camera and repeated a line he used at a news conference shortly after Trump’s election in November: “If you come for my people, you come through me.”

Holding his wrists out toward the camera, Pritzker added, “So come and get me.”

Johnson struck back with an apparent reference to Trump’s efforts to win a death penalty verdict against the now-exonerated “Central Park Five,” a group of men convicted as teens of a gruesome New York City sexual assault who were exonerated after spending years in prison and have sued Trump for defamation.

“This is not the first time Trump has tried to have a Black man unjustly arrested,” Johnson said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Speaking to local reporters on Federal Plaza, Pritzker said he doesn’t think Trump will make good on his threats, despite his administration’s moves to take legal action against political opponents such as former FBI Director James Comey, who pleaded not guilty Wednesday to charges alleging he lied to Congress.

Trump is “a coward” who “likes to pretend to be a tough guy,” Pritzker said.

“He said he was going to jail (California Gov.) Gavin Newsom. He says he’s going to jail me. He says he’s going to jail the mayor of the city of Chicago,” Pritzker said. “These are people who stand against him, disagree with him, speak out about it, but literally have done nothing wrong. We are doing the people’s business by standing up for them.”

Trump’s comments appeared to refer to instructions sent to Chicago police during a protest that emerged on the Southwest Side after federal immigration agents shot a woman they later accused of ramming them with a car.

Conservatives have been in a furor after an internal dispatch from the department’s chief of patrol that said, “no units would respond” to a call for assistance from armed Border Patrol agents who said they were in the middle of a crowd about two hours after being targeted in two hit-and-runs.

Snelling on Monday denied that officers had been told to stand down, but did concede, “I will say there was a lot of miscommunication, back and forth about what was really happening out there on the ground, and we need to do better.”

The mayor, who appointed Snelling, denied that Chicago police did anything wrong. He pinned blame on a non-communicative and overly aggressive federal government.

Johnson took to television Wednesday morning to continue blasting Trump’s rhetoric. Asked about the jail comment during an appearance on CNN, he called Trump “unstable, unhinged, a double-minded individual” and a threat to democracy.

“I’m going to stay firm as the mayor of this amazing city, which was voted nine years in a row the best big city in America,” he said, a reference to a Condé Nast Traveler ranking released this week.

At an event in Minneapolis on Tuesday, less than a day before Trump’s post, Pritzker was asked whether he sincerely believed he could be arrested in the president’s targeting of his political enemies.

“I’m asking any of you to come visit me in the gulag,” the governor answered dryly.

With the state awaiting a ruling from a federal judge, possibly as soon as Thursday, on its request for a temporary order blocking Trump’s deployment of Texas and Illinois National Guard members in the Chicago area, Pritzker said the administration “has not communicated with our state in any way whatsoever about what their troop movements are going to be.”

“I can’t believe I have to say ‘troop movements’ in a city in the United States, but that is what we’re talking about,” he said.

As Johnson and Pritzker hit the airwaves, Trump made an even more direct effort to spin his Chicago dealings into political fortune Wednesday. He sent supporters a fundraising email calling Johnson’s effort to create “ICE-free” zones via executive order “totally insane.”

“Are you an AMERICAN CITIZEN or an ILLEGAL ALIEN?” the fundraising page linked in the email reads, before soliciting contributions of $3,300.

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