CHICAGO — Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Thursday a decision on whether to pursue the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination comes down to whether he thinks he can meet “both the challenge and the promise of tomorrow” and execute on it.
“I’m going to evaluate it. If I think I’ve got something to say that nobody else is going to say, and I’m going to be able to say it in a way that I think others don’t say it, I’ll make a decision,” Emanuel, who was the U.S. ambassador to Japan from 2022 to early 2025, told about 250 people at the City Club of Chicago. “If I have something I can say that hasn’t been said and the ability to get it done — not say it, not think it, not articulate it, but then execute it — if I think I can do that, I’ll do it. If I don’t, I won’t.”
Afterward, asked by the Chicago Tribune whether he would be able to “execute” his plans amid the sharp divisions in the current political atmosphere, Emanuel cited his record in Congress and as chief of staff to President Barack Obama in dealing with Republicans.
“You have to have trust, and I have established that on that level, but I haven’t made a decision,” he said.
Yet it was a lack of voters’ trust in Emanuel that clouded his second term as mayor and prevented him from seeking a third term in 2019, primarily due to his administration’s decision to withhold video of the 2014 police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald until it was ordered by a court.
A February 2016 Tribune poll found that a vast majority of Chicagoans didn’t think Emanuel was honest and trustworthy, didn’t think he was justified in withholding the McDonald video and didn’t believe his statements about the controversial police shooting, all fueling a record-low job approval of 27%.
Still, Emanuel was greeted with a standing ovation Thursday by the 250 members of the city’s civic community as he touted his mayoral record of business growth and foreign investment in Chicago and said the city needs what he had, a growth strategy.
“We had a strategy. We had five keys. Everybody on the staff knew how to repeat it — talent, training, transportation, technology, transparency — and everybody knew how to repeat it. We knew our mantra. We knew how to recruit companies,” Emanuel said.
“And if you’re growing, people are investing, and if people are investing, again, not that the budget for the city gets solved, but it is easier,” he said, pointedly saying he was not addressing current Mayor Brandon Johnson and the current budget problems. “Worse, as a country, we’re too much taking our eye off of the ball on growth.”
Without mentioning President Donald Trump by name, Emanuel backed the Democrats’ strategy in Congress to keep the federal government shut down until they could extract a commitment for an immediate vote on Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies for the poor after a vote on the Republicans’ “clean” continuing budget resolution.
He criticized Trump’s move to commit $20 billion to Argentina “to bail them out and you got 20 million Americans” seeking financial support for their Obamacare premiums.
“The White House is exerting no leadership to solve it,” Emanuel said of the government shutdown, acknowledging it may not get resolved “until there’s a level of pain where the public tells the members to get going.”
Emanuel also made a plea for educational reform to counter China’s growing power worldwide.
“We are now in the middle of one of the biggest challenges we’ve had. If you look at American history, we’ve never faced a country that’s three times our size, let alone the scope and scale. And China is very focused on the future, very focused on what they’ve got to do to invest in that future to win,” he said.
To compete with China, he said, “one of the biggest pieces that’s challenging America is the fact that we are failing our children. Our children are failing. We’re failing them.”
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