Why Is MLB in Chicago Acquiescing to Trump?

In 1914, Carl Sandburg famously called Chicago “the City of Big Shoulders.” The poet wrote, “Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.” More than a century later, Chicago is living under the threat of military invasion by its own country, but Sandburg’s city remains “Stormy, husky, brawling.” A National Guard sworn to defend the rights of its residents is poised, according to this country’s commander in chief, to occupy the streets as the first act of this regime’s newly branded Department of War. The messaging by President Donald Trump and the dangerously dim-witted Pete Hegseth isn’t complicated: Their most pressing bogeyman isn’t China or Iran. It’s those fighting for justice in the United States, or as Trump described them during his campaign, “the enemy within.”

Those who refuse to kiss this man’s ring are now effectively enemy combatants in their own country. If you’ve read the more disturbing passages in Hegseth’s book American Crusade, you know the secretary of defense dreams not only of defeating grammar and complete sentences; he also thinks that responsible governance involves ordering police and the military to take sides against “radical leftist” dissenters in a coming “civil war.”

Hegseth wants to see his “fellow Americans” who think, act, and live differently from him subjected to military violence. Like Trump’s entire royal court, Hegseth doesn’t work for us. The GOP has long stoked its base by feeding it racist caricatures of Chicago. Now the Republican Party is ready to live out talk radio’s 40-year propaganda fever dream and stomp what Trump’s balding, 31-year-old “youth” leader Charlie Kirk calls “the cockroaches” of this remarkable city.

Kirk, however, is more than a dull racist with a penchant for old-school Nazi verbiage. He was raised in Arlington Heights, a soft, tony Chicago suburb, which explains a great deal, including why he’s a diehard Cubs fan. On August 20, after a 4–3 Cubs victory, Kirk was allowed to take the field and pose with two of the team’s stars, Michael Busch and Matt Shaw. Kirk wrapped his arms around the two players (both white). Shaw brandished a satisfied thumbs-up, and Busch grinned for the cameras. When Kirk posted the photo online, people in Chicago were livid. Here is this suburban dork, scared of the big, bad city and thrilled at the thought of the military on every corner, smiling next to a pair of the city’s best baseball players.

The Nation spoke with Rory Fanning, a former Army Ranger and author, who leafleted around Wrigley following Kirk’s visit. For the Cubs “to be associated with this rabid white nationalist who is front and center in this [political] debate right now,” sets a horrible example, he said. Referring to two Latino players on the team, Fanning asked, “How does Miguel Amaya feel? Willi Castro?”

Fanning said that the Cubs organization first owes its fans an apology—“particularly the Black, brown, gay, transgender women fans,” he said. But he argues the Cubs should go even further: “Charlie Kirk needs to be banned from Wrigley Field.”

That’s not likely to happen under the ownership of the Ricketts family, who has owned a 95 percent stake in the Cubs and Wrigley Field since 2009. Paterfamilias Joe Ricketts was under fire in 2019 after a series of racist and Islamophobic e-mails were leaked to the online publication Splinter. The next year, Todd Ricketts, the youngest of his four siblings, rose to prominence as Donald Trump’s chief fundraiser for his reelection campaign in 2020, leading to an outcry of protest from Cubs fans. (One might remember Todd’s previous work in 2010 when he went undercover at Wrigley for the television show Undercover Boss and got fired for not cleaning toilets properly.) A June 2020 editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times asked: “What are you to do if you’re a fan of the Chicago Cubs but the team’s owners include a guy who’s leading the effort to reelect the most divisive, destructive and incompetent president in modern American history? We’d say there’s always the White Sox.”

And yet there was no such editorial outcry in 2025 about Kirk sullying the sacred spaces of Wrigley Field. Fanning told The Nation, “Wrigley is way bigger than the Ricketts. Wrigley is way bigger than these two doofus players who come out with Charlie Kirk.”

The Cubs are just part of Major League Baseball’s capitulation to the Trump regime. In addition to making sure to flatter their decaying Dear Leader, teams and networks now run ICE recruitment ads in between innings. During a Mets game, you can see advertisements that blare, “Join ICE. Catch the worst of the worst.” Given that Major League Baseball is dependent upon immigrant labor from Latin America, its complicity with this regime is nauseating, especially when considering that Venezuelans are the second-largest immigrant group in the MLB and an open target of this administration. And still Kirk’s photoshoot at Cubs is especially galling. It was like a pretentious Brit in jodhpurs overseeing colonized India and thinking he represents progress. This suburban Illinois man-child, this walking argument against white superiority, does not know Chicago outside of Wrigley.

Thousands of brave Chicagoans filled the streets on Saturday refusing to live under internal occupation in their own country. The protests appear to have stymied these efforts—at least for now. Kirk will bluster, but certainly at a distance. He would never dare face the “City of Big Shoulders.”

Editor’s note: This article was published at 5AM ET on September 10, before the shooting of Charlie Kirk at a college event in Utah.