Chicago bleeds, and its Democratic president and mayor are impotent to stop it

President-elect Donald Trump's tweets often trigger what is now commonly referred to as Trump Derangement Syndrome.

You've seen the symptoms: the wailing and shrieking of tortured liberals; references to Hitler and the end of days or whatever dark prophecies can be tweeted with two left thumbs.

But there was an intriguing Trump tweet aimed at Chicago the other day — the dysfunctional Democratic machine town that gave political birth to President Obama and Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Oddly, this Trump tweet didn't set off charges of fake news or hair pulling and screaming.

"Chicago murder rate is record setting — 4,331 shooting victims with 762 murders in 2016," Trump tweeted on Monday after a "60 Minutes" piece on the city's homicide epidemic. "If Mayor can't do it he must ask for Federal help!"

Trump is wrong on a couple of counts. Chicago's tally of 762 homicides isn't a record. Higher numbers were routine in the 1990s. But with more than 4,000 people hit by bullets last year, there is an argument that the city that used to work is more violent than ever.

Trump's talk of federalizing street crime, increasing the size of the leviathan, doesn't sound remotely conservative. It's something a big-government Democrat would say. Historically, many Chicago bosses have preferred the FBI worried about gun cases rather than public corruption.

Because more people were slain in Chicago last year than in New York and Los Angeles combined. And according to the Chicago Tribune, police street stops have dropped by an astounding 82 percent over the year before.

So, as people are cut down every day, as protesters hold crosses on Michigan Avenue to commemorate the dead, as others build shrines and weep, and as journalists like me preach to the choir while the thugs keep pulling their triggers, here's what I see:

Chicago is bleeding.

And Chicago's Democratic president and the Democratic mayor are impotent to stop it, even in the Democratic city, in this dark blue and fiscally ruined Democratic state.

Chicago cops have withdrawn, the drop in street stops tells you. And the city's public schools don't work, and the working class jobs are gone. But the blood flows on the streets, and the taxes rise as people in their prime working years become refugees, seeking safety and economic opportunity in other states.

Obama, the best speaker of all, is scheduled to give a farewell speech in Chicago on Tuesday.

It's not really a final farewell. He won't ever stop speaking. It is what he does best: giving long, lyrical speeches about himself and his hopes and dreams. Talking is the president's one singular talent.

Yet for all his talk, he has no answers for Chicago, or for its failing institutions or for the blood running in the streets.

He hasn't had answers for Chicago for years.

Lately, all Chicago seems to have been is a prop for Obama. Now, Chicago is the place for a grand golf course near the proposed site of the temple to his presidency on the South Side.

There has been much fancy talk from others about treating Chicago's homicides as a public health problem. But you can't put salve on a mother's heart as she buries her child. And Emanuel is right about this: Putting repeat gun offenders into prison and keeping them there so they can't kill innocents is the smart move.

Yet he can't push as strongly as he should, because he's done tremendous political damage to himself.

It was Emanuel's City Hall that sat on that horrific Laquan McDonald police video showing the black teenager shot 16 times by a white cop. That video was held until after the mayor's re-election. Voters, particularly black voters, were angry, and now Emanuel is seeking another term and hoping Chicago will forget.

The mayor insists that he had nothing to do with the video being held until after his election. But somebody at City Hall did. And he runs City Hall.

And now he can't very well publicly pressure black lawmakers to take the lead on stronger gun sentencing laws. So he's sent police Superintendent Eddie Johnson out to beg them to stand up to the gangs in their neighborhoods.

Of course there is a sickness, an old infection that has festered over decades and decades of corrupt political machine rule.

It has festered through "Outfit" influence at City Hall and top echelons of the Police Department (outsiders call it "Mafia"). It has festered through a public education system where unions, vendors and political clout take precedence over students. And it has festered through the long-accepted use of street gangs as election muscle.

So what do Americans see in the tolling of Chicago's dead, and the inability of public officials to stop the killings?