President calls for the Governor of Illinois and the Mayor of Chicago to be jailed.

On Wednesday morning the President wrote, on his social platform, that Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois and Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago should “be in jail” for “failing to protect ICE officers.” The two officials, the public record will reflect, are the elected chief executives of, respectively, a state of nearly thirteen million people and a city of nearly three million people. Neither has been charged with a crime.

The post was published three days after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit had ruled, in a published opinion, that the federal government could not deploy the National Guard to Illinois. The Governor and the Mayor were the named plaintiffs in the proceeding the President was now demanding they be imprisoned for prevailing in.

This is the construction worth pausing on.

The President of the United States has a disagreement with the Governor of Illinois about the deployment of the federalized National Guard. The disagreement, as designed by the Constitution, is resolved by the federal courts. The federal courts ruled against the President. The President’s response, the same week, in writing, on his own platform, is that the Governor and the Mayor should be jailed for the act of being the named plaintiffs in the case the courts ruled in their favor on.

There is a phrase for the use of state criminal authority against political opponents. It is not a contested phrase. It appears in the State Department’s own annual human rights reports, where it is used in reference to the conduct of foreign governments the United States declines to associate with. The phrase is “political prosecution.”

The Governor’s office issued a statement of concern. The Mayor’s office issued a statement of concern. The President of the Illinois State Senate issued a statement. The post remained up. By midweek the language was being repeated, in less explicit form, by aides on cable.

A serious country writes the phrase “lock him up” on placards at rallies. It does not write the phrase, in the first person, in the voice of the head of state, against the elected governor of one of its constituent states, in writing, on the official record. It does not, in particular, do so the same week the courts have ruled against it.

Calmly documenting the decline.