Chicago Tribune Editorial Board Calls for Removal of the Trump Sign

The Editorial Board of the Chicago Tribune has checked back into a controversy from the previous decade—the massive sign adorning the Trump Tower along the Chicago River.

Long-time readers will remember the public spat between former President Trump (before he launched his successful campaign for president) and former Chicago Tribune Architecture Critic Blair Kamin. The massive sign ended up prompting new sign regulations in the city, in addition to an April Fools post on Planetizen (back when Planetizen did that sort of thing).

In 2014, Trump wrote an op-ed touting the sign, titled “Why I love Chicago... and my sign!” Trump’s argument in the op-ed hinges on the idea that “a deal’s a deal.”

Which is somewhat contradictory to the statements released by the former president recently called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” in response to his fabricated claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election.  That would, presumably, include the deal that allowed the sign.

Hence, in 2022, the editorial by the Chicago Tribune reads, “Time to take a jackhammer to the Trump sign on Chicago’s Trump Tower.”

But the “Trumpian blather” of the statement is not the primary piece of evidence in the Editorial Board’s case, which is the recent conviction of the Trump Organization as a criminal enterprise:

Two Trump Organization companies, Trump Corp. and Trump Payroll Corp, were convicted Tuesday of 17 counts of criminal tax fraud, falsifying records and other crimes in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. The jury found that the Trump Organization was corrupt at the core, we are less than shocked to learn, helping executives dodge required taxes on a punch bowl of perks from luxury apartments to Mercedes-Benzes to cold, hard, cash.

The question asked, then, by the editorial: “And Chicagoans still have to look at that sign?”