Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel Confirms He's Considering 2028 Presidential Bid: Reports

CHICAGO — Former Chicago Mayer Rahm Emanuel has confirmed that he is mulling a presidential run in 2028, according to news reports. Emanuel, who finished up a four-year stint as ambassador to Japan for the Biden administration in January, made his remarks to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

“You got to look at this, you got to be comfortable understanding the family room,” the former Chicago mayor said on CNN. “You got to be comfortable understanding, literally, the classroom, comfortable in the, what I would call, the boardroom, comfortable in the Situation Room, and periodically comfortable in the emergency room.”

Emanuel was a policy advisor to President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. In 2002, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Illinois’s 5th Congressional District. Emanuel was tapped as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, a position he held until his election in 2011 as mayor of Chicago.

“I’m looking at the (Democratic) field and, most importantly, what I have to contribute,” the former Chicago mayor told Crain’s political writer Greg Hinz.

Emanuel, long known as a moderate, has offered blistering assessments of today’s Democratic Party, calling the Democratic Party’s brand “toxic” and “weak and woke” in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal.

He urges Democrats to get back to “kitchen table issues” in a post on X.

“Real talk. We got ourselves into a cultural cul-de-sac,” Emanuel said. “We weren’t good on kitchen table issues or the family room. The only place we did well in the house was the bathroom. That’s the smallest room in the house.”

While mayor of Chicago, Emanuel fell under heavy criticism for his handling of the 2014 police murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, a Black youth, who was shot 16 times by a white Chicago police officer. Activists accused the mayor of covering up for Chicago police, which grabbed global attention. Former Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke was convicted by a jury of second degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery in 2018. The former cop was sentenced to six years and nine months in a federal prison. Van Dyke was released after serving half his sentence.

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York led House progressive Democrats in trying to block Emanuel’s appointment as ambassador to Japan, due to his alleged cover-up of the Black teen’s shooting at the hands of a white Chicago police officer.

Still, Emanuel, known for his pugnacious toughness, says he has something to contribute to the Democratic Party.

“I’m tired of sitting in the back seat when somebody’s gunning it at 90 miles an hour for a cliff,” Emanuel told the Wall Street Journal. “If you want the country to give you the keys to the car, somebody’s got to be articulating an agenda that’s fighting for America, not just fighting for [President] Trump.”