Ex-Chicago mayor rips current city leaders for focus on bathroom and locker room instead of crime, education

Emanuel said on Friday night that government has allowed the city to become too "permissive" on crime and has fixated on niche liberal issues like transgender bathroom policies rather than dealing with plummeting education standards.

"Round it up. 7," the ex-mayor and former U.S. ambassador to Japan joked, though he went into some serious criticism of the city's government. He began by noting his own mantra back when he ran the city, telling Maher, "Safe streets, strong schools, stable finances. Focus on those three things and your city's going to be fine."

Emanuel added, bringing it back to Chicago: "We've gone through five years where people became way too permissive as a culture - which is why everything is locked up at CVS and Walgreens, and that's a disaster."

"Why doesn't anybody talk about that? Why aren't there a hundred giant Black celebrities, who would have the respect of those people, saying, 'What are you doing to yourselves? Why are you killing each other?"

Back on Friday's show, Emanuel then torched the city's education standards, saying the government is fixated on woke policies rather than the grades of their students.

"We have the worst reading scores for eighth graders in 30 years, and nobody - not a governor, not a mayor, not a president, not a secretary of education is talking about it. We're all wrapped up."

Mocking woke policies and progressive gender language, he quipped, "Look, in seventh grade, if I had known that I could have said the word 'They' and got in the girls bathroom, I would have done it."

"We literally are a superpower, we're facing off against China with 1.4 billion people and two-thirds of our children can't read eighth grade level," he added.

Though Emanuel mentioned that no president has addressed this crisis, President Trump has railed against the low educational standards in America since coming into office, pointing to it as a reason to overhaul and even disband the U.S. Department of Education.

Zakaria responded to Emanuel by proclaiming,"This is a huge Democratic Party problem. If you look at Democratic cities, they are terribly run. They have incredibly high taxes, so it's impossible to build."