Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel got into a tense and awkward exchange with Politico’s Mike Allen on Wednesday.
During a public interview, the infamously irascible mayor blew up after Allen revealed that Emanuel and his family would be traveling to Cuba for the holidays, which was something the mayor had told Allen backstage before the interview.
“First of all, thanks for telling everybody what I’m going to do with my family,” Emanuel said icily. “You had a private conversation with me, and now you decided to make that public. I really don’t appreciate that. I really don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” Allen said, “I didn’t know that wasn’t public.”
“I’m expressing to you now, publicly, my displeasure: My family trips are my family,” Emanuel said, before going on to explain that he wanted to expose his children to other cultures and other parts of the world.
“This year, if my wife doesn’t kill me now because of what you just did, we will take our kids to Cuba to be exposed to that culture, in the same way they’ve been to India, in the same way that they have been to Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Chile and Vietnam and Laos.”
Emanuel then asked Allen for his cell phone number so he could apologize to his wife, Amy, personally.
“I don’t know if you know this, it’s not going to work,” Emanuel said.
Reached for comment, Allen referred CNN to a tweet from his colleague.
“Politico’s Jake Sherman said it best, on Twitter,” Allen said. “‘Of course Rahm – a public figure since 90 – knew he wasn’t going to go to Cuba for Christmas w/o people knowing. Mayor of 3rd largest city!'”