Watch Rahm's Angry Exchange With The Politico Reporter Who Asked About His Vacation Plans

By Kate Shepherd in News on Dec 2, 2015 5:41PM

There was bound to be a tense moment when Mayor Rahm Emanuel submitted himself to a tough but fair interview from Politico reporters Mike Allen and Natasha Korecki in front of an audience, the day after he fired his police chief. And it happened when Allen, who is Politico's chief White House correspondent, asked Emanuel about his upcoming family trip to Cuba.

Don't ever ask the mayor about his family vacations...the video's a must-see:

The angry exchange was one of several interesting comments from the mayor to come out of the event.

Emanuel also said he is not listening to the growing calls for his resignation: he says he won't step down.

"We have a process. It's called the election," Emanuel said. "The voters spoke. I'll be held responsible for my actions and the decisions I made."

But the current political climate in Chicago is changing some of the mayor's plans. He won't be heading to the Paris Climate Change Summit this week and he's postponed a political fundraiser set for next week, according to the Sun-Times.

"I'm not going to go to Paris," he told Allen and Korecki. "I'm going to deal with the issue that's front and center for the city."

After announcing that he fired police chief Garry McCarthy on Tuesday, Emanuel told reporters that he was still deciding whether or not to travel to Paris. Instead he said he's staying home to give Chicago's local issues his full attention. Emanuel plans to venture around the South Side through this weekend to talk with his constituents at churches, stores and restaurants without cameras or microphones to hinder the conversations, he said.

"I wanted to be in the community on the South Side as we're dealing with some tough challenges—not for images, but to be able have people directly, without anybody around, talk to me and say what they thought. So they felt free to say what they want and I was just there," Emanuel said at the event.

The mayor's scheduled $2,500-a-head political fundraiser to help pay off his campaign's $122,000 in unpaid bills has been postponed to a later date. He spent a record $24 million on his reelection campaign.