Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a leading Democrat, during a news conference on September 2 in Chicago. Photo / Joshua Lott, The Washington Post
While most of the rest of the Democratic Party was still reeling from Donald Trump’s victory in November, Illinois Democratic Governor JB Pritzker was already gearing up for battle.
“I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior,” Pritzker said two days after the election. “You come for my people, you come through me.”
Pritzker has positioned himself among the most visible and unflinching figures of the resistance.
The mutual antagonism between him and Trump has escalated to a point rarely seen between a president and the governor of a large state.
A billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, Pritzker will be on the Illinois ballot next year for a third term, but he is also assumed to have national aspirations.
He brought his battle cry to the traditional first-in-the-nation presidential primary state of New Hampshire earlier this year.
“It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once,” Pritzker declared in a speech that brought Granite State Democrats to their feet.
“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilisation, for disruption, but I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.”
Though many believe moderation and modulation are the ways for Democrats to repair their tattered brand, Pritzker has claimed that anything less than waging a full-throated battle against Trump is “moral abdication”.
As the Governor put it in his February State of the State address: “There are people - some in my own party - who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm”.
Pritzker didn’t mention anyone by name, but it was hard to miss the contrast he was drawing at the time with California Governor Gavin Newsom (D), a potential presidential rival.
Newsom made early efforts at outreach toward Trump, as he sought up to US$40 billion in disaster aid following California’s devastating January wildfires.
Any chance at a truce collapsed in June when Trump sent the California National Guard into Los Angeles, over Newsom’s objection, to quell immigration enforcement protests. And the federal disaster assistance has still been slow in coming.
Now, the two governors of big blue states are pretty much in sync at the forefront of opposition to Trump - although Newsom’s style has tended more towards trolling the President with snide posts on social media, while Pritzker’s is one of pure belligerence.
In doing so, they appear to be staking out possible liberal lanes for 2028.
As Pritzker told me in an interview, he had expected from the start that Illinois, and especially Chicago, would be in Trump’s crosshairs - something that has turned out to be the case.
“It was just a question of, in what order is he going after these cities? Because we’re not the first, and we’re not the last,” Pritzker said.
“He is hell bent on militarising our cities. And he just has something in his head about Chicago. He always has.”
As a governor, Pritzker has little by way of formal power to stand in Trump’s way, but Illinois has joined a lawsuit by state attorneys-general against the President’s executive order banning birthright citizenship and led one to block the Administration’s freeze on federal grants, which the White House subsequently rescinded.
He has also barred rioters pardoned by Trump for the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol from holding state government jobs.
Over the weekend, an appeals court temporarily barred Trump from deploying hundreds of National Guard troops in Illinois to guard property or patrol the streets, although it allowed them to remain in the state under federal control. The case was brought by the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago.
“We can speak out, and I do think that the courts for the most part - I’m not thoroughly confident about the Supreme Court, of course - but the courts are doing so far mostly the right thing,” he said.
Illinois has also been the target of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in which an estimated 2000 people have been arrested and detained, most of them in the Chicago area, Pritzker said.
Though the Trump Administration cites approximately the same figure for total detentions under what it is calling Operation Midway Blitz, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin insisted that those being arrested are “the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago”.
“For years, Governor Pritzker and his fellow sanctuary politicians released Tren de Aragua gang members, rapists, kidnappers, and drug traffickers on Chicago’s streets - putting American lives at risk and making Chicago a magnet for criminals,” she said in a statement.
Pritzker insisted that is a fiction.
“Approximately 70% of them have no criminal record at all,” he added.
“The other 30% are not the worst of the worst. They might have a criminal record. They might have served time already, by the way, and been released. In other words, they paid the price for whatever crime they had, and they were released.”
Pritzker also noted that the numbers so far in his state suggest Trump is falling far short of his pledge to deport up to 20 million undocumented people living in the US.
“They are not near - anywhere near - what they had said they were going to do. I’m not bragging about that. I’m saying that I think that is very frustrating for the Administration,” he said.
“One reason that so few people have been picked up is because we have done, I think, a terrific job in our state of educating people about what their rights are.”
That included the fact that a detainer issued by Ice does not have the force of a warrant issued by a judge or give agents the power to demand entry into a home.
The Governor also accused Ice of staging its raids for maximum dramatic effect and pointed to one in particular that happened during an early morning last month at a dilapidated South Shore apartment complex housing 130 people.
“They had a few - and I really mean a single-digit number of people that they were going after that they said were members of a gang, Tren de Aragua,” Pritzker said.
“And instead of going after those four people, they surrounded the building like it was Fallujah, full of terrorists and enemies. They took everybody in the building and detained them.
“And by the way,” Pritzker added, “they set up dozens of cameras - dozens - before they attacked the building. So it was clearly, like, for social media purposes they were doing all of this.”
On his way back from a trip to the Middle East, Trump compared the crime rate in Chicago unfavourably with that of Egypt’s.
“You can actually walk down a park and not get mugged or hit over the head with a baseball bat,” Trump said.
“There were 4000 shootings in Chicago, murders, over a fairly short period of time, meaning like a year and a half.”
Statistics show that Trump’s murder number is exaggerated and that the violent crime rate in Chicago has been falling.
But an analysis of 2024 statistics by the University of Chicago Crime Lab showed violent crime continued to be higher than the average over the past five years and that the city’s black residents were 22 times more likely to be killed by guns than White residents. Moreover, the lethality of gun violence was up.
There are ways the federal Government could help, Pritzker said, including by sending more resources from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
“I would like them to take real gang members and violent criminals off our streets - like, I would love it. But that’s not what they’re doing. They’re just going after black and brown people.”
Trump also has suggested that Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “should be in jail”.
“Truly, the man has dementia,” Pritzker said of Trump. “He’s just saying things like he does all the time because he’s a bully, and he thinks, if he says outrageous things, that people will believe him.
“By the way, I do take seriously that he would like us to be jailed,” Pritzker added, “and he has the power, potentially, to do that, but there’s no chance that he’s coming after me or the mayor to jail us. We haven’t done anything wrong.”
So when and how is all of this going to end?
No time soon, Pritzker said. “In a normal circumstance, the Congress of the United States, no matter what party controlled it, would not just accept what’s happening and have no hearings about it.”
So, “the first thing that happens is that we need to flip the Congress in November of 2026”, he said.
“And I do think that we’re headed in that direction if people continue to be as activist as they seem to be.”
In the meantime, you will know where to look for Pritzker: at the ramparts.
- Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.
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