Vowing to defend his constituents, will J.B. Pritzker shame fellow Democrats into taking on Trump?
In a Chicago speech warning Trump off troop deployments in that city, the Illinois governor modeled how to confront a lawless presidency
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
The last few weeks have witnessed two crucial and interrelated political events. First, as Garrett Graff documented in a wrenching piece, the scale and damage of the Trump administration’s lawlessness has arguably pushed the country into territory that can justly be termed authoritarian. Graff laid out a convincing case, encompassing Donald Trump’s violent threats against the American people, his obscene corruption, and his increasing involvement with every aspect of American life, from business and education to sports and culture.
Second, over this same period, we have also seen the beginning of promising pushback from some Democratic politicians. California Governor Gavin Newsom began to speak directly about the threat posed by President Trump, a stance amplified by an aggressive Twitter campaign to mock the president by adopting his bombastic, insanely self-centered style while parodying a variety of MAGA memes. For a bunch of reasons — MAGA defenders of the president taking the bait, a basic cleverness to the tactic, some genuinely amusing tweets, the way they laid bare Trump’s essential absurdity and mental confusion — Newsom’s attacks on the president appeared to break through to capture additional media coverage and become part of the public discourse around the president. More substantively, Newsom began driving an effort in California to create additional Democratic-leaning House seats via gerrymandering, in response to a push by Texas Republicans to do the same for the GOP in that state at the behest of Donald Trump.
Then last week, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker delivered a speech that may well be remembered as a turning point in the pro-democracy majority’s efforts to re-take the initiative against growing Republican authoritarianism. Speaking in response to President Trump’s plans to dispatch troops and federal agents to Chicago, Pritzker called out his authoritarianism, incitement of violence, and lawlessness, while laying down a baseline obligation for Democrats and others to resist a nationwide MAGA onslaught.
Pritzker did not shy away from asserting that a real crisis exists — though not the crime-related one that Trump claims — and that it is of historic proportions, remarking, “What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American.” Crucially, he dispatched the lie that Trump is “fighting crime” by sending troops and weapons of war into American cities, and then asserted the actual purpose: “This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city in a blue state to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections.” Later in the speech, he returned to his diagnosis of an authoritarian crisis, stating, “Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.”
But alongside describing Trump’s dictatorial ambitions, Pritzker also made a series of important assertions: he offered a prescription for resistance that combines a personal commitment to protecting Americans based on his position of public responsibility; reminded listeners that MAGA will sooner or later be turned out of power; and made clear that Donald Trump and his allies will be held accountable for their crimes:
Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: we are watching and we are taking names.
This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf.
You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.
Two things jump out at me about the last paragraph: first, how essential it will be for other elected Democrats to assume a similar stance of implacable resistance linked to inevitable accountability for Trump; and second, how this is the first instance I’ve heard any Democratic politician of stature actually do so. In this, Pritzker’s lines are doubly shocking, articulating a baseline responsibility for all Democratic elected officials while reminding us that the Illinois governor more or less stands alone in doing his actual job.
And behind the defiance and the promise of accountability lies another quality that’s been in short supply among Democrats: a willingness to defy Trump in a way that the president will almost certainly view as a provocation, which means that Pritzker is embracing a willingness to escalate a confrontation with the president. This fear of escalation, I believe, has been a crippling and increasingly disqualifying drag on too many Democratic officials. As Brian Beutler suggests in a piece examining the Democrats’ reluctance to stand up to Trump, party leaders instead keep backing down from fights out of a basic fear that there is nothing they can ultimately do to stop Trump’s depredations. For Beutler, Democratic leaders’ antipathy to discussing how Trump has committed impeachable offenses is a glaring tell; but as he discusses, leaders like Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer shy away from a fight even where they do possess the tools to win, while failing to engage in any alternate strategizing for driving Trump from office.
In light of this, we should view Pritzker’s speech as a gauntlet thrown down not only at Trump, but also at other Democratic governors and federal elected officials (a point that Beutler pursues in a great analysis at his blog, as well as in a discussion with Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast). Having put himself forward and made himself and his state more of a target than ever, other Democratic governors now have a stark choice between solidarity and abandoning one of their own to Trump’s concentrated fire. I realize these choices can be genuinely difficult — for instance, it’s easy for me to sympathize with our governor here in Oregon, Tina Kotek, who is surely weighing what harms mass anti-Trump demonstrations might do to a downtown Portland still slowly recovering from post-pandemic malaise. At the same time, our collective danger is clearly more important than the particular needs of any single state or city. Donald Trump and his advisors are likely relying on bullying states and cities one by one, making examples of some to cow the rest; this is a situation where solidarity is the strongest defense.
In particular, this line from Pritzker — “If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law” — is not a bell that can be easily un-rung for Democratic leaders. By asserting that his role as an elected official carries with it a burden of defense of the American people against tyranny, Pritzker is arguably calling out those Democratic officials who are ducking the full extent of their responsibilities. As I’ve written before, defending the safety and security of one’s constituents may be the single most basic duty of an elected official, just as the provision of security is a bedrock responsibility of government more generally; the full scope and burden of this responsibility has now been thrown into stark relief by a violent-minded and lawless president. Not only are the stakes higher for ordinary Americans — they now face a chief executive who sees political advantage in inflicting physical harm on some of them — they are also higher for elected officials who may draw retributive Justice Department investigations or prosecutions simply for doing their duty.
In his speech, Pritzker did something else that I’ve been begging Democrats to do: provide a basic narrative framework that helps ordinary Americans make sense of the momentous political events unfolding before them. He uses Donald Trump’s own actions to illustrate Trump’s larger intent, while also signaling through his personal defiance that the president’s lawless rule is hardly preordained. Again, this contrasts with what we’ve been seeing from other Democratic leaders. Not only do they not bother to present a coherent account of Trump’s authoritarian goals, too many are pinning their strategies on winning back the House and perhaps the Senate in 2026 based on passively waiting for Trump to harm the country — even as it’s clear by now that allowing the current pace of damage to continue unchecked will result in a U.S. that is deeply imperiled by the time the midterms arrive (and that’s also putting aside the Republicans’ open scheming to fireproof themselves against any public reckoning via all manner of election subversion).
The actions of elected officials alone will not be enough to stop Trump and MAGA’s multi-front war on America, but they are absolutely necessary. By laying out a clear vision of right and wrong, of freedom and repression, and above all by accepting the necessity of escalating conflict with Trump if necessary, politicians like Pritzker can help create a permission structure for mass resistance to Republican authoritarianism. While no one can say with certainty what forms of politics will liberate us from MAGA’s deranged chokehold on our government and society, the mobilization of millions upon millions of Americans in righteous defiance and patriotism will be essential. The least our elected officials can do is to truly conduct themselves like they’re on our side.