Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has complained that Democrats are not standing with him enough against President Trump.
Pritzker has become a symbol of the Democratic resistance over the past month as the Trump administration targets the lawless city of Chicago for immigration raids and a restoration of law and order.
In an interview with The New Republic, Pritzker was asked by the reporter whether Democrats “could be doing more to raise alarm… about Trump’s escalating authoritarianism.”
He responded:
Yeah, don’t you think? [Laughs] And I mean, look, I understand there are people who’ve stood up, I want to say, and we should give kudos to those people.
I think Cory Booker has been terrific. I think that we’ve seen people standing up—Chris Murphy, Gavin Newsom—you know, there are people who are regularly calling it out. Right. But I wonder about lots of other folks.
And it’s not something that’s like, well, maybe, you know, if something happens this month, I’ll say something. No, it’s happening every single day.
I mean, I’m living it here in Chicago and in Illinois that it’s happening, but it’s happening in Portland. It’s happened in L.A. It’s happening in Washington, D.C. And those are just the troop movements.
We’re also seeing ICE in places that, you know, nobody expected them to be—in suburbs and rural areas of my state and elsewhere.
So I am surprised that more leaders have not stood up. I don’t think we should just say Democrats—like, “Why haven’t Democrats”—because that sounds political. And to be frank with you, this isn’t about politics.
This is genuinely about the future of our country. Do we believe in a constitutional republic, or do we think that it’s okay if this becomes the law of one—the president of the United States, the law of Donald Trump—that that is what we’re going to go by and not the law that is set out in the Constitution of the United States.
Earlier this week, Pritzker suggested that Trump is planning to use the military to steal next year’s midterm elections.
“Next year, I fear that what they’re going to do is deploy these folks eventually to polling places and say they’re protecting the vote,” he said in an interview with MSNBC host and conspiracy theorist Rachel Maddow.
”Donald Trump knows that without shenanigans and without this, these breaches of the Constitution, that he’s going to lose the Congress.”
JB Pritzker goes full election denier, says Trump will “use the military to confiscate ballot boxes” and steal the midterms pic.twitter.com/qza9dT1RNu
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) October 7, 2025
