"It pisses me off": JB Pritzker channels liberal anger at Trump — and his own party

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a rumored contender for the Democratic Party's 2028 presidential nomination, waded into the debate over Democratic resistance and capitulation on Tuesday, name-dropping one member of his state's congressional delegation but conspicuously avoiding mention of the senior Democrat who helped Republicans pass a six-month spending bill.

"I want to commend Tammy Duckworth, who I called to ask how she was going to vote [on the government funding resolution], and she said 'my vote is hell no,'" he told an audience at a forum hosted by the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank in Washington, DC. "I love her."

Pritzker did not mention Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the 80-year-old senior senator from his state and the Democratic whip who voted with Republicans to keep the federal government open even as President Donald Trump seeks to dismantle congressionally authorized agencies. While the two political heavyweights have already worked at cross-purposes, Pritzker's omission further underscored a frustration by party leaders in Washington who Democrats across the ideological spectrum have criticized variously as feckless, uninspiring and cowardly.

While Senate Minority Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and other Democratic "yes" votes have insisted that their party would be blamed for shutting down the government and people would suffer as a result, Pritzker and others, like Minnesota governor and former Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, argue that allowing Trump and Elon Musk to ransack the federal bureaucracy is  even worse.

"We have to take any opportunity where we have leverage in order to stand up and fight," Prtizker said Tuesday. "Now, it's not about fighting to no end, so what do you use that fight for? It's to get compromises from this ridiculously quiet Congress that goes along with whatever Donald Trump and Elon Musk are telling them."

The decision by Schumer, Durbin and eight other Democrats to squander "a real opportunity to stand up and speak out and protect people who we have to stand up for," he added, "disappointed" him. 

As liberal anger towards the Trump administration and congressional Democrats alike boils over, Pritzker is eagerly claiming a role as both an advocate and example for an all-of-the-above approach towards opposing Trump and enacting a relatively bold policy agenda in his own jurisdiction. First elected to office in 2018, the billionaire heir to the Hyatt hospitality fortune seemed an unlikely figure of progressive hope — and yet, within months of his inauguration, Pritzker signed bills to raise the minimum wage to $15, legalize the recreational use of marijuana, ban so-called "right-to-work" laws designed to hobble trade unions and codify abortion protections into state law. 

While he's still hardly the leader of a class revolution, Pritzker's success in transforming a slew of promises into law has won him some praise from left-wing publications like Jacobin and an X account facetiously called "Socialists for Pritzker," and also helped position him as a leading voice in the Democratic Party. Shortly after the 2024 election, Pritzker formed an alliance of Democratic governors to coordinate their response to any federal government overreach, and less than two weeks into Trump's second term, Pritzker was on the phone with Schumer, urging him to push back more forcefully against the president. Under Pritzker's direction, the Illinois state attorney general has joined a series of lawsuits challenging the Trump administration's policies, some of which have been stalled in federal courts.

To his CAP audience, Pritzker pitched his record as an antidote to the party's problems and a blueprint for its future. "When there's a disconnect between Democratic policies and people's recognition of those policies, we lose," he said, referring to voters who supported progressive ballot initiatives but voted for GOP candidates. "If we want to regain the trust of the voters that we stand for, Democrats have to deliver. For sure, we have to call out the BS that Republicans have been selling. But meanwhile, Democrats have to make people's lives better," he continued, before launching into a story of how he saved a state government that had been "withering away for decades" and vigorously pursued "social and economic justice" for working families and the state's most vulnerable residents.

He also had choice words for Republican allies of Trump, calling them "bootlickers" and "a few idiots who are trying to figure out how to pull off the scam of their lives."

Pritzker's combative, populism-inflected approach not only differs from Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, but also from some fellow governors like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has spent the past two months pinning Democratic losses on transgender rights (which did not feature prominently in the 2024 campaign), bantering with right-wing figures like Steve Bannon on his podcast, and distributing "burner" cell phones to favored tech CEOs. Even so, Pritzker may still need to persuade some activists and voters that his wealth is no hindrance to good politics — a task he alluded to when, in a reversal of Mitt Romney’s 2012 refrain, he said that "I'm a businessman, and I'm the first one to tell you that government shouldn't be run like a business."

Even so, Trump and "President Elon Musk" aren't even running government like a business, he continued. They're running it to the ground.

"I knew when I ran that I'd be dealing with Donald Trump for two years at least. But I did not expect what we are seeing right now in our country," he said. "It pisses me off. And it makes me want to fight even harder."