Governor JB Pritzker has mastered the art of standing up to Donald Trump. Whether he’s mocking Trump’s threat to jail him (“Come and get me, Mr. President!) or calling on the citizens of Illinois to grab their phones and document how ICE is targeting black and brown people, Pritzker is showing us how it’s done. With the threat of deployment of federal troops to the streets of Chicago, Pritzker is determined to lessen the fear and suffering of his constituents (“People are traumatized”) and hold the Trump administration to account. Now, the Governor is warning that Trump may use the military to interfere in the 2026 election and turning our attention to a lesson from the Holocaust, so eloquently captured in Pastor Martin Niemöller’s haunting poem “First They Came”. “People need to speak up, speak out, grab a megaphone and get to the ballot box.”
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Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
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Governor JB Pritzker: We often think about the adults and how they are having to hide away or they’re fearful. But the, the kids in that school that I was at, those kids are afraid when they go home, no one will be there, that their parents will have been disappeared. I mean, I don’t know what to say, except that people are traumatized.
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Nicolle Wallace: So when the podcast started, we asked ourselves, what is the best person? What makes the best people, the best people? And this week’s guest brings that into focus for us. The best people are the truth tellers. When the truth is not convenient and the telling is not easy, they run toward the fight because the alternative isn’t peace, they understand that. It is a privilege and an honor to welcome this week’s guest, Illinois governor, JB Pritzker. Welcome to “The Best People’ podcast.
Governor JB Pritzker: Thanks so much, Nicolle. Great to see you again
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Nicolle Wallace: Let’s start with what’s happening right now because you are in the middle of, we weren’t sure that you would make it today because I know you’re in the middle of this. Just bring us up to speed on the legal status of Trump’s deployment of troops to Chicago.
Governor JB Pritzker: Well, I’m smiling just because when you say you might not have seen me today it’s because the president threatened to jail me. So any day you might not see me I suppose, but I ask that you visit me at the gulag in El Salvador when that happens.
Nicolle Wallace: Deal, deal.
Governor JB Pritzker: What’s happening on the ground right now is that we have ICE and Customs and Border Patrol, who are literally stopping people who are brown and asking them for their papers to prove that they’re U.S. citizens or that they have a legal right to be in the country. So we’re seeing literally that is the only criteria that’s being used often. We are seeing that Customs and Border Patrol have been marching in uniform with semiautomatic or automatic weapons in the streets of downtown Chicago. We are seeing unmarked vehicles and masked agents invading every neighborhood all across, not just the city of Chicago, but all the suburbs also. And then we’ve got the court cases that are going on simultaneously.
There’s a private case that’s been brought, mostly by media organizations, that has been very effective at limiting the activity of ICE or at least putting some restrictions on them. They have to reveal who they are when they’re detaining somebody. And that private action is on top of the action by our government and our attorney general, which has won so far, every level of hearing that’s taken place, including a temporary restraining order on bringing in National Guard. They’ve been federalized, but they’re at a federal facility right now in Joliet, Illinois and they’re not allowed to come into Chicago.
I’m talking about Texas National Guard, California National Guard and, of course, they federalized the Illinois National Guard. So everything is, you know, pending some next action that might take place. So you’re right to wonder whether I might have been here because we just don’t know from minute to minute or day to day what the next thing will be that we’re confronted with.
Nicolle Wallace: What is that like for you? I mean, we all sleep with the phone next to our bed, but I mean, what have these last few weeks and months been like for you?
Governor JB Pritzker: You know, honestly, I feel like saying to you, it doesn’t matter about what it feels like for me, because think about how people are feeling. Just folks who live in Chicago. I mean, I’m talking about if you have brown skin or black skin, you are literally afraid that you are going to get pulled over or detained walking down the street just for being brown or black. I mean, that is not a world that I have ever lived in, at least since I was born. And it’s certainly not legal and allowed since well, until now, I guess because you heard that Brett Kavanaugh at the Supreme Court essentially said, that’s fine. You can use racial profiling as a reason to detain somebody.
So I’m very concerned about the people that I represent and the state that I represent in the city of Chicago and our people here. And also, I will add, for undocumented people who are here because, yeah, they can be detained and they could be deported. But very importantly, their rights are also being abridged and taken away. There are rights for people who are in the United States, whether you’re here because you cross the border without papers or you overstayed your visa or whatever. But remember that Donald Trump said that he was using Customs and Border Patrol and ICE to go after the worst of the worst.
And listen, I would love it if they would go arrest the actual gang members who are committing violent crimes, if they’d actually go after criminals. That’s not what they’re doing. They’re literally stopping the abuelas and little kids and zip tying them. They’re attacking a building in the middle of the night in a way that they said they were going after Tren de Aragua, but actually there were only two or three people that they could identify that fit that. And in the 130 other people, many of whom were U.S. citizens were detained for hours, put into U-Hauls, little kids zip tied, and they used Blackhawk helicopters repelling out of the helicopters and they set up dozens of cameras before they attacked this building so that they could show it all on social media and, I don’t know, act like tough guys.
And Gregory Bovino who runs the operation here and ran the operation for them in Los Angeles is somebody who loves social media. Go look at his account. And so, this is the world we’re living in and it’s frightening for so many people. So my job every day is to make sure that I can lessen the fear that people are experiencing or stand in the way of ICE breaking the law.
Nicolle Wallace: What will you do to do that last thing because ICE breaking federal law is complicated, but ICE breaking Illinois law, I had read that you were looking at whether there was some legal recourse if you feel that ICE agents have broken Illinois state law? Can you tell us where that stands?
Governor JB Pritzker: Yeah. So we’ve looked at really at every angle and one of the challenges is that federal agents enjoy federal immunity and typically, and throughout history, federal agents are held responsible by inspectors general or by their supervisors, by U.S. attorneys, right? These are all federal officials who are responsible for following the law. Well, guess what’s happening? They’re not following the law and the people who are overseeing them are not following the law. They’re not following the Constitution. So we have only one recourse, really, if we want to hold them accountable. Well, I would say two, really. One is we’re taking them to court. And so far, mostly we’re winning, but not on everything. And frankly, that’s allowed them to do a lot of things we don’t want them to do.
But there’s a second thing that we’re doing. And that’s making a record of what they’re doing, a contemporaneous record. I’ve asked people all over the city of Chicago and we’ve used also our state resources to video as many things as we see that ICE are doing and that CBP is doing to the people of Chicago that we think are illegal. And making a record and actually asking for people to submit testimony about that. You know why? It’s not that we think that Donald Trump is going to hold them accountable now, but he will not be in office forever. And the Congress won’t always be in MAGA Republican hands where they’re just saying hands off, whatever the president wants.
There will be a moment when these folks are held accountable and they can be held accountable by the Congress being hauled in front of them, but also potentially held accountable later for criminal activity that they’re committing now or by their supervisors in one fashion or another in terms of their jobs and whether they’ll continue to have their jobs. So, I’ve reminded them of that, the federal agents, that you won’t always have the situation you’ve got now where people are turning a blind eye at the federal level to what you’re doing. And so, you better be careful because it may not be very long before you are, in fact, held accountable.
Nicolle Wallace: I heard you call on the citizens to do that. And you’ve been really, I think, appropriately blunt with the media. Our job isn’t to ask both sides what they’re doing, it’s to Chronicle the human experience. I’m paraphrasing you now, but are you the holder of those archives or are you asking everybody to take a record and hold it for that later moment in time?
Governor JB Pritzker: Well, what I’ve asked people to do in the interim until we decide how to archive these things is post it online or send it to the local media. We actually have some terrific reporters here and local media. Block Club Chicago is one you may not have heard of, but it’s a local media organization —
Nicolle Wallace: Yeah.
Governor JB Pritzker: — nonprofit, Sun-Times, terrific reporting. In fact, they’re the ones who found out that the first killing by ICE of Silverio Villegas Garcia in Franklin Park, where the ICE agents said, and DHS said someone had been dragged and seriously injured and so on. The ICE agent himself said that wasn’t really hurt that badly. And yet they killed a man in a car who had just dropped off his kids at daycare. And DHS put out the first story so that got reported as if this person had run over an ICE agent, but that’s apparently is not what happened. So this is why the reporting is so important. And so, I’ve encouraged everybody, we archive it really by doing it in public these days.
Nicolle Wallace: Yeah.
Governor JB Pritzker: Right? We don’t need to put it in on a shelf somewhere. It’s actually playing for anybody to find. And I hope people will go look because when pastors are getting pelted by pepper pellets and by rubber bullets, the protestors who are not committing crimes, they are literally exercising their First Amendment rights. When people are getting tackled, 15-year-olds, when a Latina walking out of the Waukegan city hall is a U.S. citizen and she gets detained and thrown in the back of a vehicle. I mean, these things you wouldn’t know about unless somebody was videoing it. And so, they’re posting it online and that’s the archive at the moment that we have, but we’re actually looking to formalize some of that.
Nicolle Wallace: I want to ask you what your visits are like to these communities after ICE is gone, after they’ve been traumatized or in their words, usually terrorized, after they’ve picked up whoever they’re going to pick up for the crime often of being brown in your city. What do those communities say to you?
Governor JB Pritzker: Well, you can imagine, I went to an elementary school in a community where the kids, we often think about the adults and how they are having to hide away o they’re fearful and they’re not going out to the restaurant or the local store because they’re afraid. But the kids in that school that I was at, those kids are afraid when they go home, no one will be there, that their parents will have been disappeared. The people in the communities, you know, they don’t know what to do because the federal officials are not being held accountable by their superiors for the things they’re doing to people.
And everything from the restaurants and the stores are dying because people are too afraid to go out shopping. People are staying indoors because they’re afraid to walk around. And then when there are shootings, and there have been several now by ICE or CBP, against people who are residents of the city of Chicago, I mean, I don’t know what to say except that people are traumatized and I’m hearing it over and over again.
And I want to tell you about one instance that I’m kind of proud of the local officials here. Not kind of, I’m very proud. We have an alderman named Jesse Fuentes, who she went to the local hospital where there was somebody who was being temporarily detained and asked for papers and so on, and she was there and it’s on video. She was there asking them, why are you detaining this person? What are you asking for? And can you show me your judicial warrant? Not your CBP issued or ICE issued detention warrant, but an actual judicial, show me. And they wouldn’t answer any of her questions. And eventually after she asked the question, four or five times, they grabbed her and threw cuffs on her and detained her.
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Unknown: — me the laws.
Jesse Fuentes: We have constitutional rights.
Unknown: No, no.
Jesse Fuentes: He has constitutional rights.
Unknown: No.
Jesse Fuentes: Do you have a signed —
Unknown: No. You need to leave.
Jesse Fuentes: — judicial warrant for me?
Unknown: Turn around. You’re (inaudible). Turn around and (inaudible).
Unknown: He is under —
Unknown: I’m going to arrest her. You are going to be placed under arrest.
Jesse Fuentes: Do you have a sign? Do you have a signed judicial warrant for him? Do you have a signed judicial warrant for him? I am asking. I am asking. I did not touch you.
Unknown: He told you to leave —
Jesse Fuentes: I did not touch you. I did not touch you.
Unknown: Thank you.
Jesse Fuentes: I did not touch you. I asked you if you had signed judicial —
Unknown: His visa is still out there.
Jesse Fuentes: — warrant for him. It is very simple. It is very simple. That man has constitutional rights.
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Governor JB Pritzker: I mean, literally you could just see it’s the perfect kind of vignette of what’s happening —
Nicolle Wallace: Yeah.
Governor JB Pritzker: — all across the city of Chicago and at the broad view ICE facility as well. They have no rules, these federal agents and they are literally treating U.S. citizens like they are criminals.
Nicolle Wallace: Do you have a mental image of that happening to you? Do you see it as, and we joked when you got here about Trump threatening to put you in jail. I don’t know anyone that covers Trump that views him as someone with a sense of humor. So if he’s saying it, it’s obviously on the table for him. And I wonder if you’ve thought that through, if you have a plan, if you know what would happen if he came to arrest you?
Governor JB Pritzker: A plan? Look, I have said very explicitly come get me because he’s got no reason. There’s no probable cause. There’s nothing. He is literally just threatening people that are his political opponents. And you’ve heard him do that writ-large against Democrats, calling us essentially terrorists and saying that that Democrats are Antifa. And again, no one’s really defined what that is. It’s just some mythical thing out there that he thinks anybody that’s opposed to him belongs to.
It’s sad. I mean, there is something wrong with him, and I really believe that he’s got to have family members who want to do something, but nobody’s close enough to him apparently who would help him. And the people around him, Stephen Miller and Christy Noem, and I don’t know, Lutnick and the rest, they apparently are just taking advantage of his condition. So I’m not worried for myself. I mean, could it happen? Sure. But boy, I think they’re be an awful lot of people who’d be concerned if he’s just randomly having people arrested. We are seeing him take action, as you know, against his opponents, you know, James Comey and Tish James and others, again, because they are political opponents. But I do think that the judiciary, in the end, that the criminal justice system would treat people fairly. And in the end, even Donald Trump will get held accountable, even though he is currently experiencing immunity, but eventually he will.
Nicolle Wallace: Is that faith rooted in the belief, I mean, Martin Sheen articulated something like that. That whatever we see and witness and chronicle, this is a fleeting moment. Nothing lasts forever and this won’t last forever. Is that rooted in your faith that we will have free and fair elections in ‘26 and ‘28, and the American people will choose someone else because I know you’ve also been sounding the alarms as loudly as anyone in the pro-democracy coalition about the role of the military and militarized federal agents on the streets of Chicago in terms of chilling the right to vote in ‘26?
Governor JB Pritzker: You know the expression, of course, the Martin Luther King expression about the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I’ve come to believe that there’s an amendment to that now, which is it bends toward justice if we take it there. But we have to make that happen. That’s up to us. So when you ask about faith in the 2026 elections, no, I don’t. What I have faith in is that 7 million people showed up at the No Kings rally, that people understand that something really terrible is happening in this country. That the fundamental, well, the foundations of our nation are being tested and shaken. And so, the faith I have is that the American people know that this is wrong. That doesn’t mean that a minority, like the Trumpers, can’t continue to take us down a path that would lead to destruction and lead to the destruction of our democracy.
But in the end, I guess my, my faith again, is that the people will stand in the way of what Donald Trump’s trying to do. And you’ve heard me say before that, I believe that what he’s trying to do is interfere with the 2026 elections using the military. And so, I think he needs to prove otherwise, because at the moment he’s following precisely a kind of playbook that we’ve seen throughout history, but also each of the items that would lead to the military standing outside of our polling places or seizing the ballot boxes if he doesn’t like the results of the election, all the pieces of that are seemingly in place.
And the more he says, every time he opens his mouth, he seems to prove that all of our worst fears are rooted in truth and in reality. And so, I also built a Holocaust museum with Holocaust survivors. And I have to say that they have faith, not that things can’t get awful, but they have some real faith that having seen the worst of humanity that people will not forget. And I’m not suggesting we’re heading toward a Holocaust. I am suggesting though that authoritarianism, which they easily recognize the early stages of is coming upon this country and that people are beginning to wake up and recognize it
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Nicolle Wallace: Much more on my conversation with Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, right after the break. Stay with us.
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Nicolle Wallace: You put sort of the intellectual architecture around something that, I mean, J.D. Vance called Donald Trump America’s Hitler. That’s not a partisan analysis, right? There is an intrigue there that’s been noted by J.D. Vance and reported on by journalists. But you’ve put some architecture behind the parallels that involve all of us. And you’ve talked about the first thing you said, was people being asked for their papers, American citizens being asked to show up with papers. Street vendors being asked to produce passports, rounding people up and good people looking the other way, thinking that’s not about me, I’m a citizen, but who do they go after next? We talk a little bit about why that’s so uncomfortable for so many people.
Governor JB Pritzker: Yeah. I do want to separate myself from the idea that I’m calling him Hitler.
Nicolle Wallace: From J.D. Vance.
Governor JB Pritzker: Well, I definitely want to separate myself from him, and from the idea that I haven’t suggested that Donald Trump is Hitler. I wouldn’t say that.
Nicolle Wallace: I don’t think any Democrat has.
Governor JB Pritzker: Yeah.
Nicolle Wallace: Actually, and I think it’s a smear that they project back onto critics —
Governor JB Pritzker: Yeah.
Nicolle Wallace: — but J.D. Vance called Donald Trump cultural heroin. He called him America’s Hitler.
Governor JB Pritzker: Yeah.
Nicolle Wallace: I mean, the attacks on Donald Trump as a fascist came from three generals who worked for him.
Governor JB Pritzker: Yeah.
Nicolle Wallace: The most brutal critiques have come from people that have seen him far more closely than you or I combined. But I think that that gets lumped in with what is a very thoughtful analysis about all of us —
Governor JB Pritzker: Yeah.
Nicolle Wallace: — that looking the other way has an equally harrowing echo in history.
Governor JB Pritzker: Yeah. I appreciate that. And my point, and I think the point you’re making is that we’ve seen this before with totalitarians and authoritarians, that there’s a well-worn path throughout history, and you can recognize the signs of it. And that it just happens that the authoritarian and totalitarian history that I know best is having built a Holocaust museum sitting next to those survivors for 10 years doing it and learning so much about the Holocaust and my own family’s experience escaping the Russian killings of Jews in the 19th century in Ukraine. I think it’s easy to recognize this.
I think we all ought to go re-read Martin Niemoller’s poem. First They Came, is the name of it. And because it’s right. I mean, you can substitute different names in there for socialists or Jews or trade unionists. It all applies today. It happens that what the Nazis did was they went after immigrants first, just so happens, you know? And then they categorized people who were German citizens but weren’t maybe multi-generational German citizens as immigrants after they had demonized immigrants. Right now you’re put in a demonized category and so on.
So, again, you can recognize all this and yeah, it’s deeply concerning. I was at a union rally. This is Southern Illinois. These are older, a lot of middle-aged, white trade unionists. And their leader got up, and I would not describe him as a progressive or liberal. And he got up and he was accepting an award and he read Niemoller’s poem.
Nicolle Wallace: Wow.
Governor JB Pritzker: To a room of, essentially, all white trade union guys, plumbers and carpenters. And he was letting everybody know, like I don’t know how old he is. Maybe he’s 70-years-old, that he feels like people need to wake up and see what’s happening. That he’s seeing it. And it was powerful to me because it’s not a room where normally you would hear that. And frankly, I think there are probably a lot of people that were in that room that voted for Donald Trump.
And so, I guess that gives me hope that beyond the people that I normally talk to every day, who already are seeing the things that I see, there are a whole bunch of people who I don’t see every day and who you might suspect aren’t recognizing all of this who are waking up. And I think, again, No Kings is an example of that because there are a whole lot of people out there that don’t look like me and don’t have my background and they aren’t usually at these sorts of things. I’ve had lots of people come up to me and say I’ve never been to a protest before, but I had to come out.
Nicolle Wallace: Let me just ask you. We covered the No Kings protests in Chicago. I think it was one of the biggest and you were there.
Governor JB Pritzker: Yeah.
Nicolle Wallace: What are you seeing on the streets that we might be missing from climate-controlled studios?
Governor JB Pritzker: I mean, again, this will give you hope. These ICE agents started showing up outside of some houses of worship where there are more typically Latinos who will show up for services on Sunday. So on Sunday morning, they showed up outside of several of these churches and people in the neighborhoods of the churches and people from other neighborhoods came and saw it and began to form a kind of a human chain wall to protect the parishioners coming out after the sermon, and they’re now doing this every Sunday.
And the same is happening around schools and school drop off areas, right, where a bus will leave kids and normally you have parents, they’re receiving their kids, but the parents are afraid. You now have people volunteering to help, and again, to protect because the ICE agents are showing up there too. And so, everybody has a television camera essentially in their pocket now.
Nicolle Wallace: Yeah.
Governor JB Pritzker: And that’s why it’s so great that so many people are just pulling it out. Even people who have never done this before, they’re filming things and they’re just throwing it up online and really, it’s true democracy. And I think the role that the media plays is so vitally important because you can amplify, you and others can amplify this so that ultimately all across the country, people will be seeing the kinds of things that I saw.
Nicolle Wallace: What is your most brutal criticism of people staying on the sidelines or of the press, not really understanding the human toll of what’s transpired over the last nine months?
Governor JB Pritzker: Yeah, let me hold the criticism just for a second just to say —
Nicolle Wallace: Okay.
Governor JB Pritzker: — I understand that a whole lot of people are just trying to get through the day, right? You’ve got one or two jobs that you’re holding down. You can’t pay the bills. Groceries are too high. I mean, the tariffs are destroying everybody, small businesses. You can’t buy beer and tomatoes and lettuce at a reasonable price anymore because of tariffs. So people are focused on how to get through the day. I remember when I was about 23 years old, I went with an organization called the American Council of Young Political Leaders to Argentina to learn about their political system. It was a Democrats and Republicans, and it happens that when we landed, there was a military coup in Argentina. So you want to learn about a political system that may be a way to do it.
So we went to the hotel that we were staying at and we watched on CNN all the things they were videoing and showing, but we had to make a decision that we’re going to go out to the democracy rally the next day, and to witness the democracy or the failure of it in action, or we were going to go to the U.S. embassy. As you can imagine, all the Republicans voted to go to the U.S. embassy and wait it out. The Democrats voted to go out in the streets. We had one tiebreaker.
So we ended up going out in the streets and we went to the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, and we stood at a kind of an elevated area. And I remember watching hundreds of thousands of people protesting for democracy. And in the middle of all of it was a guy with an ice cream cart. He wasn’t protesting. He was trying to sell ice cream and popsicles on a hot day. And you know what? I remember that, because I remember thinking, that guy, whether it’s an authoritarian regime or a democracy, he’s got to put food on the table.
So back to your question, I understand why some people are just, you don’t have time. It’s not part of your existence that you can go show up at a protest. So, like, I’m very forgiving and understanding of that. I think that if you have the ability to stand up, that it is your obligation. And think about the organizations like university boards, like corporate boards, like corporations, that probably those folks have the time and have the ability.
And when they’re not standing up, and indeed some of them are doing the exact opposite, I think that’s a shame. And those are the people who are giving in, the people who are saying, well, if I just keep my head down, if I just give in and if I just pay these guys off, I give something to Trump, they’ll leave me alone.
Nicolle Wallace: Yeah.
Governor JB Pritzker: I’ll make an extra buck.
Nicolle Wallace: The law firms and the universities. What is it that explains the silence or the go along, get along in your view? I mean, you have some huge companies headquartered in your state and in the city of Chicago. There’s not an example on the planet of a thriving economy in any of the world’s autocracies. What do you think keeps business leaders in your own state on the sidelines?
Governor JB Pritzker: Some have stood up. I want to be clear because on the first day that we were standing up against Donald Trump bringing National Guard into Chicago, because soldiers don’t belong on the streets of American cities. The business community stood with us because they understand first and foremost, it’s bad for democracy. They also understand it’s bad for business. That scaring people unnecessarily, especially when we’ve brought crime way down and we continue to do that. There’s always more to do. But the idea of bringing troops in who aren’t trained, they’re not law enforcement, that’s not going to help. Like give us some help, and I’ve said that in the business community said it too.
Nicolle Wallace: So you would take help if Trump offered cops or law enforcement, you would take help.
Governor JB Pritzker: Oh my goodness, many times I’ve said this, how about just send us more FBI, ATF, DEA.
Nicolle Wallace: Yeah.
Governor JB Pritzker: I’d love to get more drugs and guns off the streets and go get the gang members, but attacking a building full of mostly people who are law abiding in order to get two or three people that you’re trying to get to, that’s not how we do things in law enforcement, anywhere in the country. And the way that they’re operating, I mean, they are breaking the law every day and sending troops and doesn’t help. So the business community, I have to say, has stood up with me and with the city of Chicago to do the right thing. But you know, you do see the guys who are sitting at the table with Trump. Some of them, the tech bros who have decided like it’s better just to go along, get along with him and it’s better for their business and their pocketbook.
Well, I got to say that you’re never immune because just like the Martin Neimoller poem, first they came for some other folks, then no one was left to protect me when they came for me. That’s going to be the case for everybody. And so, you got to recognize that capitalism can thrive in a thriving democracy, it does. And the less democracy there is, the less likely it is that the economy will succeed in the end. And so, I think there is a kind of a growing recognition. I don’t know if it’s growing fast enough.
Nicolle Wallace: What is the fairest critique of your fellow Democrats? People are hungry for the leadership that you’re displaying. People are enthusiastic about the leadership that your fellow governor, Gavin Newsome, is displaying. A lot of your fellow democratic governors, long discussed as part of this great and brilliant bench have not entered the national conversation in any meaningful way. What explains their silence and our democratic voters and pro-democracy voters justified in being frustrated that there are only a handful of you out there fighting?
Governor JB Pritzker: What explains it is fear, but what they need to recognize, and again, go talk to a Holocaust survivor. What they need to recognize is that what you’re afraid of happening to you today will be much worse if you duck and hide, instead of standing up and fighting. The Holocaust survivor, I keep referencing them because they really have had a big impact on me, especially at this moment. They used to say that they would challenge children, young people who would come through the Holocaust museum that we built to think about who they really are.
Are you a collaborator? Are you a bystander? Are you a rescuer? Are you an upstander? Now rescuer is tremendous. Upstander is somebody who’s willing to stand up and speak out, even at the risk of their own safety. And I think that is the question that is facing so many people right now. And if you’re a bystander and you just let it happen, you are going to suffer mightily. So people need to step up, speak up, speak out, grab a megaphone, a microphone, soap box and get to the ballot box.
Because in the end, the 2026 elections are the determinant, because all this stuff going to court, protesting, all the things that we’re doing now vitally important to do because these are the things that we can do right now.
But we got to preserve our democracy. We’ve got to elect people who are actually going to hold this administration to the law and the people who are breaking it need to be held accountable. That only happens if we win the at least one or both houses of Congress in 2026.
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Nicolle Wallace: My conversation with Governor Pritzker continues after a quick break. We’ll be right back.
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Nicolle Wallace: Before you were in this moment, you gave a pretty viral, I think it’s a commencement address in 2023, about some of what the human condition is that that allows people to operationalize the racial profiling or the treatment of people here illegally.
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Governor JB Pritzker: When we see someone who doesn’t look like us or sound like us or act like us or love like us or live like us, the first thought that crosses almost everyone’s brain is rooted in either fear or judgment or both. That’s evolution. We survived as a species by being suspicious of things that we aren’t familiar with. In order to be kind we have to shut down that animal instinct and force our brain to travel a different pathway. Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity to step past our most primal urges.
(End VT)
Nicolle Wallace: Do you think at all about the human condition in this moment that allows so many people. I mean, being here illegally is not a crime, or it wasn’t before Trump was there. It was a civil offense. And never mind not pursuing the worst of the worst. I mean, they’re rounding up people who aren’t criminals by any standard, legally accepted prior to January 20th, 2025. I mean, what is your sense of what happened to people and, by extension, to our politics, that there are so many people who voted for this? So many people who with cameras on waved around mass deportation now signs. And so many people, I mean, Chicago is a bright spot, but in a lot of places, people are maybe understandably but undeniably sort of keeping their heads down and hoping this doesn’t come for them.
Governor JB Pritzker: Well, let’s not throw everybody under the bus because if you voted for Donald Trump, it doesn’t mean that you agreed with everything about him. I think a lot of people, like I said earlier, a lot of people deeply concerned about inflation, deeply concerned about being able to pay the bills, the cost of everything, housing, everything has gone up. And I think that there are a lot of people that voted for him thinking, because he was promising to do it, that prices will come down. He said that.
And I think there are people who believe that there are people who are here and undocumented in the country who are somehow causing some of that. But I don’t think a majority of those people thought that what is happening now would be happening. I really don’t. And I think you’re seeing more and more that sometimes there’s embarrassment so people don’t really want to admit that they disagree with Donald Trump’s tactics, but they are saying they don’t like what’s going on. They’re saying that they may not say they don’t like Donald Trump yet. They haven’t gotten there.
But honestly, that doesn’t really matter so much. What matters is will they stand up and speak out and end up voting against the policies by voting for Democrats. I think more and more people will, or there are people who will stay home because that’s their way of protesting, right? They may not love Democrats, but they sure as heck don’t like the Republican policies that they’ve seen.
Nicolle Wallace: Why do you think they don’t like Democrats? I’m an ex-Republican? So I don’t have the, the long lens of what the sort of brand problems are with the democratic party, but what do you think the problem is?
Governor JB Pritzker: Yeah, I have some opinions about this. We’ll have to have another show to, to talk about it. But look, I do think there were problems in the 2024 election and then there’s a broader, longer term problem of a lack of focus. I mean, among Democrats. Those of us who are lifelong Democrats, we chose to be Democrats because we believe that fighting for working-class people, for middle-class and for the most vulnerable that Medicaid, Medicare, social security, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act. These are all really important to us. Fighting for civil rights, really matters to a whole bunch of us.
And those are all fundamental things, I think, about being a Democrat. I’m not suggesting that’s the be all on the end, all of being a Democrat, but if we’re not reiterating that over and over that we are fighting for average folks every day, folks who are just trying to get by the people I was talking about earlier, who barely pay the bills. Now, if we’re not demonstrating that we believe that they are front and center, and very importantly, delivering on that. We can all talk about abundance or talk about policy into action. I like to say you got to deliver.
Nicolle Wallace: Yeah.
Governor JB Pritzker: And I’ve had to do that in Illinois. I came in office, minimum wage in Illinois was $8.25. It’s a dollar more than the federal minimum, which is still $7.25, I can’t believe it. But you know, we raised it to $15. You know, that was just one thing. Putting people to work, building roads and bridges and, schools and, and ports and airports and so on. And these are things that we Democrats do, right. It’s like building for the long term, making sure that people can actually put food on the table and afford to live somewhere.
We’ve had to implement policies that stood up for me. How about healthcare, you know? Yeah. It’s almost like after Obamacare succeeded, meaning it wasn’t going to be repealed. It’s like Democrats walked away from the healthcare issue, but we really believe in it. It’s just —
Nicolle Wallace: Yeah.
Governor JB Pritzker: — wasn’t a priority and boy, oh boy. I mean, we’ve been we’ve been upgrading and focusing on people’s healthcare in the state of Illinois because that is the future. If you ask me for the Democratic Party to get back to basics and we’ve got to talk about what I think is something hugely important that’s coming, and that’s AI. The number of people that are going to be laid off and have challenges finding work, people who’ve gotten an education to do one thing and won’t be able to do that thing because those jobs will have gone away.
AI poses real opportunities and amazing things for the future of humanity, but it is going to be a terrible circumstance of transition unless we address it. We Democrats are uniquely qualified to do that. I think Republicans don’t really care. And so, I mean, I really don’t.
Nicolle Wallace: Yeah.
Governor JB Pritzker: I mean, think about what Donald Trump is doing today. None of it about trying to make sure that in all of the transition of technology that he’s continuing to promote what are we doing about the dislocation of people who train to do one job and can’t do that anymore. So these are, I think the problems that Democrats have had losing focus, letting the Republicans set traps where Democrats walk right into them, right?
Nicolle Wallace: In cultural debates.
Governor JB Pritzker: Yeah, or frankly in a whole bunch of ways, right? I mean, they take one small thing and they turn it into like, are you for men going into women’s bathrooms? I mean, is the way that they try to describe the entire issue of standing up for someone’s civil rights.
Nicolle Wallace: Right.
Governor JB Pritzker: And it’s not about whether you’re allowing men to go into women’s, that’s not the issue. And yet, we go walking, wandering right into it, and instead what we ought to be asking is, are you able to get a job that pays the bills and are you being discriminated against in getting that job because of something that has nothing to do with whether you can actually do the job. How about black people and women now being discouraged from going into the military? I mean, we have the greatest military in the world, and yet they’re tearing it apart right now, Hegseth and Trump, because why they have some odd 1930s idea about what the military should look like.
Nicolle Wallace: Yeah, beards and, yeah.
Governor JB Pritzker: Really? I mean, it’s crazy. And then they want to blame Democrats somehow for this kind of fake problem that they’ve made up about the military. We have the greatest military in the world. I mean, we do, and we continue to have it. And it’s in part because women have become part of our military, in part, because we’ve democratized the military, meaning we’ve let people who are qualified and willing to serve, come in and help defend our country. So, anyway, this is a longer rant that I will have with you someday. But I —
Nicolle Wallace: It’s an important one. It’s an important one. We have to have it. I covered and find it very refreshing that you have criticisms for people like me, for the press. Lay it on me. What are we doing wrong?
Governor JB Pritzker: Well, not everything is a both sides issue. You know, when someone’s breaching the constitution, it needs to be called out. There’s a Constitution. It says what it says. And then when someone is literally breaking the law because they’re ignoring the Constitution, there are like two sides to that. It’s just, it should be called what it is. This group of people is ignoring the law. I understand the job of the media is to make sure that when there are two sides, that they are both fairly presented, but sometimes they’re not. And especially when there’s fact and fiction, you don’t present those equally. It strikes me. And, and we saw that during COVID.
Nicolle Wallace: Yeah.
Governor JB Pritzker: And now we’re seeing it. I joke about it. I’ve been in office since 2019 and my chief of staff and I joke about the fact that in all that time I’ve had about eight months of unprecedented times. All the rest of it has been unprecedented. And what I know is that sometimes it’s hard for all of us, including the media, to get ahold of, wait, how do we deal with this? It’s truly unprecedented. But I remind members of the media that the real job, at least, it seems like the mainstream media ought to be, to do your best at objectivity and recognize that there is sometimes just truth and lie and they can’t be presented next to each other as equal.
Nicolle Wallace: I think that’s right. If you’re confused about what that means, just be a mirror, right. Just hold up the mirror. I mean, and the journalists in Chicago have been in the league of their own. They’ve been incredible. The reporting on a lot of the things we’ve talked about today, a lot of what we know is from the great journalists there in your city, so.
Governor JB Pritzker: Well, I’m not allowed to compliment media in my home state because they look for ways to criticize. No, I’m kidding.
Nicolle Wallace: I will, I will, I will.
Governor JB Pritzker: You said, I’m only kidding. Really, we do have some great reporters and great organizations too and I’m proud. Yeah.
Nicolle Wallace: Governor Pritzker, thank you for your time.
Governor JB Pritzker: Thank you, Nicolle.
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