Illinois Gov. Pritzker Fights Back Against Trump

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Pritzker. Honored to have you on.
Governor, governor, right after the election, you were one of the first, if not the first, governor, Democratic governor, to kind of come out and say, you know, we're going to protect the state of Illinois. We're going to protect this country from Trump's encroachment if he starts violating the Constitution.
Why'd you come out with that statement right away? Well, Ben, we know who this guy is, right? I was governor back in 2019 and 2020 when he was in his first term. And I can tell you that my experiences back then, and of course, the man's history, would tell you that he doesn't live up to his promises, that he doesn't give a darn about really any of the people that he represents.
And I knew that we had to start on day one as Democrats to rebuild and remind people who we are as a Democratic Party and what we stand for, because he sort of during the election obscured so much of what he really is about. And somehow the campaign last year just wasn't able to get across, you know, what our fundamental values are as Democrats.
So that's why I was immediate about it. The fact is that, you know, the lies have cost so much for the American people, even already, what are we, 62 days into his administration.
And I think people are finally, finally waking up, but it was important to me to sound the alarm. Has his corruption and the wrecking ball that he and Elon Musk have taken to this country kind of met the expectations of corruption, exceeded them in kind of the pace? What would you make of what you're seeing?

Well, I will say, at least for me, I expected it. I think we're living in a kleptocracy now.
It's clear that Elon Musk, you know, is trying to benefit himself while he's also exercising powers that he was never supposed to be granted. The Constitution certainly doesn't give someone unelected like that the amount of power that he's got.
And you're watching as he benefits himself, harms his enemies, and I'm talking about just Elon Musk. Then you've got Donald Trump, who is enriching himself.
We've seen him already selling meme coins that are worthless, taking people for all that they're worth sometimes. And then at the same time, you know, he said that on day one, he was going to bring down prices for people across America, right, that you could go to the grocery store, and you'd know that inflation was gone.
Well, he's done the exact opposite. That was supposed to be day one, you know, day 62.
we've seen prices at the grocery store are going up and 25% tariffs on tomatoes and lettuce and barley from Canada and aluminum cans. You go to the grocery store, your beer is costing you more.
Your tomatoes, your lettuce, etc., costing you more. Automobiles costing you more.
Housing, lumber costing you more. This is what Donald Trump's all about.
And what does he get out of all of it? The ability to cut taxes for the wealthiest people in the United States, the people who don't need it. He's taking money from people who are suffering, people who are just trying to get by, and giving that money to, again, the wealthiest and the biggest corporations.
Do you think people are indeed getting it now? You know, you mentioned how, you know, for whatever reason during the campaign, and we'll get to that, the election that people, you know, were, I guess, fooled into voting that this guy was going to solve all these issues on day one. You think people are getting it now in your state and elsewhere? Yeah.
And I think we could talk about, you know, why that was obscured during the campaign, but I am beginning to see it and look at, you know, I wish it was sooner, earlier that everybody was waking up, but here's what I'm seeing. Veterans across large swaths of my state, we have about a half a million veterans in Illinois in the southernmost district, congressional district of Illinois, represented by Mike Bost as the congressman, who is the chair of the Veterans Committee.
That district has a lot of veterans in it, and those veterans are already seeing that their services are being taken away, that it's taking longer to get an appointment at the VA. There are homeless veterans

that aren't getting the kind of services and help that they need to get shelter over their heads,

to find the food, the basic necessities that they need. And so they're showing up,

they're speaking out. These are not Democrats, many of them, many of them are Republicans, but they are outraged.
They can't believe many of them that, you know, they voted for Mike Bost and they voted for Donald Trump. And now this is being done to them.
And so I think that's just one example of a group of people who are waking up and speaking out.

But so many of us who revere veterans are also outraged by what's happening to them and speaking up and speaking out about it. I'll tell you one quick other story.
We have many Head Start programs, and I've been for decades now involved in early childhood education and development.

And those Head Start programs are hugely important to especially middle class and working class families across our state.

Well, the uncertainty that was created and has still persisted across Illinois about whether those programs are going to get funded has led many parents to wonder whether they can even keep their jobs because they no longer have a place that they can rely upon to take their child. So when you think your job is at stake and you're worried about, you know, whether you can leave your child in a good location while you go to work, I mean, you can imagine there are people thinking about, you know, they may have to quit their job or they're going to be laid off because they're going to have to take care of their child at home and not be able to go to work.
So these are the kinds of things that are happening for people. And those people are showing up, speaking up and speaking out.
It's a gathering storm against Donald Trump and Elon Musk. But it's getting more and more intense every day.
So other than Herbert Hoover, Donald Trump was the only president during a term to lose jobs. We all saw how disastrously he handled covid during the first time or didn't even handle it at all.
Like a miracle, it's all going to go away. Or he said, don't test, because if you don't test, you can't get the results.
So we saw that disaster. So what do you think was the issue? Why the message got obscured that he could show up with a cold pizza to a fire department and, you know, basically have policies that would gut the unions of those same people, but give people cold pizzas at the union halls and get people to vote against their interest or show up at a McDonald's dressed like whatever.
And that somehow resonated with the people. What happened? Well, let's start with an underlying problem that, you know, you can't point fingers exactly about this.
And that is, there was high inflation, and people were feeling it. And so they're living in an environment where they were feeling like things have been bad.
And it's, you know, it's hard to recover from that. You know, in a political environment, there, there are folks who say that by June of an election year, if you people not feeling like the economy is going to improve or like inflation is under control, by November, they're going to vote for the non-incumbent for the opposition party.
And that, in this case, was Donald Trump and the Republicans. So that is a problem that was just a baseline issue for Democrats in 2024.
Add to that, of course, the uncertainty of the president decide President Biden decided not to run for reelection. Never in my lifetime have we had anything like that, where the incumbent who's running for reelection decides not to after the primaries.
And then replaced by the vice president, who, as much as people may like her, she wasn't very well known. And just people don't know the vice president, they still don't know J.D.
Vance, too. And so, you know, she took his place, but all of a sudden, she had to introduce herself.
So in 108 days to run the, okay, so that's the part that I think where, you know, it's hard to point fingers exactly about some of those things. But let's just be clear that it also was a messaging problem.
That in those 108 days, there were challenges, you know, the attacks that were coming on Kamala Harris. I think the Harris campaign had difficulty responding to.
They didn't directly go after or even respond to some of those attacks. And I think that was a mistake.
You really can't let any time go by in this 24-7 media world where you're getting attacked and people don't know what your response is. So that stuff can stick.
And especially, like I said, in an environment where people are very uneasy and they feel like going to the grocery store is a disaster every time because prices are going up. So those are a lot of things that I've said, but just to be clear, what we should have been focused on every single day is, and every minute of every day, is on the things that matter to your life at the kitchen table.
Like, can you pay your bills? Can you buy the tomatoes, the eggs, the groceries that you need for your family? Can you afford those things? Beer, you know, which under Donald Trump has gone up in price significantly. Just things that matter to you in your everyday life.
One more thing about this. You know, Biden gave a speech in January of 2024, I think, at Valley Forge about democracy.
Everything he said was accurate. And democracy was on the line in that election.
But the problem is, if you go door to door, I'VE DONE A LOT OF door, door knocking for votes, and you talk to people at the doors, people don't understand what it means when you say democracy is at risk. And you can explain it all you want, but people are used to a system that just works for them.
They've never seen democracy that goes away, right, in your entire life. And so it's hard to make that case to people.
But you can make the case that we Democrats, we're the ones who are providing child care for families that need to go to work and leave their child in a quality environment. We're the ones who are funding education and believe in funding education, not just K through 12, but also being able to go to community college.

We're the ones who are standing up for Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. And those cases really weren't made very well during that last election.
So we need to, you know, laser-like

focus on those issues. And if I had to pick one thing that I wish that Kamala Harris had talked

about, because I think it's such an easy thing for us to point out to the American public, the Republicans are opposed to raising the minimum wage at $7.25. $7.25 an hour, $14,000 a year.
You can't live as a single person, let alone raise a family. So we should have been talking about the minimum wage.
Here in Illinois, we raised the minimum wage to $15. We should be talking about that, doing that nationally.
We should be talking about the idea that we want higher wages for people. Republicans want lower wages.
There are many Republicans, if you just survey the Congress, they're opposed to raising the minimum wage, and many of them would like to get rid of the minimum wage. So I think just messaging was a little off, maybe a lot off in 2024, and I think lesson learned by a lot of folks.
But for me, it's what we've been doing in Illinois for the last six years. Donald Trump keeps attacking our allies and keeps doing basically whatever Putin's telling him to do.
He keeps on spreading Putin talking points, voted with Putin and North Korea and Hungary against a resolution condemning Russia's unlawful invasion of Ukraine. I mean, not a day goes by where I think there's always an interview with Donald Trump where he's saying something like this.
Here he is giving the Russian propaganda points about Ukrainian troops being encircled in the Kursk region and that he and Putin are going to have to save the Ukrainian troops. But the Ukrainian troops in Ukraine is going to have to give in to what Trump and Putin want.
I mean, here's what he said. Let's play it.
Russia has the advantages, you know, they have encircled about 2,500 soldiers. They're nicely encircled, and that's not good.
And we want to get it over with. Look, we're doing this.
There are no Americans involved. There could be if we end up in World War Three over this, which is so ridiculous.
But, you know, strange things happen. What do you make of Trump's obsession with Putin? Yeah, you know, I was asked the other day if I could say something to Donald Trump, you know, one question, what would it be? And I said, what does Putin have on you? Because Donald Trump has literally changed our alliances entirely, switching sides.
You know, we used to be the country that stands up for the good guys, that stands with our allies. Ukraine is our ally.
Europe, Western Europe, all of Europe, really, those are our allies. Why did Donald Trump switch sides and choose not the good guys, but the villain, Vladimir Putin.
And everybody understands, everybody rational understands that Vladimir Putin is trying to put together the old Russian empire. And he has been feeling that and wanting to do that since he took power many years ago.
And Donald Trump is literally handing it to him when he hands him the power to control the peacemaking with Ukraine. And I'm Ukrainian American.
I have to say my family escaped being killed in Ukraine by Russians. And this country offered us the safety and security that so many refugees have been able to obtain by coming to the United States.
And we have stood with Ukraine for more than 10 years in their battle for democracy. And the question, I guess I would ask is, if you're willing to hand the keys to Europe over to Vladimir Putin, what's next? Where does this end? And how does the United States retain its leadership in the world when essentially he's retreating entirely to the borders of the United States? He's even made enemies now of the Canadians.
I mean, I can't imagine anything more telling than, you know, having such a close relationship, probably one of our closest allies in the world, certainly in the Western Hemisphere. And, you know, we now are, you know, we've now made enemies of our friends.
Europe is going it alone and trying to figure out how to deal with Putin. What happened? What happened? And so Donald Trump, all I can say is he must, you know, have read the wrong books, listened to the wrong people, and certainly misunderstands the importance of leading in a, you know, in a world that needs a leader of a free world.
And Donald Trump wants to lead just the United States when we need to provide leadership and human rights leadership and strength to so many allies across the world. You know, and in a world, in a country that needs leadership, people are looking to you as well for leadership.
So a lot of people are scared right now in this country. Just as we conclude this interview, you know, what's your final mess? What's your message right now to the Americans out there who are scared, who are nervous? They're worried about what's going to happen tomorrow.
What are you going to say to them? Join the fight. Stand up, speak out, show up.
This is how we're going to change things. It's clear Democrats, right, can't, I mean, you can't outvote Republicans in Congress.
We don't control the executive branch in Washington.

States can't change the trajectory of the federal government, but all of us can use our bully pulpits or our own feet and voice and show up because I'm telling you, Congress people who, you know, work against the will of the American people are going to feel it if you show up. And I mean, even if there's not a town hall meeting, go to their office, bring five friends with you, show up with signs, make sure people know you're going.

That is how we're going to defeat them.

That's how we're going to stand up to them. It's how we're going to slow down the damage that they're trying to do and aim toward the November elections in 2026.

We have to retake at least one, if not both houses of Congress.

And we have the ability to do that if people will speak up, stand up, show up. Illinois Governor J.B.
Pritzker, first time on the Midas Touch Network. Thank you for joining us.
Thanks, Ben. Great to see you.
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