Snapshot: "These Republicans Cannot Know a Moment of Peace"

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker calls for mass protests and disruptions in response to the Trump regime's cruelty and "authoritarian power grabs"

(Video screenshot)

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has been emerging in recent months as a key leader among elected Democrats to define the opposition and confront the dangerous threat of Donald Trump and his hostile regime. He heightened that position Sunday night in a nearly 30-minute keynote speech for the New Hampshire Democratic Party and a crowd of more than 800.

I was first struck by his comments about the need and way to fight back. I hadn’t heard before such a clear call for mass protest by any other Democratic leader. “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now,” Pritzker said.

“These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace,” he continued. “They must understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box and then punish them at the ballot box.”

But I also listened to the rest of Pritzker’s vivid depiction about what’s at stake, what he sees unfolding and why it’s not adequate to respond with business-as-usual approaches. “It’s time for us to be done with optimism about their motives or their objectives,” he asserted.

“Time to stop wondering if you can trust the nuclear codes to people who don’t know how to organize a group chat,” he continued. “It’s time to stop ignoring the hypocrisy in wearing a big gold cross while announcing the defunding of children’s cancer research. Time to stop thinking we can reason or negotiate with a madman.”

Trump enablers, he added, should “feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history” their portraits will end up in “the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.”

Pritzker also had tough words for hesitant, “do-nothing” Democrats who “would tell you that the house is not on fire, even as they feel the flames licking their face.” He called out those “whose simpering timidity served as a kindle for the arsonists.” He insisted, “We need to knock off the rust of poll-tested language, decades of stale decorum. It’s obscured our better instincts.” And he concluded that Democrats should fight “everywhere and all at once.”

Pritzker also got personal about his own background. “As a Ukrainian American Jew who built a Holocaust museum,” he said, “whose family emigrated here as refugees from the Russian pogroms, let me say this to Donald Trump: Stop tearing down the Constitution in the name of my ancestors. Do not claim that your authoritarian power grabs are about combatting antisemitism. When you destroy social justice, you are disparaging the very foundation of Judaism.”

This speech was far from the first time the Illinois governor, a member of one of the country’s wealthiest families, has spoken out without pulling punches. You will recall that in February Pritzker recounted the Nazis dismantled Germany’s constitutional republic in “one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes” and warned that “when the five-alarm fire starts to burn” we’ll need good people “to stop it from ranging out of control.” Then in March he asserted that “the response to authoritarianism isn’t acquiescence”—that the best response to bullies is “a punch in the face.”

Pritzker’s speech Sunday night caused Trump henchmen like Stephen Miller to claim that his words “could be construed as inciting violence” and a Cook County commissioner in Illinois to call the remarks “unhinged.” The New Hampshire speech also elicited fresh talk in the room and beyond that Pritzker is gearing up for a 2028 presidential run.

Maybe, he is. But 2028 is like a lifetime from now—and what matters most is not Pritzker’s political aspirations. What matters now is his ability to help motivate the opposition while we still have a democratic country to save.

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