Governor quest to project pragmatic progressivism present in budget, other policy proposals
By HANNAH MEISEL
Capitol News Illinois
news@capitolnewsillinois.com
SPRINGFIELD – A month into President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, Gov. JB Pritzker last week warned that the breakneck pace at which the Trump administration has been remaking federal policy could be a harbinger of something darker.
“It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic,” the governor said near the end of his annual combined State of the State and Budget Address on Wednesday.
Pritzker’s speech to a packed Illinois House chamber marked the start of the usual monthslong process of crafting a new state budget for the coming fiscal year. More than any budget or policy proposal, though, the governor used his annual public address to take aim at Trump in a way other high-profile Democrats have largely shied away from: discussing the rise of Adolf Hitler.
“The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight,” he said. “It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.”
Pritzker, Illinois’ third Jewish governor whose ancestors fled religious persecution in Ukraine in the late 1800s, said he didn’t “invoke the specter of Nazis lightly” but cited his experience working with survivors to help found the Illinois Holocaust Museum in suburban Skokie as basis for his warning message.
“I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now,” he said. “The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems. I just have one question: What comes next?”
Read more: Pritzker emerging as one of Trump’s most vocal Democratic critics
As the governor presented his seventh budget proposal last week, he nodded to the very real possibility that it could all be blown up by the Trump administration and a Republican-controlled Congress.
Read more: Pritzker calls $55.2B budget ‘responsible and balanced’ – but warns Trump policies could upend it
“For all the Illinoisans watching at home, let me be clear: this is going to affect your daily lives,” Pritzker said. “Our state budget can’t make up for the damage that is done to people across our state if they succeed.”
Instead of his usual post-Budget Address whistle-stop tour of Illinois promoting his agenda, the governor spent Tuesday in the U.S. Capitol with Illinois’ congressional delegation “to press the Trump admin on the more than $1.8 billion they are withholding from Illinoisans,” according to a social media post from a spokesman.
It’s unclear whether Pritzker’s fiery rhetoric will help him pass the budget blueprint and legislative agenda he laid out last week in Springfield. But it did garner him national attention, including on The Rachel Maddow Show and earning millions of ‘likes’ on TikTok.
The governor insisted he wasn’t “speaking up in service to my ambitions – but in deference to my obligations.”
But the spotlight moment comes as years of speculation over the governor’s political future as a presidential candidate may come to a head later this year as Pritzker decides whether to run for a third term as governor in 2026.
‘On the federal chopping block’
The second-term governor went on to urge political leaders to “be strong enough to learn from” history in order to prevent repeating it.
But Pritzker also cited more recent history, drawing parallels between Trump’s move to slash federal spending and a budget fight that crippled much of Illinois government under his predecessor, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner.
This year marks a decade since Rauner’s political fight with Democratic majorities in the General Assembly launched the state into a two-year budget impasse that decimated social services in Illinois. It also ballooned Illinois’ unpaid bill backlog to $17 billion and earned the state multiple credit downgrades.
“Here in Illinois,10 years ago we saw the consequences of a rampant ideological gutting of government,” Pritzker said. “It genuinely harmed people. Our citizens hated it. Trust me: I won an entire election based in part on just how much they hated it.”
Pritzker, who is now the nation’s second-wealthiest elected official after Trump, said in his speech Wednesday that tech billionaire Elon Musk – the richest person on earth – plans to “steal Illinois’ tax dollars and deny our citizens the protection and services they need.”
“They say they’re doing it to eliminate inefficiencies,” Pritzker said of Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.” “But only an idiot would think we should eliminate emergency response in a natural disaster, education and healthcare for disabled children, gang crime investigations, clean air and water programs, monitoring of nursing home abuse, nuclear reactor regulation, and cancer research.”
Despite campaign promises to not touch entitlement programs, Trump has endorsed congressional Republicans’ plans to shrink federal spending to pay for an extension the president’s 2017 tax cuts over the next decade at a cost of $4.5 trillion. Advocates worry the GOP framework would leave Congress little choice but to gut Medicaid, a joint program between states and the federal government that supports 3.3 million Illinoisans who are either low-income, have disabilities or meet other qualifications for benefits.
Illinois is one of 40 states plus the District of Columbia that have adopted Medicaid expansion programs authorized under the Affordable Care Act that extend Medicaid coverage to low-income childless adults who don’t otherwise qualify for the program.
But like other states, Illinois has a trigger law in place that would effectively cancel its Medicaid expansion program if federal reimbursement falls below 90%, making it likely more than 700,000 Illinoisans would lose health coverage if congressional Republicans target ACA expansion first.
Pritzker warned Medicaid cuts would mean rural hospitals in Illinois would be shuttered.
Meanwhile the governor said popular programs like Meals on Wheels “are on the federal chopping block” as the Trump administration briefly blocked routine federal payments for many services last month.
Read more: ‘Blatantly unlawful’ federal spending freeze sends state scrambling
Even so, Pritzker last week presented no contingency plans for federal funds potentially disappearing. Instead, he proposed a $55.2 billion budget that would see discretionary spending – including state programs targeted at everything from economic development to violence prevention – grow at about 1% from the current fiscal year, which ends June 30.
Fixed costs, including pension payments, K-12 education spending and state employee health care costs – drive the rest of the $2 billion in spending growth from this year’s enacted budget.
Read more: Pritzker’s budget office projects $3.2B deficit in early look at upcoming fiscal year | Pritzker must address multi-billion-dollar deficit amid federal funding uncertainty
Reaction to invoking Nazi history
While some members of the General Assembly’s influential Latino and Black caucuses were less than thrilled with Pritzker’s budget proposal, some in his own party praised the framework – including moderate members who held up last year’s late night budget vote in protest.
Read more: Black, Latino lawmakers criticize Pritzker’s proposed budget
But reactions were mixed when it came to the governor invoking the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany. Many Democrats clapped when Pritzker urged learning from history to avoid repeating it.
Rep. Bob Morgan, D-Deerfield, who co-chairs the General Assembly’s Jewish Caucus, and whose great-grandparents perished in the Holocaust, was among them.
“I think we are seeing some ignoring of those rising elements of extremism and hate,” he said. “The confidence that white supremacists feel to march in state capitals around the country is relatively recent, and it's absolutely happening, and I think we have to call it out … That was the lesson I've always taken from the Holocaust – it’s that people didn't speak up.”
To critics’ ears, however, Pritzker’s speech signaled he has his eye on the White House in 2028.
The governor was vetted as a possible running mate for former Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential run last summer. He’s also expanded his political influence in recent years, spending big for Democrats in other states and even launching a nationwide “dark money” 501(c) organization focused on progressive policies, starting with abortion protections.
Read more: With budget proposal and fiery address, Pritzker paints himself as progressive pragmatist | In primetime DNC speech, Pritzker leans into role of benevolent billionaire
Rep. Ryan Spain, R-Peoria, warned that the governor’s rhetoric may put Illinois squarely in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.
“He is not going to be running against Donald Trump in 2028 and he needs to understand that as soon as possible, because there's a lot at risk for the state of Illinois by continuing to play the part of antagonizer to the president of the United States,” he said.
Even Democrats who had previously been more outspoken in their opposition to Trump have been more muted since the president’s inauguration last month.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who just last summer made references to the spread of fascism in 1930s Europe in his 2024 State of the State speech, needs federal disaster funding to help the state recover from January’s devastating wildfires. Earlier this month Newsom met with Trump about disaster relief, thanking the president and his administration for their assistance.
Trump has directly threatened funding to blue states in the last month, including directly to Maine Gov. Janet Mills last week over her state’s laws aimed at protecting transgender people from discrimination.
Federal funding to Illinois has also been threatened in Trump’s second term. Though courts blocked the president’s 2017 attempt to withhold funding from “sanctuary cities,” an executive order the president issued on his first day back in office calls for the same halt to funding on any local government that has enacted policies restricting local law enforcement agencies from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement actions.
And earlier this month, Trump’s Department of Justice sued Chicago, Cook County and Illinois over their “sanctuary” laws.
Read more: Illinois locked in legal battles with Trump administration over immigration policy
Illinois’ senior U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, with whom Pritzker has publicly disagreed with over politics in the past, last month was roundly criticized for saying he didn’t know who would be leading Democrats’ charge against Trump.
“I can’t answer that. Give us a little time,” he told Semafor. “This is brand new.”
Pritzker on Wednesday used his bully pulpit to challenge his fellow Democrats, who are facing intraparty criticism for failing to do much to stop or slow the Trump administration’s consolidation of power.
Read more: Pritzker emerging as one of Trump’s most vocal Democratic critics
“There are people – some in my own party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm,” Pritzker said, launching into an abbreviated version of a story he’s told publicly several times about the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.
In the governor’s telling, he offered to praise Trump on Sunday news shows in exchange for N95 masks and ventilators. But when the supplies arrived, the crates were instead filled with surgical masks and broken BiPAP machines, which are most commonly used to treat sleep apnea and other breathing disorders.
“Going along to get along does not work,” he said. “Just ask the Trump-fearing red state governors ... Those Trump state – red state governors are dealing with the same cuts that we are, and I won't be fooled twice.”
Aside from accusations that Pritzker used inflammatory comparisons to grow his national platform, some Republicans said they were offended Wednesday. Six GOP House members left their desks on the House floor, walking toward the back exit when the governor began talking about the 1978 Nazi march on Skokie.
Though most of them were members of the ultraconservative “Illinois Freedom Caucus,” Rep. Jeff Keicher, R-Sycamore, one of the more moderate Republicans in the General Assembly, said his walkout was spurred by “emotional frustration” borne of what he felt was a sort of cognitive dissonance in Pritzker’s speech.
“We still have all this money to spread all over the place,” Keicher said of Pritzker’s spending plan, even as social services in Illinois face persistent funding challenges. Keicher cited ongoing state funding challenges to services including domestic violence shelters, nursing homes and “a seven-year backlog” for adults seeking ” for developmental disabilities services.developmental disabilities services in Illinois – though the state’s official estimate has fallen to roughly five years.
"And then I hear the governor lay into what he's calling Illinois Nazis, and the way that we slip into Nazism is by having high inflation,” he continued. “As a man who has stood up repeatedly in his public role and defended the plight of Israel and Jews in this country – to be called a Nazi is beyond the pale.”
David Shyovitz, the director of Northwestern University’s Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies and an associate professor of history, said careful study of how Hitler consolidated power through “constitutional means” – “basically uprooting and eventually eliminating any legal impediments that stood in their way” – can be instructive.
But he said Nazi Germany is not the only example of strongmen leaders seizing power, and pointed to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whom Trump has said he personally admires.
While Shyovitz said invoking Hitler has a “certain rhetorical thrust,” he said there is a risk to “devaluing what made that historical period so horrible” and warned that overuse, particularly in online discourse, could zap it of its power.
“As a historian, I think it's appropriate for us to try and learn from the historical past and apply it in the present,” Shyovitz said. “As a voter, I would be worried that using that example is going to end up alienating the very people that you need to convince.”
‘It’s not a scare tactic’
Rep. Terra Costa Howard, D-Glen Ellyn, the chair of the New Democrats caucus, a group of more than 20 more moderate Democrats in the Illinois House, agreed. She said she understood why Pritzker would choose to invoke Nazism because “it is the only reference in modern times that people can connect to.”
But she said Democrats will see more success messaging against Trump if they put the focus on the ways in which decisions from the White House affect Americans.
Read more: Trump tariffs could impact hundreds of billions of dollars of trade in Illinois
“If we lose Medicaid dollars, everybody knows somebody in a nursing home,” Costa Howard said. “That is going to have a direct impact to people we know and love in our community. People are not making that connection. We need to explain what that is. It's not a scare tactic. It is a reality. And that is what people need to hear.”
In an op-ed for MSNBC and a longer podcast interview with one of its hosts published Monday, Pritzker agreed with Costa Howard’s assertion, saying Democrats should focus on “affordability” instead of expending the party’s rhetorical power on “threats to democracy.”
To that end, the governor also backed an array of legislative proposals in his speech last week, including cracking down on pharmaceutical benefit managers in an attempt to hold down prescription drug costs. Pritzker’s campaign last week also put out a poll showing that of Trump’s recent moves, Illinoisans are most concerned about rolling back former President Joe Biden’s initiative to lower drug costs.
Another Pritzker-backed idea would build on last year’s Healthcare Protection Act, requiring insurers to reimburse travel costs to get to medical appointments at certain distances and barring insurance companies from spending less than 87% of premiums on health care services.
Read more: Pritzker signs health insurance reform measures
Another affordability-focused proposal would have Illinois follow 24 other states that already allow community colleges to offer baccalaureate degrees. As proposed, the program would authorize community colleges in Illinois to offer four-year degrees specifically tailored to meet the employment needs of their communities, including in fields like health care, early childhood education or advanced manufacturing.
Read more: Pritzker to call for expansion of 4-year degree offerings at some community colleges
Rep. Fred Crespo, D-Hoffman Estates, said he’s “excited” about that proposal after having twice passed legislation in the House to allow Harper College in Palatine to offer nursing degrees, only to see the bills die in the Senate.
“So getting the governor's backing on this – I'm hoping really moves the needle because I think really that that's where the future of education is,” he said, noting that enrollment in Illinois’ community colleges has increased more than the national average in recent years.
Pritzker’s other proposals range from progressive priorities like further expanding abortion care availability and protections to ideas that could appeal to voters in both parties, including banning cell phones during instructional time in Illinois schools. At least 11 other state legislatures have passed legislation on school cell phone use in the last two years.
Improving and then selling off unused state property, lowering the petition signature threshold for a township consolidation ballot question and regulating cryptocurrency ATMs are also on the governor's list.
Bridgette Fox and Jade Aubrey contributed.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
