Inside JB Pritzker’s public and private efforts to counter Trump and challenge fellow Democrats

JB Pritzker greeted Rep. Maggie Goodlander with a joke. Answering his own question about how the New Hampshire congresswoman’s first few months in office have been, the Illinois governor laughed: “Awful, right?” But the conversation immediately became a mini-huddle about the debates they’ve each been having with friends at law firms over conceding to President Donald Trump’s demands and the conversation Pritzker had with his sister, Penny, as she leads the Harvard Corporation in its own fight. “This is the way the world ends,” Goodlander said, after they turned and smiled for their photo. Pritzker raised his eyebrows, clenched his lips together in a grimace that looked like he was maybe about to blow a trumpet and gave a slight nod. He has been making that face a lot these days. “There is certain momentum where people are now feeling like — well, the politicians are feeling like, ‘Oh there’s a political reason why I should now speak out and be a fighter.’ I don’t care why you’re joining the fight at this point, we just need everybody out there, right?” Pritzker told CNN in an interview a few minutes later. “And then there are others who are joining the fight because they’re coming to a real realization that, ‘This is much worse than I thought it would be and it’s getting worse.’ And then I look at some of the people who have capitulated and I wonder in the end, is this how you want people to think of you?” There was nothing subtle about Pritzker’s trip to New Hampshire, the state where politicians go to spark chatter about potential presidential runs. Nor was there much subtlety with his intense speech chiding his own party for “simpering timidity” and demanding a stronger, prouder response to what he sees as the “tyrants and traitors” among the Republicans, woven with lines designed to be easily clipped on social media. All that, along with Pritzker’s speeches comparing Trump to the rise of Nazis and the governor’s calendar of similar Democratic event appearances around the country are the visible, visceral part of what he’s doing to push his party now and stoke talk about 2028, even as he repeats that Democrats should focus on the 2026 elections. Pritzker and his team are making a bet about where the country is, and where it’s going. The existential bet is that things are going to get much darker and more authoritarian. The political bet is that Democrats will remember deep in their cores who was out front first. As a man who was one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors long before he was a governor bracing his state against Trump’s actions or a potential presidential hopeful, Pritzker is in a unique spot. Most expect if he runs in 2028 he would largely self-fund his campaign, as he has done in Illinois. The Hyatt hotel fortune made the family so rich that several heirs are billionaires. Now, on top of his official duties, his days can range from calling up Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler to say he hadn’t seen enough yard signs while driving through his neighboring state and asking how much money they needed to fix that, to calling executives he knows from before his time in office to urge them to think how history will see their administration-friendly moves now, to calling Maine Gov. Janet Mills after the president threatened to strip funding from her state during an event at the White House in February. The Democratic Governors Association’s aghast statement after Trump’s heated Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was because Pritzker, along with frequent phone buddy Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, insisted on it, according to aides to both. Pritzker and his aides are initiating calls to other governors, state legislators and activists urging them to follow Illinois’ lead in anticipating Trump’s next moves. Pritzker has his own plane, so it wasn’t travel logistics that kept him from this year’s National Governors Association meeting in February in Washington, but an unspoken statement about how feckless he has found the Republicans in the group in standing up for their states against Trump and how disappointingly docile he has found too many of his fellow Democrats. In the interview, Pritzker compared this moment in America to what he sees walking through the exhibits of the Holocaust museum he helped get built outside Chicago. He likened it to the point when Nazis were on the rise, everyone was writing them off and only looking back “where you can feel, you know it, you can see and absorb what was happening in 1933, 1934.” Others, including fellow governors, see opportunism, or at least the convenient freedom that he has as a rich man in a solidly blue state so comfortable in his standing and wealth that he spent millions in the 2022 Republican gubernatorial primary to get a weaker candidate he could run up the score on. Unlimited money means unlimited new groups and organizations he can fund that don’t do much except provide new avenues for press releases and TV bookings. Now Pritzker’s Think Big PAC, formed after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision to boost abortion protection ballot measures across the country, is preparing to expand both geographically and on issues, with plans to support efforts to protect Medicaid and Head Start programs, according to people familiar with the plans. “The people who are fighting against the things that are so important to working families and the fundamental values of Democrats have all the money, or most of it,” Pritzker said. “And so when I have an opportunity, I step up.” His fortune means Pritzker has the dollars, but also the entre with other major donors to serve as a sort of angel investor in ways that are known among Democratic insiders but not immediately apparent. Sometimes that’s through drawing attention by news of where he’s weighing in. Sometimes it’s through organizing calls with others in their own mansions to say where he’s giving to prod them to match. Stacy Pearson, an Arizona consultant who helped run last year’s successful campaign to pass abortion protections in the state, told CNN that unlike other big donors who have not actually helped, Pritzker’s efforts were so quietly strategic — ranging from chipping in for the legal fees to secure the initiative’s spot on the ballot to subsidizing outreach and ads — that she found herself telling the governor right before the election that she couldn’t figure out how they’d efficiently spend whatever else he was offering. “No one ever tells me,” Pearson remembers Pritzker saying with a big laugh, “they don’t need more of my money.” A billionaire in a party fighting oligarchy Yet Pritzker is in a party where attacking Elon Musk can seem at times just as popular as attacking Trump, where independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been drawing massive crowds around the country for their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, and where several operatives already sizing up the prospective presidential field told CNN they’re looking forward to making Pritzker’s bank account his main weakness. “The terms that the people use, ‘oligarchs’ and ‘billionaires’ and whatever, they’re talking about values,” Pritzker said. “It’s shorthand for everybody to use these words. And I have used the word oligarch, because I think people have looked at like the four tech titans who were sitting next to Trump at the inauguration, and just said, ‘Well, those are the oligarchs.’ I think it’s an easy word for people to use. I don’t take it as an offense to me.” Asked what he thinks of those who are just suspicious of rich people, Pritzker said, “I get it.” That’s why, Pritzker said, he spent so much time traveling his state in his first run for governor and participating in dozens of debates and forums, so that “by the end, I think what people said is, ‘He’s a normal guy and he cares about people like me.’” At least in the room on Sunday night in Manchester, that was the feeling many left with. “I know Pritzker is a billionaire, but I also know he has been consistent in how he’s spoken,” said Liz Kotowski, a retired environmental works employee from Manchester. “If you can’t see the difference between JB Pritzker and Elon Musk, you’re not listening,” said Lucas Coriaty, a 23-year-old who came from the University of New Hampshire and waited half an hour after the speech to take a selfie and tell the governor he felt inspired. One measure of the political moment and how Pritzker has placed himself in it: His call for mass protests and disruptions lit up Democrats online and top MAGA personalities, who quickly accused him of an incitement toward violence that was not, in fact, in his carefully worded speech. Also reposting video from that moment of the speech: Ocasio-Cortez. A ‘family ethos’ from his great-grandfather’s book Part of Pritzker’s speech in New Hampshire included blasting Trump for subverting Jewish values in the name of combatting antisemitism through the administration’s war with elite universities. This is less from being an active member of his synagogue than from reading his great-grandfather’s book. Every Pritzker gets a copy at 13 years old — a bar or bat mitzvah present for those in the family who have them, or just a birthday present. It’s the story of escaping pogroms in Ukraine, of arriving penniless as a refugee, of sleeping on the streets and then of starting what would become one of America’s biggest family fortunes. Pritzker didn’t really read much of it when he was 13. He’s read it several times since. Now he keeps one copy on the shelf in his home office, another on a shelf in his gubernatorial office. “It’s our family ethos that’s kind of wrapped up in this thing. He was an enormously ethical person who cared deeply about this country and the fact that we were really saved by this country had we not had the ability to have safety and security. And the ability to thrive.” Pritzker has clocked how New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, who set out to charm Trump over dinners at the president’s Bedminster golf club during the height of Covid-19 and was one of the first to call the president after last year’s assassination attempt, still ended up with Trump’s former lawyer — via her new perch as an interim US attorney — investigating him over his handling of immigration enforcement. Or that Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, fiercely loyal since she was Trump’s press secretary, had to go public after being denied federal recovery aid following recent storms in her state. “He’s vindictive to every state, it appears to me. Yes, he doesn’t like his enemies and he goes after his enemies. But I was going to suffer that either way,” Pritzker said. “It’s not like he hasn’t had words about Chicago.” The White House run everyone expects In 2017, at the same New Hampshire Democrats dinner on the last Sunday in April, at the same Manchester hotel, Joe Biden was the featured speaker. He also gave a speech urging Trump-stunned Democrats to rediscover themselves, then declared into the microphone, “I’m not running.” Pritzker didn’t bother with a line he knows isn’t true, though in the interview before the speech he stuck to saying he hasn’t even decided whether to launch the campaign for a third term as governor that aides are already planning, teasing more speeches around the country, and giving on-brand line: “This is a time for people to stand up and fight.” Several party operatives working their way around the weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner events were gaming when to reach out about signing up with him, while focus group research has already quietly been passed around about whether the governor’s weight is a positive or negative with voters, according to people who’ve seen the findings. The Democratic diehards in the longtime first-primary state on Sunday night responded with a 40-minute clump waiting to thank Pritzker and take their own photos, or to lean in with a version of how state Rep. Zoe Manos said goodbye: “When are you coming back again?”