Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker suggested that President Donald Trump was acting out his own unresolved psychological issues.
The Democratic billionaire is locked in a battle with the president over National Guard troop deployments in Chicago to assist in often violent crackdowns by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and Pritzker told Politico Magazine why he believes Trump was calling for him and Mayor Brandon Johnson to be thrown in jail.
"Well, all I can say is that with the president’s mental health decline, the fact that JD Vance really doesn’t know anything about addressing crime, fighting crime — he was a U.S. senator and before that an author — all due respect, we’ve been actually doing the job on the ground," Pritzker said, "and threatening to jail your political opponents. I mean, does that sound like the United States?"
"Should we have a president who is threatening to jail his political opponents with no evidence of any wrongdoing, just that we oppose what he’s trying to do to our country, which is to militarize our cities and turn us into an authoritarian regime?" the governor added. "I don’t think that any American thinks that we ought to be jailing people just for their views."
Trump frequently derides Chicago, the nation's third-largest city, as a hellhole or a war zone, but Pritzker faulted the administration for cutting funds for community violence intervention programs he credited with bringing murders down by 30 percent this year and shootings by nearly 40 percent.
"We’re delivering on the ground," he said. "That’s how we prove that he’s wrong, right? I’ve increased the number of state police since I took office in 2019. We’re trying very hard to do that. By the way, they’re running ads now to hire people out of Chicago police departments and other departments here and bring them into ICE. So he’s going to take civilian law enforcement off the streets in order to help him with his folly about going after the worst of the worst immigrants to this country."
Pritzker suggested that Trump's unresolved childhood trauma, combined with apparent age-related mental decline, were partially to blame for his vendetta against the Windy City.
"I want to remind you of something really important," Pritzker said. "My family is a family of immigrants who were refugees to this country from Ukraine when the Russians were killing Jews. We have a very important history in this country of immigrants being the lifeblood of building the economy and building the future of the country. Half of the Fortune 500 companies in this country are founded by immigrants or the first-generation children of immigrants."
"So Donald Trump just has this all backward in his head," the governor added. "It’s some kind of something that’s left over from, I don’t know, his childhood or some other time, and his diminished mental capacity has him unable to learn anything new."
The governor also warned that Trump appears to be laying the groundwork for military interference in upcoming elections.
"We have to think back to 2020, when he lost the general election and he contemplated using the military to confiscate ballot boxes, and it was something being encouraged by Michael Flynn, his advisor, and then fast forward just another month to Jan. 6, when he was fomenting the violence around the Capitol around the election, and then later pardoned the 1,500 people who were convicted of a crime," Pritzker said.
"Now he’s militarizing the cities, sending people in, and I think it’s not very far away from him offering and providing the military to protect the polling places across America, but particularly in blue states and blue cities, with the idea that they could confiscate the ballot boxes if they think there is fraud in the election," he added.