When President Trump ordered the National Guard to Chicago last week, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois became the latest Democrat to bear the brunt of managing an aggressive federal government.
He has concluded it must be combated with a national campaign.
Aside from instructing his attorney general to file a lawsuit to block troops from other states coming to Illinois, Mr. Pritzker has few formal options to resist what he described this week as an “unconstitutional invasion of Illinois by the federal government.”
Instead, he is using his city to issue a call to action for the nation, positioning Chicago as a harbinger of the threat that he believes Mr. Trump poses and himself as a chief antagonist to a president who has already threatened to jail him.
At a time when Democrats are searching for leadership, Mr. Pritzker is trying to seize the moment to demonstrate it — to fuel opposition to Mr. Trump across the nation, and, perhaps, his future presidential ambitions.
“This is exactly the moment for people to stand up. And do I see enough people doing it? No, I don’t,” Mr. Pritzker said at a forum in Minnesota on Tuesday, as national guardsman from Texas awaited deployment in Chicago. “It shouldn’t be that there are Democrats that are afraid, because you know what? We’re the targets. We need to be strong, we need to fight back.”
Eight months into the second Trump administration, various Democratic playbooks are emerging on how to handle unwanted federal troops and agents who descend on America’s blue cities.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California acted with righteous anger, filing lawsuits and appearing on as many media platforms as would have him.
Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C., who had fewer options in the federal city, welcomed federal efforts to help combat crime, despite outrage from other elected officials in the city. It is now commonplace in the nation’s capital to see troops from Ohio or Georgia performing gardening tasks or, in one instance last week, collecting foul balls from a youth baseball practice.
Mr. Pritzker is taking the path of fierce, uncompromising resistance. At the forum on Tuesday, the Minnesota Star Tribune’s North Star Summit, he said Mr. Trump was “out of his mind and has dementia.”
The exposure can give these officials a major political advantage as they position themselves as leaders of a party desperate for direction, said William M. Daley, a former White House chief of staff whose brother and father served as Chicago’s mayor.
“It’s a gift handed to all of them that want national exposure,” Mr. Daley said. “Without this going on, he’d be a governor running a state, but there wouldn’t be a lot of reason to have the visibility. He’d have to go looking for crowds at a fish fry in Iowa.”
Democratic allies and rivals alike say Mr. Pritzker is in an impossible position with few good options. In addition to the prospect of National Guard troops on city streets, he opposes the middle-of-the-night raids and streetside abductions by Mr. Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents but has no real tools to block them. Yet he feels compelled to raise alarms as loudly as he can.
The substance of Mr. Pritzker’s effort to oppose Mr. Trump and, in his words, protect the people of Illinois against the federal government has resulted in the sort of rhetoric once unthinkable by an American elected official. At a news conference on Monday in Chicago, he urged residents to use their phones to record video of any activity from federal agents and said he had directed the Illinois State Police to keep people who are protesting “safe from ICE.”
The governor went even further Tuesday in Minneapolis, saying that Mr. Trump’s ultimate goal is to acculturate Americans to seeing military officials patrolling big cities so the president can eventually use those troops to intimidate voters in Democratic jurisdictions in next year’s midterm elections.
“He wants us all in big cities to get used to the idea that it’s OK to have military on the streets,” he said. “You’re going to see soldiers outside your polling place. That’s going to intimidate a lot of people, and especially it’s going to intimidate people who are not Republicans.”
He added: “We know what they’re looking for is an excuse to say that there’s fraud in the election in 2026. That is the real purpose.”
His remarks prompted a bitter joke from Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who joined Mr. Pritzker onstage at Tuesday’s event. He said the two men had a bet over which of them would be arrested first.
“I’m asking any of you to come visit me in the gulag,” Mr. Pritzker said.
Indeed, just 15 hours later Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform that Mr. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago “should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers.”
Mr. Pritzker replied, on MSNBC: “Come and get me.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, called Mr. Pritzker “an incompetent slob.”
“Pritzker would rather attack the president than actually work towards solutions for Chicago’s out-of-control crime,” Ms. Jackson said. “Pritzker has blood on his hands.”
Mr. Pritzker has for months lamented a lack of urgency from his fellow Democrats about opposing Mr. Trump. The turn in the national spotlight is affording Mr. Pritzker a tryout of sorts as the party’s leading messenger and spokesman for the opposition at a moment when Mr. Trump has ordered troops sent not only to Chicago but also to Portland, Ore., and Memphis, Tenn., with promises of more cities to come.
With the federal government shut down and congressional Democrats increasingly viewed as feckless by their own partisans, it is Mr. Pritzker who is embarking on a national effort that may well dovetail into a formal presidential campaign.
Among the Democratic chattering class, already in the early stages of measuring candidates for the party’s next presidential primary, his actions — along with Mr. Newsom’s — are being viewed as a high-profile test of leadership and political dexterity.
The two men are frequently mentioned as leading candidates in a long list of potential 2028 contenders.
Neera Tanden, the president and chief executive of the Center for American Progress, a leading Democratic think tank, said Democratic voters were looking for candidates who are willing to position themselves as fighters against Mr. Trump.
“Governor Pritzker is doing that in spades,” she said. “He’s demonstrated a clarity about what is happening.”
While Mr. Pritzker dodged questions about his intentions beyond seeking re-election to a third term in 2026, his Democratic allies are less coy. Mr. Walz joked about visiting him at the White House.
“He looks like a leader,” said Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat who is running for the Senate against a rival endorsed by Mr. Pritzker. “He looks like somebody who is trying to responsibly handle a very dangerous situation.”
In Chicago, Mr. Pritzker is broadly popular, but his sharp elbows and penchant for the cameras can rankle his fellow Democratic officials. Several, following the rule of not speaking if they are unable to say anything nice, refused to say anything on the record about Mr. Pritzker.
Representative Jesús G. García, known as Chuy, who represents a largely Hispanic district that includes the largest concentration of Mexican Americans in the Midwest, said he had in recent days received calls from all over the country praising Mr. Pritzker’s actions and statements in response to Mr. Trump.
“The governor has done an outstanding job at pointing out that the immigrant community is a very vital part of our state,” Mr. García said. “He’s done everything at his disposal to protect the community, to instill a sense of confidence and purpose that what’s going on is wrong.”
Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
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