Photo: Reba Saldanha/AP
From the moment Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump last November (along with her party losing control of the U.S. Senate), Democrats have been arguing, not very quietly, about the best strategy for fighting Trump 2.0 and regaining some positive momentum. There have been three areas of disagreement, by my reckoning: Should Democrats have a strategically selective response to what Trump is doing? Should Democrats appeal to 2024 Trump voters with messages that concede some ground to Republicans and/or stress points of agreement? And should Democrats conduct a sort of internal purge to highlight fresher or younger leadership options for the future?
An inflection point in all these arguments was the incident in March when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stirred up and then killed a definitive challenge to a stopgap spending bill that might have shut down the federal government. Grassroots Democrats everywhere were infuriated, and for a hot minute it looked like the 74-year-old Schumer might get the heave-ho from his leadership post. He weathered the storm, but the reaction to his willingness to back a high-profile Trump measure fed all sorts of combative Democratic gestures right there in the Senate, most notably Cory Booker’s record 25-hour indictment of the administration and then Chris Van Hollen’s flight to El Salvador to investigate the plight of deported and imprisoned constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Meanwhile, talk of greening the Democratic ranks with primary challenges to old goats spiked with Deputy DNC Chair David Hogg’s plans to finance a purge, which did not go over well.
But now, a voice from outside Washington (and not, believe it or not, California’s voluble governor, who has been all over the place in the debate over how to grapple with Trump 2.0) has turned the volume knob all the way up to 11 and may have preempted the ground for maximum combativeness. In a perfectly timed speech in New Hampshire (which may or may not regain its status as a crucial early state in the Democratic presidential nominating calendar), Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker offered a 21st-century version of Churchill’s we’ll-fight-them-in-the-streets address to an embattled England, as The Guardian reported:
Illinois’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, scorched Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday night, calling for “mass protests” and declaring that Republicans “cannot know a moment of peace” during a fiery speech in New Hampshire that immediately sparked presidential speculation.
“It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once,” Pritzker said to a ballroom filled with Democratic activists, officials and donors. “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.”
The billionaire heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune addressed more than 800 people at the New Hampshire Democratic party’s annual McIntyre-Shaheen dinner — a state traditionally crucial to the early cycle of presidential primaries and a launching pad for anyone with White House ambitions.
To say that Pritzker pulled no punches is an understatement. He compared the conduct of the current administration to those who ruled Nazi Germany and czarist Russia. Additionally, he went out of his way to rule out pivots on hot-button issues, as The Advocate observed:
He also confronted the scapegoating of transgender youth, people of color, and immigrants, saying Democrats lost voters not because they defended vulnerable communities but because too many leaders lacked the guts to do it boldly.
“Those same do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on our defense of Black people, of trans kids, of immigrants — instead of their own lack of guts and gumption,” he said to loud applause.
Pritzker is following, or perhaps even personifying, a hoary tradition dating back at least to Democrats during the George W. Bush administration who styled themselves as progressives or populists, arguing that the party’s chief problem is a lack of spine among its politicians. It was the chief contention of the Bush-era band of “netroots” lefty bloggers, and later on, of Bernie Sanders fans. As Republican extremism shot through the roof with the advent of the MAGA movement, Democrats who took the conventional approach of seeking to occupy the abandoned center of the ideological spectrum were routinely denounced by those who believed counter-mobilization and professions of a willingness to “fight back” — or just fight, period — were uniquely capable of appealing both to the party base and to authenticity-seeking swing voters. The mood of grassroots Democrats right now, and the objective horror of what Trump and his people are doing, have created the perfect atmosphere for Fight Club messaging. And it’s hard to imagine anyone exceeding Pritzker’s combativeness.
Pritzker, being a billionaire, is an unlikely populist (though he does regularly make the point that he’s never used public service to improve his own wealth position), and at the age of 60, he hardly represents a youth movement. But he is a governor from the heartland, albeit a blue enclave in the heartland. And it’s not lost on Democrats that they’ve let senators and former senators represent them in presidential elections (and even presidential-nomination challenges) dating back to 1992. So in one fell swoop, the Illinois governor has placed himself at or near the top of the early list of presidential hopefuls for 2028, even as earlier ’28 favorites like another midwestern governor, Gretchen Whitmer, vastly lose ground by accommodating (and literally embracing) Trump. We will soon know if others emulate or attempt to outdo Pritzker in promising total war.
