Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker isn’t backing away from Donald Trump.
The 60-year-old Democrat was unfazed after the president publicly called for his arrest over a supposed failure to protect ICE agents in Chicago, where immigration raids have been met with staunch resistance from protesters.
Trump wrote in a wild Truth Social post early Wednesday morning that the “Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect ICE Officers! Governor Pritzker also!”
Pritzker did not mince words in an interview with MSNBC, speaking from a protest in Chicago.
“Let’s start with the idea that this is a convicted felon,” he told Chris Jansing Reports. “I got to say, this guy’s unhinged. He’s insecure. He’s a wannabe dictator.”
“And there’s one thing I really want to say to Donald Trump: If you come for my people, you come through me. So come and get me,” Pritzker said, extending his wrists out to the camera as though submitting himself to an arrest.
In a statement to the Daily Beast, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said of Pritzker’s threat, “Well there sure is a lot of him!”
In June, as anti-ICE protests and the deployment of the National Guard rocked Los Angeles, Trump similarly suggested that California Gov. Gavin Newsom should be arrested.
But Newsom remains a free man, MSNBC pointed out, prompting Pritzker to call the president TACO—“Trump always chickens out.”
“We’ve done nothing wrong here,” he said. “And very importantly, it’s Donald Trump that is breaching the Constitution, breaking the law. We’re taking him to court, and I believe we’re going to win.”
Chicago and Illinois filed a lawsuit on Monday alleging that the Trump administration’s order federalizing Illinois National Guard troops was “illegal, dangerous, and unconstitutional,” triggering a bizarre and baseless rant from the president comparing “war zone” Chicago to Afghanistan. A hearing has been scheduled for Thursday.
Hundreds of National Guard troops have arrived at an Army Reserve center about an hour from Chicago despite Pritzker’s resistance.
“It’s unconscionable,” the governor said. “This has never happened before. They’re calling out troops onto the streets of a state that doesn’t want them, and they’re not even telling us where they’re going to go, what they’re going to do.”
Pritzker urged Illinoisans to know their rights and “pull out their phones… and film everything you see, because we take that to court.”
