Few national Democrats have pushed back as forcefully against Trump’s authoritarian crackdown. There’s a reason for that.
Tim Murphy at Mother Jones:
In the late 1970s, after building a small airport hotel into one of the biggest names in hospitality, the Pritzkers of Chicago joined forces with an ambitious young developer to convert an unfashionable hotel on New York’s 42nd Street into a sparkling Grand Hyatt. The building would have five restaurants, a signature atrium, and even—if the city would allow it—a casino. The project was a success, but the relationship went bust. The developer accused the family of “fraud, extortion, and money laundering” and sued them for $500 million (before eventually settling). The Pritzkers accused Donald Trump of simply being himself. “If you want to see what kind of partner Mr. Trump is,” said Jay Pritzker, the hotel chain’s co-founder, “read his book.” If you want to understand the Pritzkers, you should start by reading theirs. The book that Jay’s nephew JB says changed his life is called Three Score After Ten. It was written by his great-grandfather, Nicholas Pritzker; privately printed in 1941; and distributed to his descendants as they came of age. The two-term Democratic governor of Illinois, whose father, Donald Pritzker, died of a heart attack when JB was 7, received the first of his three copies at his bar mitzvah from his grandfather, AN. He estimates he has “read it at least five or seven times.” Three Score is a rags-to-riches memoir bookended by authoritarianism. While Nicholas is the narrator, the family’s destiny is set by his brother, Abram, a “high tempered” student who is arrested in 1880 by the tsarist police and charged with treason for distributing “uncensored printed pamphlets” in Kyiv. After he’s sentenced to exile in Siberia, his mother gets him released—but pogroms sweep the city, and the family has to flee. Abram, traveling without a passport, escapes with the help of smugglers, but loses his possessions to “the border patrol.” They finally make it to the Midwest, with the help of benevolent American Jews.
Nicholas arrives with almost nothing but eventually passes the bar exam and starts the firm that will bind together a $15 billion network of companies with holdings in everything from hotels to furniture and snuff tobacco. But Nicholas rejects the myth of rugged individualism. He is lifted at every step by helping hands and tells his heirs they have a duty to support “poverty-stricken immigrants.”
Three Score is a hard book to find. JB once said it is “not on the bookshelves anywhere.” But a family that has donated dinosaur bones, surrealist art, and hundreds of millions of dollars to institutions around the country can’t be expected to keep every copy for itself. When I mentioned, during an interview in December, that I had recently discovered one at the Yale Center for British Art, the governor raised his eyebrows with a look of genuine surprise.
[...] Pritzker had come to the West Side on a snow-covered Tuesday to sign into law new protections against what he called the “depravity” of Trump’s mass deportation regime. For months, masked federal agents had swarmed Latino neighborhoods like this one, snatching residents off the streets and terrorizing citizens and noncitizens. They attacked protesters, ransacked homes, sprayed tear gas near schools, rappelled into an apartment building, and shot a 30-year-old woman five times for the crime of honking her horn. If Trump 2.0 has often felt like a protracted siege on American democracy, “Operation Midway Blitz” was its forward line, in which heavily armed men, coked up on memes, tested the defenses of civil society.
Illinois responded with defiance. Pritzker fought Trump’s plan to turn Chicago into a military “training ground” and hailed the residents who organized their communities and followed agents with whistles and smartphones. Speaking in the auditorium of the church a few minutes before we met, Pritzker announced that day cares, schools, hospitals, and courts would be required to safeguard personal information and develop plans for dealing with immigration raids, and residents would be empowered to sue federal agents. “We’re sending a message to Donald Trump, to Kristi Noem, to Gregory Bovino, and anyone else seeking to terrorize our people,” he said. “Your divisiveness and your brutality are not welcome here.”
In a year when elite institutions teetered and caved, and some Democrats seemed more interested in fighting the last war than defending their backyards, Pritzker seized the floor as one of the president’s fiercest antagonists—a blue-state governor who stood up to the regime and demanded justice for its victims. “It’s time to fight everywhere, and all at once,” he declared at a dinner in New Hampshire last spring, while slamming “do-nothing Democrats” in DC. In October, he told a group of teachers that “Donald Trump and his cronies can fuck all the way off.” In some respects, Pritzker makes an awkward champion for a Democratic Party looking for a new direction. He is a billionaire in an electorate raging against oligarchy and a former AIPAC supporter at a time when support for Israel is plummeting. (A spokesperson for the governor said Pritzker had not donated to the group in “nearly a decade” and “believes the organization has abandoned its bipartisan principles and become a pro-Trump organization.”) The pugilist who now castigates “hedge fund managers and tech bros” was a Facebook-investing venture capitalist. If you’re looking ahead to 2028—which, New Hampshire dinner notwithstanding, aides insist he is not—it is possible to imagine a future campaign crashing against the reefs of his family’s offshore trusts.
But it is impossible to separate Pritzker’s contemptuous response to Trump from the path he took to office. The desire to wield his advantages without being reduced to a caricature of them has been the central tension of his career. The family name opened doors and helped him weather setbacks that might have sunk a poorer candidate. It allowed him to spend more than $300 million on political campaigns since Trump’s first election and acquire a unique duality of influence—part officeholder, part megadonor. His background—and how he makes sense of it—also helps explain why, at a moment of upper-class capitulation, he resisted so viscerally when so many others sued for peace. Three Score is a story, in part, about what is owed. Pritzker would probably never have made it this far if he wasn’t a Pritzker. But if it weren’t for his family, he might never have wanted to. [...]
Pritzker waited nearly two decades to run again. In the interregnum, he set out to make a name for himself. Despite Trump’s assertion that Pritzker’s family “threw him out of the business,” JB was never centrally involved. Around 2000, after Uncle Jay passed away and Uncle Bob ceded control of the family companies to Penny and two cousins, another group of cousins, including JB, pushed to divide the fortune. After some contentious wrangling, they reached a deal in which AN Pritzker’s 10 grandkids (including JB) would get about $1.4 billion each. The problem was that AN had 12 grandkids. Bob’s children from an acrimonious second marriage were treated, because of the age gap, as AN’s great-grandchildren. When they found out, they sued for billions.
Pritzker v. Pritzker offered a rare look inside a family that had, per AN, steered clear of “public business.” Plaintiffs and defendants—some represented by future Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch—sparred over not just the value of their inheritance, but its purpose. If Nicholas’ memoir instilled a noblesse oblige, the family foundation and network of trusts provided the architecture. AN “believed that it is an integral part of the Pritzker family way of life that they constantly increase the scope of their charitable contributions,” one judge wrote, in an opinion from an earlier case that was entered into the record. But AN also believed that charity had tangible benefits—big donations, like the construction of a hospital, helped the Pritzkers close big deals. The court filings also highlighted the lengths to which the “tax conscious” AN went to shield the family money. When he died in 1986, his estate claimed that the head of one of America’s richest companies had been worth just $25,000. The IRS sued for $53 million but eventually settled for $9.5 million plus interest. Where did it all go? In court filings, the excluded grandkids—who eventually settled for $500 million apiece—detailed a maze of trusts in the Bahamas. According to an estimate by Forbes, the family held $3 billion offshore.
A spokesperson stated that Pritzker (who put his assets into a blind trust after being elected) “has never taken a disbursement from any offshore trust and has directed that any disbursements be given to charity.” That was also the governor’s line in a 2018 primary against a Kennedy (RFK Jr.’s brother Chris, who also had an offshore account) and in a general election against Gov. Bruce Rauner (a private equity mogul who also had offshore accounts). But to fully accept the premise, you’d have to disregard AN’s insight about philanthropy: It’s not just the recipients who gain from it.
[...]
When Pritzker ran for office again, in 2018, opponents once more accused him of attempting to buy the race (he spent more than $170 million) and flogged a Chicago Tribune investigation—based on records from the Paradise Papers—into his use of offshore companies for, among other things, a duck-boat tourism venture. Republicans made light of an incident in which the Pritzkers had removed all the toilets from the empty mansion they owned next to their actual mansion, and then had the building reassessed as uninhabitable—saving big on their taxes. (Pritzker said he “followed the rules,” but paid back $330,000.) It was all a bit Mitt Romney. But Pritzker could (and did) talk about building a Holocaust museum, funding early childhood education initiatives, and launching a tech incubator that powered hundreds of local startups.
In the first campaign, “there just wasn’t much [of a] there there,” said Peter Giangreco, a Chicago political consultant who worked for Schakowsky in that race. “The difference between him running for Congress in ’98 and running for governor in 2018 was there’s just a tremendous body of work.” Pritzker’s most serious hurdle involved his relationship with Blagojevich. After the 2008 election, as the governor was attempting to sell Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat, Pritzker was recorded on a wiretap discussing the viability of various Black Democrats (he describes one potential pick as the “least offensive”) while pitching himself for state treasurer. The transcripts, which the Tribune published in 2018, offered an unflattering picture of a would-be politico bantering with a crook in search of patronage. (Pritzker has apologized for his comments about the Black politicians and said he was not his “best self.”)
The election, though, was ultimately a referendum on Rauner, who failed to pass a budget for two years in an impasse with Democratic legislators. The state owed $16 billion at one point, and basic services were being cut off. Pritzker has analogized the budget crisis to DOGE; his tenure has amounted to a cleanup job. By recent metrics, Pritzker has been a clear success. He has not gone to prison, and the state’s finances stabilized, though Illinois is again in a budget crunch thanks in part to Trump’s cuts. With Democratic supermajorities in the legislature, he raised the minimum wage to $15, slashed medical debt, legalized marijuana, expanded abortion rights, capped the price of insulin, and banned right-to-work regulations. His tenure has been defined both by an ambitious agenda and by the huge sums of money he’s spent to get what he wants. In one of his first big fights, he personally spent $56.5 million to sell a ballot initiative to raise taxes on millionaires. Griffin, the Trump-backing hedge funder, spent $54 million and defeated it. But the cash kept coming. Ahead of his reelection in 2022, Pritzker spent $24 million to elevate Darren Bailey, a conservative he considered more beatable, over a moderate Republican backed by $50 million from Griffin. (Pritzker spent another $152 million in the general election anyway.) That year, he was also the first- and second-biggest donor to two state Supreme Court justices—a feat he achieved by donating half a million apiece from his campaign account and a personal trust, circumventing a law he had signed capping “individual” donations. All of this spending, and the policy wins that have come with it, has produced an unusual cult following. Pritzker has inspired a tongue-in-cheek X account called Socialists For Pritzker. Progressives on Bluesky sometimes call him “the Great Khan.” His image has been softened by the fact that he does not come off as the sort of billionaire who uses peasants as chess pawns—he is a big guy, you may have noticed, and a nerd. When I asked a former aide what Pritzker does for fun, she replied, very specifically, “Liberty puzzles”—referring to the purveyor of high-end wooden jigsaws. In Springfield, he has hosted bipartisan game nights for legislators.
Mother Jones has an excellent story on Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) and his key role in fighting the Trump Regime’s authoritarian crackdown.
