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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm opening up Crossplay. I've been playing against Dan, my colleague at the New York Times. Kat's played another move. Oh, she played stoop for 36 points. I've got a Z, which is 10 points. I'm guessing tanga is not a word. Let's see. Tanga is a word. Oh. Dan played his last turn. Let's see who won. It's so close, but I did win. Crossplay, the first two-player word game from New York Times Games.
Download it for free today. It's devastating when you see a game that you could have won. From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. J.B. Pritzker has served as Illinois governor since 2019, and he's now running for a rare third term. During his time in office, Pritzker has become one of President Trump's main antagonists.
And for that reason, among others, many see him as a strong contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, even if he's not saying that yet. A former businessman from one of America's wealthiest and most influential families, being a progressive billionaire is central to J.B. Pritzker's political brand.
But as anti-billionaire sentiment grows on the left, and not only on the left, so does a potential source of tension with voters. I first sat down with Pritzker at the governor's mansion in Springfield, Illinois, earlier this month, as America's war in Iran continued to escalate and on the heels of the first midterm primaries.
I wanted to discuss both, but also power, wealth and where he sees his party going. Here's my conversation with Governor J.B. Pritzker. Governor Pritzker, thank you so much for joining us. I'm really excited to have you on the interview. Great to be with you, Lulu.
It's a bit of a gray day here in Springfield, Illinois, but we are at the governor's mansion, which is really impressive, very beautiful, lots of Abraham Lincoln. In fact, there's a bust over there of Abraham Lincoln. Does it feel weird to have him sort of looming over you sometimes? Yeah. No, it's really wonderful, actually.
I mean, to think about, you know, this is the state that produced the greatest president that we've ever had. And a state that's produced other great presidents, too, like Barack Obama and Ulysses S. Grant and Ronald Reagan. So, you know, we're proud. I'd forgotten that he was born here. Ronald Reagan. That's right. It always seems such a product of California. Yeah, yeah.
You know, there's a lot going on in the world, a lot going on in your state. But I want to start with more of a philosophical question. When we look at this moment in this era, which is so dominated, obviously, by the president, I've been really thinking about how he wields executive power.
And I'm wondering what you think the lesson for Democrats is from President Trump and how he has wielded power to get what he wants. I think it's a lesson for everyone that gets elected to office in an executive post. I think that... What President Trump has done is, I think, operate like the president of a banana republic or as if he were an authoritarian. That is, now he's got power.
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Chapter 2: How has J.B. Pritzker navigated his political identity as a billionaire?
Everything gets stymied once someone gets into office. And I'm wondering if there are lessons to be taken from the frustration of voters and the way that he's managed to do it. Yeah, let me begin by saying that I ran on an agenda as governor. I ran on a very bold agenda, and I swiftly enacted that agenda. My first year in office really accomplished most of what I ran on, which were big things.
I think that is the way to operate, there's no doubt, and that we as Democrats, if there's a lesson, it's that... there should be a Project 2029 for Democrats. Now, remember, though, that Project 2025 also included taking away people's rights and freedoms. It included tearing down the safety net that holds up our working families and that stands up for the most vulnerable in our society.
So there are things about the agenda that I think are... That obviously you don't agree with. Not just that, I think they're reprehensible and they're anti-democratic. But yes, the speed of the agenda, and it's not shock and awe so much as run on the agenda. When you run and win on an agenda, you can accomplish that agenda and need to do it as soon as possible.
The problem is Donald Trump would say things and now he's doing things that are very different. Remember, he said, we're not going to cut Medicaid. That's precisely what he's done. What does a Project 2029 agenda look like for you. I don't think you can speak of it in shorthand, but I'll just say a couple of things that I think are absolutely necessary.
One is we've got to restore the rule of law, and that means holding people accountable who've broken the law. I'm talking about in this administration, when we get a new one, the people in this administration who've broken the law and federal agents who've broken the law need to be held accountable. And that means criminally prosecuted.
criminally prosecuted, civilly prosecuted, you know, whatever it is that we can do, right? It may be that you can't criminally prosecute somebody, but that you can go after them civilly. So that's one thing. But a second thing, just thinking about people's everyday lives, right? I mean, just lifting people up and making things more affordable in the world.
How about finally, finally, we Democrats get to universal health care? Obamacare was terrific and it advanced the cause. But we still have a whole lot of people that don't have coverage. And now, of course, it's being taken away from a lot of people. So that's part of the agenda, universal health care. Another part of the agenda is we've got to raise the minimum wage in this country.
You know, the minimum wage is $7.25. It's about $14,000 a year. If you have one full-time job, you can't survive on 14. As a single person, you can't. There's no place in the country. And even if you hold two jobs, minimum wage jobs, $28,000 a year. You can't raise a family on that. Maybe you could survive alone on that. So why are we allowing people to live at $7.25?
By the way, the tipped wage in this country is about $2.20 an hour. We need to raise wages in this country and start with the minimum wage. So I give that as an example because health care and people earning enough to live on, those seem like basic fundamentals of who we are as Democrats. That ought to be right at the top of the agenda.
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Chapter 3: What lessons can Democrats learn from Donald Trump's presidency?
And by the way, if you look at his entire history, Donald Trump's entire history, it's breaking promises with people. And so I'm just saying maybe our different circumstances are leading us to different conclusions. One last question on sort of the theory of power for Democrats. Obviously, President Trump has amassed an enormous amount of executive power during this administration.
Do you think Democrats should they retake the presidency, that they should keep that executive power in order to enact the changes that they want? I mean, should the executive remain as powerful as it is? It's a great question. And I will say that the Constitution confers a lot of power on the executive already.
Then what happened is the first and frankly, the worst thing that has happened is the Supreme Court essentially said the president is immune to not entirely immune from anything. Literally, what they've said is if the president decides to shoot somebody, he said this himself when he was running. But now the Supreme Court said, yeah, that's fine. He can shoot somebody and he's immune.
Not quite, but almost. Okay. But that's the point is that, I mean, it is extreme what the Supreme Court has conferred, the power that they've conferred on him. And he's doing it while he's executing his office, not because he wants to go and I understand that. I'm not accusing him of actually committing murder. Right.
But I do think that Democrats should look for ways to make sure that the shape and size of the executive in the United States is as the founders intended it and not as this Supreme Court has now made it. I've never known a politician to limit their own power. I hear what you're saying, but I think that that is why character matters. I think that's going to really matter in 2028.
Who is the person or who are the people that are being elevated to the nominees of their party? And are they people who will actually stand up for the tradition of democracy and a republic if we can keep it? Look, everybody wants, you know, let's have something happen right now today. It's unfortunate democracy doesn't generally operate that way. Authoritarians can.
But democracy is a little bit slower than that. I do believe that we can operate in a much more efficient fashion and effectuate the policies that we care about in a democratic fashion, but not by taking away people's rights, not by ignoring the Constitution or the law. That's what Donald Trump thinks. He thinks if you ignore the Constitution, the law, well, gee, we can move a lot faster.
We'd all like to move faster to get things done. I don't agree with his aims. But I also very much believe that if you want this country's form of government to survive, that we need to restore some semblance of the democracy that we knew before Donald Trump came in office. I'd like to talk about how you became you. You suffered a lot of tragedy very young.
Your father, Donald, died at the age of 39 of a heart attack when you were around seven years old. It's stuck in my mind. My father died also very young at the age of 39 when I was five. What impact did that have on you personally? I mean, do you remember that age and what happened then? I do. I mean, I was seven. That's obviously young and you have limited memories.
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Chapter 4: What is Pritzker's vision for the Democratic Party's future?
Well, my brother and sister and I were very close, and I was lucky I had two older siblings, so that was helpful for me. I think they would say also, as I would, that there were my parents' friends who cared deeply about us, and we had a broader family who really put their arms all the way around us and made sure that we were going to be okay.
And so I just feel lucky because a whole lot of people, as you know, don't have resources, don't have a family that would step in and care for them, and don't have a large group of friends who can do what their friends did. And so for me, anyway, I mean, there are a lot of lessons. I think you learn compassion going through that for other people because you've been through it yourself. Yeah.
And I think it's important to, those are lessons that I carry with me all the time. You know, my mother was really, she was more than just a story about someone who tragically died of alcoholism, right? She was an activist. She was an LGBTQ and abortion rights activist. You credit her with making you a Democrat. Really, truly. And my father was too. He was a Democrat.
But my, you know, my mother, yeah, she, I don't know if she, maybe we were Democrats for sure. You grow up in a home where you're, you know, your mother's an activist for civil rights and human rights. And where we were licking envelopes and stamps and stuffing envelopes, you know, for candidates. That's how you got your message out back then before the internet. Yeah.
I went to marches with my mother. And so, yeah, she was a special person. She left a legacy, in my view, for all three of us. My sister, you know, has done public service. My brother, he hasn't served in public office, but he has done public service. I think all of us feel like we have a whole legacy of public service before my mother. My father was in the Navy.
I mean, I think all of us feel a kind of a dedication to serving the public. So, The experiences that I had when I was young that shaped me, I think, about thinking about the challenges that other people go through were also intermixed with the idea that maybe I could do something about it.
Your great-grandfather, the patriarch of the Pritzker clan, came to the United States in the late 1800s, fleeing the Jewish pogroms in Ukraine. And he became incredibly successful. And, of course, your family became one of the wealthiest in America, running a hotel business. I mean, it is one of the best-known hotel businesses. companies in the United States.
Can I interrupt you just for a moment just to say, it was a motel business. I mean, people like think these things just come from that, you know, small business people, like people who start something. My father and his brother built something that nobody thought would be successful. And it was, it was an atrium lobby hotel, the first one in the United States. And it was a hugely successful hotel.
It was the start of something big. I only mention that because I think we overlook kind of how hard it is to build something like that from scratch. Yeah. No, I mean, extraordinary. And he helped build, you know, the Hyatt Hotel Group. You are uncomfortable talking about your family's wealth. Is that a statement? It's a statement and a question. I guess so. I'm proud. I really am proud.
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Chapter 5: What are the potential implications of a Project 2029 agenda?
They have not. And the result is you can't get the quality of health care in some of the Republican states that surround me that you can in the state of Illinois. But this is exactly the point. And I'm not saying it's an easy one. This isn't a gotcha. I'm actually just very animated by this because you can see the problem here is you have a great school system. You have health care. But
You need higher taxes to pay for that. And it seems like one of those fundamental issues, because if people feel squeezed by the cost of living and by taxes, they're going to move to places that they can afford. And then it doesn't help you with the education and the health care. So it just seems like a hard problem to solve. But people that have moved to a place like Florida are moving back.
I mean, here's the problem. That, first of all, 4.95% is our income tax rate here. Yeah, but property taxes, I think you're number one in the country. Yes, but remember, what caused that was not investing in our public schools. That is what caused it. Property taxes are charged at the local level.
And when you don't invest in public schools from a state level, which is what happened to Illinois when I took over, Illinois was the worst state in the country for funding education from a state level. The result is if you want a good school locally, you've got to raise local property taxes.
But how do you keep a young family from not moving to Indiana, for example, even though the public schools here are better? Because you're seeing— Jobs and economic growth and making sure that they have a park that they can go to locally. States are funding that. Our state is funding that. Making sure they have good health care available to them. You can't get those things in Indiana.
You can't get those things in Republican run states. You just can't. We actually believe in sort of quality of life is something very important for us to be investing in. And so that's what we're doing.
And we're doing it in a very difficult fiscal situation now made harder by the Republicans who are imposing on Republican states and Democratic states, very difficult circumstances where you can't get food assistance when you need it. And you can't get health care when you need it. And they're raising the cost of health care for working poor people.
These are working people that they're raising the costs on. There are reasons why people move to Illinois. There are reasons why the trend moves in our direction. And indeed, our population is increasing in Illinois now. One of, I think, the more interesting proposals that you've had is a social media tax. I'm very interested in this. Can you explain how that would work and what it is?
Yes, it's a fee. And the fee is on a per user basis for the largest social media companies. So it's a tax paid by the social media companies themselves. Yeah, it's a fee paid by them. Look, here's what's happening. Social media companies are benefiting from the 13 million people that live in the state of Illinois, but they're giving nothing back to us.
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