Name: JB Pritzker: the billionaire taking on Trump | Today, Explained
Uploaded: 2026-02-14T17:17:11.000Z
Duration: 22 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi, and welcome to Today Explained Saturday.

Future continuous

every week I'll be talking to someone in the news, in the culture, or just exploring an idea I can't get out of my head.

Now, this week, we're in Chicago, my hometown, where we talk to Illinois Governor J.B. pritzker.

He's one of the most vocal Democrats in the country right now when it comes to pushing back against Trump.

And we talked about everything, about how he pushed back against ICE operations in his state, about where Democrats go from here.

And I also asked them the all important question, are you running for president?

I think you're going to want to hear his answer.

Governor Pritzker, thank you for joining us.

I want to dig into everything from kind of the way Illinois has led on pushing back against the Trump administration, kind of future of Democrats.

But I also wanted to say I was thinking about you recently because I'm learning how to play blackjack and poker and some stuff, and

I was reading about just quite how good you are.

I saw that you reported more than 1.4 in Vegas, 1.4 million in winnings from blackjack in Vegas.

I wanted to know if this, like a normal week for you, like, how do you make that happen now?

And, you know, they're not in business to, you know, to, to give you money.

So if you, if you can win anything and walk away, you've done well.

You know, we want to talk about how you've positioned Illinois as a ground zero for kind of pushing against Trump's immigration enforcement.

You signed a law limiting ICE in Illinois.

You created the accountability commission.

I wanted to know, like, if you could describe what you would think, the playbook that Illinois has laid out for what to do if Trump comes to town.

I will say Minneapolis sort of adopted the playbook that we've been, not that they haven't added to it, but, but

I think we went through this really first, I mean, to developing that playbook.

It's, it starts with making sure people know what their rights are.

When, you know, ICE agents are banging on your door, do you have to open the door?

You know, what is it that they're allowed to do and not allowed to do?

this is what I told everybody very early on, pull out your iPhone, pull out your Android phone, video, everything.

And I'm talking about not just the people who are being pursued, but, you know, people in the neighborhoods who want to protect their neighbors.

And we were able to use that evidence before we even created the accountability Commission.

That evidence came in handy when the ICE and CBP agents were taken to court here.

Yeah, I mean, I wanted to dig into this because, you know, Trump gave you an ultimatum saying to activate the National Guard or they federalize your troops.

You call that an authoritarian march and that.

But at the end of the day, 300 guardsmen still came to Chicago.

You know, Trump got the show he wanted to.

What do you think was the tangible impact of that playbook you're laying out?

What do you think you all succeeded in resisting?

Well, he federalized our National Guard, but was not allowed to deploy them in our streets.

They were never deployed in the city of Chicago.

They had to stay on a federal base until it was determined by the court that indeed, including the Supreme Court, that indeed, he doesn't have the ability to send his, you know, federalized National Guard or my National Guard into our streets.

I wonder if the implication here is somewhat that blue states have been too timid in pushing back against Trump.

Is a kind of call to action for other Democratic states.

Well, it's certainly true that we've got to stand up and push back.

And I'm talking about peaceful protests and encouraging people to do, as I've described, to video everything, to stand up.

And by the way, I know that, you know, protesters hold up signs and they say, you know, maybe the law enforcement agents feel like, oh, it's, you know, terrible things they're saying.

But that is what protest is about, Right?

I mean, people showing up and making their voices heard, and

it's very important for us to protect that.

But when you see some scenes in Minneapolis, I mean, I know you've encouraged what you're describing as, you know, peaceful protests, accountability for officers.

Trump administration has argued that that type of organized resistance has escalated tensions.

Is there any concern that in encouraging what you're calling citizen accountability, that's also escalating the possibility of some of the clashes we saw in Minnesota?

So peaceful protests seems like the least you could do.

And what we should be encouraging people to do, they've you know, they've shot somebody here in Chicago five times for just observing from her car.

And also another man, Silverio Vegas Gonzalez, who was killed after dropping his two children off at daycare.

And, you know, shouldn't we, shouldn't people peacefully protest, for goodness sakes, and

I mean, take them to court, fight them in every way we can.

Looking ahead to the midterms, we talk to election experts and they say, you know, our kind of decentralized system is maybe is too disparate to be hacked, or that you may maybe that some of these fears of Trump taking over the midterms are a little overblown.

I wanted to see, like, how worried should the public be about this kind of question of fraud.

Is there any case that this is, like, you know, Democrats playing politics on that question?

Look, my belief is that our obligation is to make sure we don't have a democracy if people can't vote, and

we're trying to protect that even in the face of the onslaught.

And who could have imagined that he'd be talking about or even trying to deploy troops to do these kinds of things?

I didn't imagine it before the 2020 elections and the aftermath of it in January 6, for goodness sakes.

So now, you know, I think everybody, and I want to pay attention.

I want people to pay attention, especially to the election of secretaries of state in states where the secretary of state is in charge of the voting.

And so we've got to protect those elections and elect people to secretary of state positions who believe in democracy and who are going to protect people's votes.

You know, I want to ask about the specific issue of immigration beyond kind of what Trump is doing.

You know, Democrats have also been a part of funding and expanding ICE over the years.

President Barack Obama gave Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, a top citizen honor for his work on immigration and deportations in 2015.

I remember Democrats on the presidential campaign trail agreeing that illegal immigration was a problem.

Cities, even like Chicago, have struggled with an increase of undocumented migrants in recent years.

I remember my family who, you know, lives in the suburbs here, talking about how they see more people on the street over the last, like, four or five years.

Yeah, it's straying things beyond public safety, but also kind of social services.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

JB Pritzker: the billionaire taking on Trump | Today, Explained

vulnerable

commit

encourage

issue