SPRINGFIELD, Ill.—Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who compared Donald Trump to the Nazis in a late-night MSNBC interview more than a year and a half ago, has done it again, but in his annual State of the State address.
The governor, who is term-limited and must leave the office after next year’s election, is thought to have presidential ambitions. He’s set up his own campaign finance committee to help other Democrats with contributions. And Pritzker and Gov. Jared Polis, D-Colo., have formed a coalition, recruiting other governors, to battle back against Trump’s constitutional violations.
Pritzker disclaimed those ambitions in his speech. He dealt with budget problems, a few new programs, cuts and freezes, and Trump and Trumpites in D.C. That was the context for his comparison of Trump and the Nazis.
The governor was the second prominent Illinois public figure in recent weeks to raise the specter of Trump and prior racists. The other, two weeks before, was Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates, a social studies teacher.
Reporting on Trump’s plans to invade “sanctuary cities” such as Chicago, and roll back the civil rights gains of the 1960s and beyond, Gates said the president wants to return the U.S. to the divided country of the 1850s. The U.S. was ripping itself apart over slavery in the runup to the Civil War. And white nationalist Southern aristocrats exercised great and undue influence in the halls of government.
Pritzker’s Trump-Nazi comparison came at the end of his speech when he discussed U.S. Nazis’ 1978 march in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, which is disproportionately Jewish and which then housed one of the highest numbers of Holocaust survivors in the world.
“The leaders of that march knew the images of swastika-clad young men goose-stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population–so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps,” Pritzker, a student of the Holocaust, and Illinois’s third Jewish governor, explained.
Skokie tried to stop the march and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where a Jewish attorney for the ACLU argued for the Nazis’ freedom of speech, citing the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. The justices sided with the ACLU, leaving Pritzker with mixed feelings, he said—and leaving the ACLU split right down the middle, which he didn’t say.
An oath to the Constitution
“My oath [of office] is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America–and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one,” said Pritzker, referring to Trump. “I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions, but in deference to my obligations. If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:
“It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic,” the post-World War I Weimar Republic in Germany, said Pritzker, who met with Holocaust survivors, including those from Skokie.
“All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.” The governor did not mention that after the Nazis took power, one way they consolidated it was to burn the Reichstag building—the German equivalent of the U.S. Capitol—and blame it on somebody else.
“Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978, just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only 20 showed up. But 2000 people came to counter-protest.
“I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately…Here’s what I’ve learned: The root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed, a seed of distrust and hate and blame.
“The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.”
Voters blamed Democratic President Joe Biden for inflation in last year’s election, ignoring the facts that such pump-priming was needed via massive federal spending to pull the nation out of the coronavirus-caused depression which Trump aggravated—and that inflation was temporary.
“I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now,” Pritzker said. “A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac–and suggests, without facts or findings, that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash.
“Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks, arguing consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too ‘female’ and ‘nonwhite.’” The Missouri AG is a Trumpite Republican. “The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here,” said Pritzker. “They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.
“What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities, once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends. After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face, what comes next?
“All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history, then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.
“Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the ‘tragic spirit of despair’ overcome us when our country needs us the most.”
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