Gov. JB Pritzker on Sunday used his first-ever appearance on Fox News to take his criticisms of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs to the network’s conservative-leaning audience, labeling the Republican administration’s levies on imports “taxes on working families.”
Pritzker, who has made frequent national media appearances since Trump retook the White House this year, is widely viewed as a potential contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. And as “Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream noted in the morning show interview, the billionaire governor has taken a more aggressive approach to criticizing the president than other Democratic governors who are also frequently mentioned in those conversations, including Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and California’s Gavin Newsom.
Illinois’ two-term Democratic governor wasn’t asked directly about his presidential aspirations, and he sidestepped a question about a Fox News poll that showed majority support for GOP positions on issues such as bans on transgender athletes, deportation of immigrants in the U.S. without legal permission and increased domestic oil production.
Instead, the American people “want affordability to go up,” Pritzker said when asked whether Democrats are out of step with voters. “They want their costs to go down when they go to the grocery store. That’s the opposite of what this administration does. This administration says they’re for working families and then attacks working families with the biggest tax increase in U.S. history with these tariffs.”
Pritzker’s roughly 10-minute interview followed a week when Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs roiled stock markets and left American investors, businesses and the nation’s trading partners perplexed about what the president is attempting to achieve. The governor’s Fox interview was immediately preceded on the TV program, which airs on Fox affiliates across the country, by a segment about support for tariffs in the shrimping industry in the South.
Pritzker said the potential for tariffs to help certain industries that face competitive disadvantages is “an argument for targeted tariffs.”
“But that’s not what President Trump has done,” the governor said. “He’s put massive tariffs across the board, and that’s going to affect not only the cost for average working families going to the grocery store, but it’s also going to affect the sales of crops that we grow in the state of Illinois and across the United States.”
Pushing the U.S. toward potential trade wars with some of its largest export markets is going to make it harder for highly productive Illinois farmers to sell their corn, soybeans, pork and beef, Pritzker said.
“We’ve got to focus on targeted tariffs,” he said. “Good trade policy, I might add, is really about protecting U.S. workers, making sure that we’re expanding markets overseas, and focusing on lowering costs for American families. And none of what President Trump has done really does that.”
Pritzker also pushed back on the argument that Trump’s use of tariffs is causing U.S. companies to consider building up domestic production or retain jobs here that otherwise might have gone overseas.
Some of those decisions already were being made as a result of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, while any possible significant increases in U.S. manufacturing and jobs as a result of steep tariffs would take years to materialize, “and we’re going to lose a lot of jobs and have a big recession in between,” Pritzker said.
Pritzker also criticized Trump for using tariffs as a way of “punishing” major allies and trading partners, including Europe, Canada and Mexico, where the governor recently completed a trade mission and signed a memorandum of understanding with the state that contains Mexico City.
“We’ve got a free trade agreement between Mexico, Canada and the United States that should be strengthened and we should continue to use that,” Pritzker said. “It’s one that President Trump put in place, President Biden abided by during his term, and now President Trump wants to blow all that up and re-trade the very thing that he negotiated.”
Earlier in the program, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Trump “is working to fix” imbalances that have hurt American producers.
“For decades, the way we have been treated in this country and especially our farmers and ranchers is absolutely stunning,” Rollins said. “We have been living under a tariff regime but it has been the regime of other countries.”
During the interview, Bream pressed Pritzker on his frequent claims that Republicans in Congress want to cut Medicaid, noting that both Trump and U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson have said cuts to the government-run health insurance program for the poor aren’t on the table in current federal budget negotiations.
But Pritzker said the GOP’s proposed $880 billion in cuts to federal spending would not be possible without hitting Medicaid or other social safety net programs.
“There are only three places that you can find that kind of money. And those are the things that most Americans, frankly, rely upon. I mean, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security,” Pritzker said. “It’s going to really hurt working families across the United States.”
Unmentioned in the interview was the invitation Pritzker received Friday to testify before the House Oversight Committee about Illinois’ policies toward immigrants who are in the country without authorization.
Pritzker spokesman Alex Gough said last week that the governor was “evaluating whether he should take time from his busy schedule serving the people of Illinois to educate the House GOP on these matters.”
The request from Republican U.S. Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, chairman of the Oversight Committee, came about a month after Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson testified before the same committee about the city’s similar policies.
Comer said in a social media post Thursday that he also invited Democratic Govs. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Kathy Hochul of New York to testify about their states’ “sanctuary policies,” which he contended threaten safety and violate federal law.
Illinois law “is fully compliant with federal law and ensures law enforcement can focus on doing their actual jobs while empowering all members of the public — regardless of immigration status — to feel comfortable calling law enforcement to seek help, report crimes, and cooperate in investigations,” Gough said in an emailed statement, also noting that one of the Illinois laws in question was signed by Pritzker’s predecessor, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner.
