Pritzker Refuses To 'Bend The Knee' As Trump Says 'Long Live The King'

ILLINOIS — Gov. JB Pritzker evoked strong responses online and across the aisle when he spoke of kings and Nazis in relation to the country’s current political climate during his State of the State address last week.

“If we don’t want to repeat history then for God’s sake, in this moment, we’d better be strong enough to learn from it,” the governor said Wednesday, to a standing ovation.

“… My oath 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.”

The same day, the White House posted on social media an image of President Donald Trump wearing a crown, accompanied by the text, “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!"

“If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this,” Pritzker continued. “It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic.”

The Illinois Republican Party responded with a statement in which it framed Pritzker’s comments as “antisemitic attacks,” noting Trump’s support for Isreal in its war with Hamas.

On the r/illinois subreddit, Reddit users had a generally favorable response to the speech.

One person said they had plans to move to Illinois in part because of Pritzker’s leadership, while another called him “the shining face of hope left out there.”

“It’s pretty bad when the governor of Illinois looks more presidential than the freaking president,” one user said.

Over on the r/politics subreddit, Pritzker was referred to as “the fabled good billionaire politician” and the best choice for the Democrats’ next presidential nominee.

“For a Democratic Party struggling in the wilderness ever since Trump’s election, and still searching for a response to his actions during his first month in office, it was a calculated move by the prospective presidential contender to use stark rhetoric to fill the void and offer a searing rebuke of Trumpism 2.0 aimed beyond Illinois and to a national audience,” Rick Pearson, the Chicago Tribune’s chief political reporter, wrote.

But professor David Shyovitz, director of Northwestern University’s Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies, told Pearson that comparisons to Nazis have “lost their power to shock.”

“So regardless of the actual merits of these historical analogies — they are all imperfect, in my view, but some are better than others — I simply doubt they are effective at changing anyone’s minds,” Shyovitz said, according to the Tribune.