Let’s be blunt about the ground rules from the outset: There are certain Democrats who get hall passes on criticizing the Beltway gerontocracy, and there are others on permanent detention.
I’m speaking, of course, about every lib who either 1) aided and abetted Joe Biden’s obvious senility when he was president, or 2) was too chicken to do anything about it.
Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker — who is clearly running an undeclared 2028 shadow presidential campaign at this point — very much gets detention until the end of his time in the American body politic for his actions during the 2024 presidential campaign. And yet, here he is, going around talking about how Stephen Miller is the guy really pulling the strings at the White House because of President Donald Trump’s “diminished capacity.”
Pritzker was appearing Thursday on the podcast of The Bulwark — the NeverTrumper, allegedly conservative outlet which seems to do its only real right-of-center work by giving elected liberals a petard to hoist themselves upon (see: Mamdani, Zohran; “globalize the intifada” doesn’t really actually mean that) — when he said that Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and a notable immigration hawk, has been using what he claimed were Trump’s reduced mental abilities to crack down on illegal immigrants.
“I do think he needs help,” Pritzker said of Trump, according to The Hill.
“And I don’t think anybody around him on a day-to-day basis wants to get him any help because they have more power based upon his diminished capacity.”
No one was benefiting more, Pritzker claimed, than Miller, who is “clearly is the one pushing the tactics” at the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“He’s clearly the person that is aiming to have Donald Trump become an authoritarian leader,” Pritzker said.
“And I wish that, you know, people could at least recognize that Stephen Miller is bad for the country, and he is abusing the fact that Donald Trump has diminished capacity.”
Give me a sec, I just pulled a skeletal muscle rolling my eyes.
Just in case you’ve forgotten, Pritzker was one of the people who basically refused to see the reality of Joe Biden’s obvious decline, which played out in public over a four-year period.
For instance, here’s Trump throwing a bit of shade at U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer during a summit after negotiating the peace deal with Israel and Hamas, being his usually Trumpian self:
Trump: I have known so many of you for so long. Your friends of mine, you great people. I have a couple I don’t like in particular but I won’t tell you who. I have a few actually I don’t like at all but you will never find out who they are. Maybe you will. pic.twitter.com/81cXvLugnu
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) October 13, 2025
So that’s a recent clip. Here’s Joe Biden during his presidency, during a friendly appearance at a Wisconsin brewery in January of 2024:
“The beer brewed here… Hah ish issah use to make the brew beer here… Issh da-finer… Oooooh Earth Rider… Thanks for the Great Lakes!”
– President Joe Bidenpic.twitter.com/UfD1cZTwU3
— Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) January 25, 2024
And here’s Biden in front of the first particularly unfriendly audience he faced in 2024:
Needless to say, the drugs didn’t work. pic.twitter.com/3lYHnU476w
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 28, 2024
For those of you with memories longer than Joe’s, you may recall that he blamed his performance during that debate on jet lag from a trip he’d returned from long beforehand.
Funny, jet lag didn’t seem to be bothering Trump in the Middle East. Just saying.
So, what does this have to do with Pritzker, aside from the fact that we’re comparing the obviously diminished Biden with a Trump that Pritzker claims is diminished? He’s not responsible for Biden carrying on in that condition, right?
Well, actually he kind of is.
Let’s start in 2022, according to reporting from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”
Say what you will about how perspicacious one half of the authorship duo was in following up on “Biden’s Decline” back before he withdrew (the half that works at CNN, in case you needed more prodding), the book itself is pretty thorough in its research, and few if any attempts at factually rebutting its claims have been put forth or taken seriously.
Thus, we can safely assert that, at least two years before the election, Bill Daley — a high-level Clinton and Obama administration politico — “hardly recognized” Biden on TV and knew that he was in real trouble, mentally speaking, according to the book. He wanted someone with an actual national profile to challenge Biden so the race didn’t get thrown away.
From “Original Sin”:
In 2023, he made some calls to see if any heavy hitters were thinking about running against Biden in the Democratic primaries. Having been around politics forever, Daley felt strongly that the notion that Biden would be up to the task the following year was unsustainable. If they waited too long, the inevitable moment when Biden bowed out would saddle the Democratic Party with Vice President Harris as the nominee, and she was even less popular than Biden. Neither California Governor Gavin Newsom nor Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear was willing to take the plunge. Daley also reached out through an emissary to his own governor, JB Pritzker. They all said no. Others had advised them that doing so would make them pariahs; when and if Biden lost, they would be blamed. [emphasis ours.]
Later, little-known Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota would mount a challenge of his own, although not because he thought that he should be the nominee — just that Biden shouldn’t be, for reasons that are all too obvious. And he didn’t want to run in the first place, mind you. Again, from “Original Sin”:
[Dean Phillips] tried to get other Democrats to talk about the president’s decline, but no one was willing to say anything publicly. “The whale who spouts gets harpooned,” Phillips later noted. In July 2022, WCCO’s Chad Hartman asked Phillips if he wanted Biden to run for reelection in 2024.“No, I don’t,” Phillips told the radio host. “I think the country would be well served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats who step up.”He was going to push others to run against Biden in the Democratic primaries and caucuses. This was his new mission — to enlist competitors. He reached out directly to Governors JB Pritzker and Gretchen Whitmer, but both declined to take his call.
Pritzker is so concerned about presidents with “diminished capacity” that he wouldn’t even take a phone call about it, because he was too much of a coward to get involved in an internecine battle that needed to happen, and happened anyway.
And even after that debate performance, Pritzker continued to campaign for Biden.
“Listen: Joe Biden is our nominee. I am for Joe Biden. I’ve been campaigning for Joe Biden. I think you’ve seen I’ve got dates
scheduled to go to Indiana, to Ohio for Joe Biden,” he said on July 9, 2024, according to Capitol News Illinois.
And then, on July 10, he got caught on a hot mic admitting what everyone knew:
Here’s the hot mic remarks from @GovPritzker “I don’t like where we are” – in contrast to his public support for Biden pic.twitter.com/b2jl2OsNvN
— Mary Ann Ahern (@MaryAnnAhernNBC) July 11, 2024
“We’re just going to keep fighting. I don’t know what to say,” Pritzker, sounding resigned, said. “We’re going to do what we have to do. I don’t like where we are.”
Yeah, if only there were a way the Democrats weren’t there. Say, if they had a viable choice that wasn’t Joe Biden or Dean Phillips. Can’t think of who might have been reached out to about such a run.
But now, of course, Pritzker is brave enough to claim an American president has such “diminished capacity” that he’s a marionette for Stephen Miller and the rest of the Trump White House — absent any clear evidence of this, obviously.
It’s not just that Pritzker’s hall pass on this matter has been permanently revoked. It’s the fact that he’ll call an energetic looking president of “diminished capacity” but is too gutless to challenge one of his own when it’s clear to anyone with eyes and ears that he’s not up for the job. Not that you needed another reason to disqualify J.B. Pritzker from the White House, but this’ll do the trick nicely.
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