In a stunning escalation of rhetoric and legal conflict between state and federal powers, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker launched a fiery attack on President Donald Trump, accusing the Republican leader of not only abusing his military authority, but doing so while suffering from “dementia.”
“This is a man who’s suffering dementia,” Pritzker said flatly in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, suggesting the president’s fixation on deploying National Guard troops to Chicago and Portland stems not from strategy but from cognitive decline and ideological vendetta. The governor’s comments came as the Trump administration prepared to send 300 Illinois National Guard members into the field for at least two months — against the wishes of both Pritzker and Chicago city officials.
At the heart of the standoff is the Trump administration’s claim that the Guard deployments are necessary to protect federal agents and facilities involved in a renewed deportation surge, citing recent immigration enforcement activity. Pritzker, however, sees something far more alarming: a deliberate, politicized show of federal force designed to provoke, intimidate, and dominate Democratic strongholds.
The legal fight is heating up. Pritzker’s administration, joined by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, filed suit to block the deployments under the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using federal troops in domestic law enforcement without statutory authorization.
The president, for his part, is considering invoking the Insurrection Act — a two-century-old exception to Posse Comitatus that allows military intervention in cases of rebellion or where law enforcement becomes “impracticable.”
This is no theoretical debate. The act has been invoked 30 times, most recently in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots — but rarely without state cooperation. The last time a president overrode a governor’s objection using the Insurrection Act was in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson acted to protect civil rights marchers in Alabama over the defiance of segregationist Governor George Wallace. In invoking this legal tool, Trump would be bypassing Illinois leadership entirely — turning the Guard on American streets over the express objection of the state’s elected officials.
Pritzker’s response has been part legal, part moral. “We’re not going to go to war between the state of Illinois and the federal government,” he said, “but we are monitoring everything they’re doing, and using that monitoring to win in court.” He emphasized the importance of legal process and denied any talk of “soft secession” — a fringe theory gaining traction in some progressive circles about states gradually disengaging from federal authority.
Yet even as Pritzker asserts the primacy of law, Trump appears to be seeking ways to circumvent it. From the Oval Office, he doubled down on considering the Insurrection Act, leaning on his belief that federal authority overrides governors’ objections when national order is at stake.
Legal scholars note that while the president has broad discretion to invoke the Act, courts may still rule on whether it was invoked in “bad faith” — a phrase that may become central to the Illinois court battle.
