(The Center Square) – Gov. J.B. Pritzker is blaming the Trump administration for potential Medicaid cuts, but Black Republicans in Chicago disagree.
The governor was in the Windy City Friday to criticize President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and U.S. House Republicans for proposing cuts that could affect Medicaid recipients.
“If Medicaid is cut, no state in the country, including Illinois, has the money to backfill the billions of dollars in funding,” Pritzker said. “It will be gone, and the consequences will be devastating. People will be stripped of life-saving care. People will die.”
ChicagoRED founder P. Rae Easley said that it was Pritzker who spent $1.6 billion on health care for illegal immigrants.
“So we are directly suffering health-wise, because these people are here. We want Governor Pritzker to be held accountable as well,” Easley said.
Easley founded ChicagoRED last March with other Black Republicans in Chicago. Speaking Friday at City Hall, Easley said the group was asking the governor to stop promoting violence.
“Especially during Black History Month, that is most offensive, egregious thing that a sitting governor can say. Number one, to call us Nazis removes our sovereignty and our ethnicity in this country. We are not Europeans,” Easley said, referring to Pritzker’s comments during his state of the state address when he referenced Nazis six times while criticizing Trump. “The second thing is, we have to understand that calling people Nazis is inflammatory language. It encourages political violence against us, but this is who the Democratic Party is.”
Asked how his Nazi comments weren’t an insult to more than half of the voting public who supported Trump, Pritzker pushed back.
“Those words never came out of my mouth, that is not true what you just said,” Pritzker said at an unrelated event following the speech. “Here’s what I will say. I think it is important to talk about the destruction of a constitutional republic.”
Friday, Easley cited Trump’s gains at the ballot box from 2020 to 2024 and said a red wave could be coming to the Land of Lincoln.
“Seven-hundred-fifty-three-thousand people in the state of Illinois dumped the Democratic Party, and that was done in four years,” Easley said.
ChicagoRED members called for an end to the sanctuary city policies employed by Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
Dennis White asked why Black Chicagoans keep voting for Democrats.
“They’re not Democrats. They are [diversity, equity and inclusion] opportunists. Now it’s time for us to stop voting for the Democrats, stop voting for DEI and stop voting for the madness,” White said.
