Billionaire governor and amateur content creator JB Pritzker on Friday took aim at President Donald Trump with a tongue-in-cheek campaign video proclaiming Lake Michigan renamed as “Lake Illinois” and annexing Green Bay.
“I’m here today to make an important announcement,” a straight-faced Pritzker says in the minute-long social media clip, referring to made-up experts who have purportedly determined “that a great lake deserves to be named after a great state.
“So today I’m issuing a proclamation declaring that here and after, Lake Michigan shall be known as ‘Lake Illinois.’ The proclamation has been forwarded to Google to ensure the world’s maps reflect this momentous change,” Pritzker says, poking at Trump’s sincere vow to rebrand the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
Trump has also batted around the idea of purchasing or annexing Greenland, and he’s suggested he’d like to make Canada the 51st state.
Pritzker took that cue to sarcastically announce “Illinois will now be annexing Green Bay to protect itself against enemies, foreign and domestic.”
He then teased “an important announcement next week regarding the Mississippi River,” and nodded at the football rivalry implied in his supposed encroachment on Wisconsin, closing with “God bless America, and Bear down.”
An important announcement from the Governor of Illinois. pic.twitter.com/irh7UtwEOe
— JB Pritzker (@JBPritzker) February 7, 2025
The progressive governor and prolific Democratic donor has positioned himself as a top national voice against Trump, and has hardly downplayed rampant speculation that he’ll make a run for president in 2028.
“JB wishes he was [Trump] so bad,” the Illinois Republican Party said in post responding to the video. “News flash, JB — you actually have to win the presidency, not just bankroll Kamala’s disaster of a campaign.”
The video came out a day after the Trump administration sued Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle for allegedly interfering with the president’s mass deportation campaign.
At an unrelated press conference Friday, Pritzker called the federal lawsuit “a massive effort to distract from what they are doing across the country, to take away things that working-class, middle-class people, families, the most vulnerable, really need.”
“We are tough, we are strong and Donald Trump has no idea what he’s up against when he attacks Illinois,” Pritzker said.