President Donald Trump’s recent call to jail Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is just the latest smackdown in a long personality rivalry between the two real estate billionaires.
The two have sparred over wealth, immigration, crime and democracy, with Pritzker recently questioning Trump’s mental fitness and suggesting he has dementia, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
But the clash started with a decades-old Manhattan hotel dispute involving Pritzker’s late uncle.
The bad blood first surfaced in 1992, in a fight over the ownership of the Grand Hyatt hotel in New York. Trump owned half and the Pritzker family of Chicago owned the other half. When the Priztkers pushed for and the Pritzkers wanted an expensive upgrade to the property.
Trump saw the demand, which required more cash from each owner, as an attempt to take advantage of him at his weakest moment, as his three casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, were in Chapter 11 at the time, according to a Wall Street Journal story published in 2016.
Trump sued the Pritzkers, accusing them of civil racketeering to force him out of the deal, an allegation they denied.
“I called Jay [Pritzker] and said, ‘You’re a bad guy, Jay. I’m going to kick your ass,’” Trump told the Journal in 2016.
Trump later settled the suit and the Pritzkers’ Hyatt Corporation bought his half of the property for $140 million. Jay Pritzker, JB’s uncle and Trump’s main antagonist in the drama, died in 1999.
More recently, the Illinois governor has clashed with the president over Trump’s claims of crime and immigration issues in the Windy City.
Tensions reached a fever pitch last week after federal agents with the Department of Homeland Security raided a building on Chicago’s South Shore, resulting in the arrests of 37 people and outcry from local officials over the atypical detainment of tenants, including children, during the operation.
The raid raised questions about landlord and tenants’ rights in the city amid an escalation in federal scrutiny, The Real Deal previously reported.
Trump this week deployed 300 Illinois National Guard members and 200 Texas troops to Chicago. Pritzker condemned the move as unconstitutional, and the state filed a lawsuit seeking a restraining order. Trump responded to Pritzker’s rebukes of immigration agents on the ground by saying he, along with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, “should be in jail.”
The governor isn’t the only Pritzker family member still engaging in the long-running clash with Trump.
JB’s sister Penny, who served as finance chair for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, has engaged in recent months in a separate battle with the Trump administration over antisemitism claims at Harvard University, where she now serves as a senior fellow on its governing board.
– Joel Russell
