Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, one of the most vocal Democratic critics of the Trump administration, escalated his ongoing war of words with the president on Sunday, declaring on X that Donald Trump is “the most corrupt president in American history.” The two-word verdict came in direct response to a post highlighting newly reported figures showing Trump personally earned more money last year than in any other year of his life.
Pritzker’s post, published at 11:32 a.m. on August 2, 2026, read in full: “The most corrupt president in American history.” The remark was posted as a direct reply to another user’s post stating that “Trump made over $2.4 billion last year, which is more money than he made any other year in his life.”
The most corrupt president in American history. https://t.co/fSaoIbYRTK
— JB Pritzker (@JBPritzker) August 2, 2026
The $2.4 billion figure cited in the post to which Pritzker was responding traces back to a Forbes analysis published earlier this summer. Forbes reporter Dan Alexander combined Trump’s financial disclosure report with bond filings, securities documents, and court records to arrive at the more precise total, which folds in both operating revenue and proceeds from asset sales. The figure dwarfs the roughly $760 million Forbes estimated Trump brought in during 2024, and it amounts to roughly 6,000 times the sitting president’s $400,000 annual salary.
According to that same analysis, cryptocurrency ventures accounted for the largest share of the increase. Forbes found that Trump generated approximately $1.4 billion from digital assets, memecoins, and ventures including World Liberty Financial, with the remainder coming from traditional holdings such as Mar-a-Lago, international licensing agreements, and asset sales. Forbes reported that “most of the year-over-year increase, $1.4 billion, comes from cryptocurrency.”
Trump has publicly downplayed the scale of the windfall. Asked directly about his recent earnings, he responded, “I’ve made a lot of money before I became president,” adding, “You know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market is going up.”
Sunday’s post is the latest in a long pattern of Pritzker using the exact phrase “the most corrupt president in American history” to describe Trump. In July 2026, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz used an identical line while sharing a Wall Street Journal report on Trump’s crypto earnings, and Pritzker has deployed the same framing on his own Facebook page in connection with financial disclosures affecting Illinois taxpayers.
The governor’s criticism of the president has sharpened considerably over the past year as tensions between Illinois and the federal government have deepened. Pritzker has been at the center of a protracted standoff with the White House over the deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago, a fight that began in the fall of 2025 when Trump ordered an increased federal law enforcement presence in the city to address crime and support immigration enforcement. A federal judge blocked that deployment for at least two weeks in October 2025, a ruling Pritzker celebrated as confirmation that “there is no credible evidence of a rebellion in the state of Illinois.”
That fight has grown personal. After Trump suggested publicly that Pritzker “should be in jail,” the governor responded by telling Trump to “come and get me” in a televised interview, and later joked to an audience that they should “come visit me in the gulag in El Salvador,” a reference to the offshore prison used to hold deported migrants. Pritzker has also accused the administration of seeking access to Illinois voter rolls as a pretext to challenge the legitimacy of the 2026 midterm elections.
Pritzker’s official statements as governor have consistently linked his criticism of Trump’s conduct in office to broader claims about corruption and self-dealing. In a February 2026 statement issued after Trump’s State of the Union address, Pritzker’s office said Illinoisans had endured “baseless claims, shameless propaganda, and the ramblings of a wannabe dictator,” and pledged that “Illinois will keep standing for the truth and work to hold this President and his administration accountable.”
The corruption framing predates the current controversy by years. Following the Senate’s 2020 vote to acquit Trump on impeachment charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, Pritzker issued a statement declaring that the Senate had “capitulate[d] to this corrupt and untruthful President,” and vowed to make Illinois “a firewall against Donald Trump’s assaults on our democracy.”
Sunday’s post adds to a broader chorus of Democratic officials and commentators who have applied similar language to Trump’s second term. Reporting earlier in 2026 detailed a Justice Department settlement establishing a $1.776 billion fund tied to a lawsuit Trump brought against the IRS, which critics characterized as a mechanism for compensating political allies. The same reporting noted that Trump made more than 3,700 financial trades in the first quarter of the year alone, an average of roughly 59 trades a day, several involving companies with pending federal government business.
For his part, Pritzker has increasingly positioned himself as one of the leading national voices against the administration, a role that has fueled speculation about a potential 2028 presidential bid. He has used his personal wealth — he is worth an estimated $4.3 billion as an heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune — to fund Democratic campaigns and causes, including efforts to protect abortion access. He has not yet formally confirmed whether he will seek a third term as Illinois governor in 2026.
The governor has faced his own scrutiny over personal finances. Tax filings released by his campaign in October 2025 showed that Pritzker and his wife, MK, reported $10.7 million in adjusted gross income for 2024, including $1.4 million in blackjack winnings from a Las Vegas casino trip, all of which his campaign said would be donated to charity. Pritzker, who takes no gubernatorial salary, has declined to release his full tax returns, which would disclose additional details about his family trusts.
As of Sunday afternoon, neither the White House nor Trump’s reelection campaign had issued a public response to Pritzker’s post. The exchange nonetheless underscores how closely the president’s personal finances have become entangled with the broader political battle between the administration and Democratic state leaders heading into the 2026 midterm elections, with Illinois emerging as one of the most contested fronts in that fight.