CHICAGO, IL – New reporting from the Chicago Tribune makes it clear: despite claims otherwise, Darren Bailey remains firmly aligned with the MAGA movement. He’s giving interviews at Trump Tower, pushing failed Trump policies, including trying to “DOGE” Illinois, casting doubt on our democracy by questioning the results of the 2020 election and downplaying the January 6th insurrection, and continually seeking Trump’s approval by praising him as a “man of integrity” and saying he’d welcome his endorsement.
Darren Bailey is still the same MAGA extremist he’s always been.
Chicago Tribune: Illinois Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey seeks distance from Trump, but MAGA shadow looms
- After Darren Bailey last month won the Illinois Republican Party nomination for governor, he quickly tried to separate himself from President Donald Trump, declaring, “I am my own person” and that “there will be no outside influence dictating anything that we do here in Illinois.”
- Yet less than two weeks later, there was Bailey, sitting across from Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump inside Chicago’s Trump International Hotel & Tower. In an interview for her Fox News show, Bailey urged the president’s U.S. Justice Department or the FBI to come to Illinois to investigate “waste and fraud at massive levels” without offering any proof.
- It was just one example of the contradictions that have become a feature of the downstate farmer’s second bid to challenge Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker for the state’s top office, reflecting few lessons learned from his first unsuccessful effort or even from the stumblings of his GOP rivals in the March primary campaign.
- Opposition to Trump in Illinois deepened with last year’s controversial and aggressive federal immigration raids, actions backed by Bailey, and has only grown with economic concerns due to tariffs, sustained inflation and higher grocery costs, and increased gas pump prices as a result of joint U.S.-Israeli military strikes on Iran.
- All of which makes Bailey’s chances for success in November even more daunting than they were in 2022, despite his attempts to convince voters he is not a MAGA Republican Trump disciple.
- Bailey ardently sought and received Trump’s endorsement in the 2022 GOP primary race for governor. He sought it again in his unsuccessful 2024 primary challenge to U.S. Rep. Mike Bost of Murphysboro and did not get it. This time, Trump encouraged Bailey to run again for governor after a tragic helicopter crash killed Bailey’s son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren, but the president stopped short of a formal endorsement.
- Resuming his campaign in December, Bailey said he “would be honored” to have Trump’s formal endorsement, calling the president “a smart man.”
- “I’ve had many conversations with him, and he is a very, I believe, he’s a very genuine person. He is a man of integrity,” Bailey said in the interview with NBC-Ch.5.
- In an interview with an internet blogger later that month, Bailey would not say whether he believed the 2020 presidential election was stolen to elect Democrat Joe Biden, as Trump has falsely claimed. But Bailey said, “There’s always been cheating.”
- Bailey also has invoked the Trump administration by saying he wants to replicate the president’s Department of Government Efficiency, the ballyhooed and much-criticized agency run by Elon Musk to look for waste in government early in Trump’s second term. Numerous reports found that DOGE vastly inflated its claims of cost savings and may actually have forced the federal government to spend more money while terminating thousands of federal employees.
- Bailey has sought to assure state workers that their jobs would be safe under his “Illinois DOGE,” but aside from claiming “massive” waste and fraud, he has not identified specific program cuts within the state budget.
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