Billionaire Jennifer Pritzker Stops Supporting Trump After Coming Out As Trans
Jennifer Pritzker Image by wikicommons
Billionaire Jennifer Pritzker never saw eye-to-eye with her family when it came to politics. The ultra-wealthy Pritzker clan are almost all socially liberal Democrats, but Pritzker was a staunch Republican donor and supporter of President Trump — until she came out as a transgender woman.
A Vanity Fair feature delved into Pritzker’s history, following her shift from an “exceptionally private” colonel in the United States Army to publicly condemning Trump’s ban on transgender people in the military.
Jennifer Pritzker, born James Nicholas Pritzker, is the great-grandchild of Naphtali ben Yakov Pritzker, a Jewish immigrant who arrived in Chicago from Ukraine. He eventually became a successful lawyer and investor; now his descendants are America’s seventh-richest family.
When Pritzker announced her transition in 2013, becoming perhaps the only transgender billionaire in the world, her family handled it fine — they were more concerned with her political stance.
“For the Pritzkers her transitioning wasn’t that eventful. They’re all cool with it. It’s like, pass the salt,” a family friend told Vanity Fair. “Her Republicanism—that’s more difficult for them.”
She had been a megadonor for the GOP, helping the campaigns of John McCain, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney and Trump, whom she revealed she voted for.
When the president said he planned to reverse an Obama-era rule allowing transgender people in the military, Pritzker spoke out. She wrote an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times, where she called the decision a “huge step backward.” In a piece for The Washington Post, she criticized both Trump and the Republican Party, suggesting that she would stop donating.
“I have hoped the Republican Party would reform from within and end its assault on the LGBTQ community. Yet the party continues to champion policies that marginalize me out of existence, define me as an eccentric character,” she wrote. “I ask Republicans to prioritize policies that improve our country for all Americans. When the GOP asks me to deliver six- or seven-figure contributions for the 2020 elections, my first response will be: why should I contribute to my own destruction?”
Alyssa Fisher is a writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com, or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
