While restating he plans to be very involved in the 2028 presidential election, Gov. JB Pritzker on Tuesday delivered his strongest case yet for a presumptive bid for the Democratic nomination, saying the party’s candidate needs to run on a “restoration and renewal of American values” after programmatic cuts enacted under Republican Donald Trump.

Speaking in a half-hour interview with Washington, D.C.-based Punchbowl News, Pritzker likened Trump’s actions to what he faced after defeating one-term Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, whose tenure included a record two-year budget stalemate that collapsed the state’s social service safety net.

“We have to restore and also improve the trajectory of the United States and many of the problems we’re currently facing, we faced in Illinois,” Pritzker said. “Frankly, when I took office in 2019, the government had been hollowed out. We had massive issues with people’s rights being taken away (in) our health care system.”

Pritzker specifically pointed to delays during the Rauner administration in processing Medicaid applications — saving the state hundreds of millions of dollars. A June 2018 report from state Comptroller Susana Mendoza found increasing delays in long-term care eligibility and said the state said it could only process 60% of new applications in a timely manner.

“Now think about that. You’re in need of health care and the governor is basically saying, ‘Sorry. You can’t have it. We’re just going to kind of put your application in a drawer and forget about it. So we had to do all those things to restore government,” he said.

Pritzker, who is running for a third term in the Nov. 3 general election while mulling a potential presidential bid, said the state was “moving on the right trajectory” after having to overcome several crises from the pandemic and the care of migrants shipped from Texas to the current Trump era.

“I do think that in ‘28, whoever’s running on the Democratic side needs to be running not just on a restoration but also a renewal of American values because I think Democrats over the years have kind of lost our way. Very important to me that we actually follow through,” he said.

“It’s one of the reasons why I think governors are best positioned to run the federal government, because governors have to deliver,” he said. “We don’t get to just vote on things and then come home and say, ‘Well, I voted for it. I know it didn’t go into effect because I was in the minority, but hey, I voted for it.’ We don’t have a choice as governors. We have to do things that are benefiting people.”

In addition to former Vice President and U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and others in Congress, Pritzker and Govs. Gavin Newsom of California, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania are among those most frequently mentioned as potential 2028 contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“We have quite a bench that’s, I think, maybe the best bench I’ve ever seen in waiting to run for president of the United States,” Pritzker said. “So I’m going to be very involved in helping elect a Democratic president.”

Pritzker also said several fundamental questions remain about the agreement to end Trump’s war on Iran, aimed at preventing the nation from developing a nuclear weapon, including whether the outcome is any better than the 2015 nuclear deal “that was already in place when Donald Trump tore it up in his first term.”

“Look what’s happened to the economy … and inflation as a result of this war, and of course we’ve lost lives and there have been a lot of lives lost on the ground,” said Pritzker, who called it an “illegal war” because it was not authorized by Congress. “It’s a real question whether there’s any advancement at all of U.S. interests and, indeed, my observation is we’ve gone backward, not forward.”