The deployment of Texas National Guard troops to Illinois at the behest of President Trump has divided the nation’s governors, severing the bonds between state leaders who have long portrayed themselves as above the partisan fray.
The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, along with Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, both Democrats, have threatened to leave the once-chummy National Governors Association, a group formed more than 100 years ago and dedicated to finding areas of bipartisan agreement even in fractious political times.
Instead, Democratic governors are accusing Republicans, especially Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, of a betrayal, even an “invasion” of their states.
“Greg Abbott is a tool of Donald Trump, he’s his lackey,” said Mr. Pritzker in an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC this week.
Mr. Abbott returned fire, calling Mr. Pritzker “clueless.”
Such animus would once have been considered unusual or out of bounds for governors, who generally have seen themselves as pragmatic politicians, required to balance budgets and find solutions for their states, regardless of party. The governors have hosted “disagree better” road shows in between twice-annual meetings and White House galas marked by bonhomie.
But the deployment of about 200 troops from Texas to the Chicago area, and the threatened movement of Texas troops to Portland, Ore., have ruptured such comity.
“The president wants to call up National Guard troops in a way that we don’t believe is lawful,” Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon, a Democrat, said in an interview. “That should concern every governor, Republican or Democrat.”
Democratic governors pleaded with Mr. Abbott to rebuff the president’s troop request. The Texan in turn castigated his Democratic colleagues as weak on crime and illegal immigration.
For Mr. Pritzker and Mr. Abbott, the rift over Texas troops is only the latest in an ongoing and bitter public feud that has not been a model of respectful debate.
Beyond calling Mr. Pritzker clueless, Mr. Abbott said during an appearance on Fox News on Tuesday, “If anybody is shot, if anybody is attacked, I tell you what, Governor Pritzker and the local mayor there in Chicago, they are accomplices to those crimes by stirring up this hate against I.C.E. agents.”
(Mr. Trump said Wednesday that Mr. Pritzker and the Chicago mayor, Brandon Johnson, “should be in jail.”)
Playing in the background is the 2028 presidential election, in which many of the big state governors — including Mr. Pritzker, Mr. Newsom and Mr. Abbott — see themselves as prime candidates to be their party’s nominee.
Mr. Abbott said as much about the Illinois and California governors during the Tuesday interview. “They’re hoping to be first in line when it comes to the Democrat nomination for the presidency,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter which one of them may be the winner of that nomination, because they are utter failures for our country.”
Mr. Abbott has previously denied that he himself has presidential aspirations, and a political consultant for the governor said that the Texas governor was focused on his re-election bid next year. But politics are always present: Mr. Abbott’s campaign sent an email on Wednesday soliciting support — and an email and phone number — for the deployment.
“While other states turn their backs on President Trump, elite members of the Texas National Guard are stepping in,” the email read.
Some bipartisanship still exists — with former governors. More than two dozen of them filed a motion on Wednesday afternoon requesting permission to enter a legal brief objecting to the Texas Guard mobilization in Illinois. Among the Republicans were William Weld of Massachusetts, Bill Graves of Kansas, Arne Carlson of Minnesota, Marc Racicot of Montana and Christie Whitman of New Jersey.
“The president’s assertion of authority to deploy military troops on domestic soil based on his unreviewable discretion, and without the cooperation and coordination of state authorities, threatens to upset the delicate balance of state and federal authority that underlies our constitutional order,” more than two dozen former governors wrote.
All of this has put severe strains on the National Governors Association, which since 1908 has sought to create a space for socializing and negotiations between Republican and Democratic states.
The association has so far been silent on the brewing clash between governors and the threats by Mr. Pritzker and Mr. Newsom to quit. Messages and emails to several representatives of the association were not returned.
Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas, the chairwoman of the Democratic Governors Association, called the National Guard deployments across state lines ordered by the president “a blatant abuse of power and an attack on state sovereignty.”
But the current chairman of the National Governors Association, Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, a Republican, has not commented publicly. He has previously suggested that the role of the bipartisan association was not to make statements but to find areas of agreement between the two parties. (The Republican Governors Association has also not weighed in.)
“The N.G.A. is to bring people together, and I don’t think America wants people to take their ball and go home,” Mr. Stitt said last month, referring to the departure from the association of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat, earlier this year. She cited a lack of bipartisanship as her reason for leaving the group.
Mr. Newsom suggested he would do the same if the association did not position itself against the interstate deployments over the objections of governors.
“If the National Governors Association cannot stand against states LITERALLY INVADING ONE ANOTHER — count me out,” he wrote on social media.
The California governor’s office later responded to a social media posting from Mr. Abbott — which suggested Democratic governors were mad at Mr. Trump for trying to do something about crime in their cities — with a litany of statistics about the high crime in Texas cities.
In recent years, the group has tried to show the country how to “disagree better,” putting out videos in which governors of different parties demonstrate to voters how to air political conflicts face-to-face, rather than to retreat to separate partisan corners. Instead, this week the disagreements got worse, after Mr. Abbott agreed to send his troops north.
The idea of “disagree better,” spearheaded by Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, a Republican, when he was chair of the organization, was to have governors model productive debate for people around the county in order to try to turn down the political temperature and lessen the nation’s polarization.
The effort appeared to be effective, said Robb Willer, a Stanford University professor and adviser to the initiative who studied its impact. “We found that when we showed that to even far-left and far-right Democrats and Republicans, that they were impressed,” he said, ”and on average tended to view the governors more positively.”
Now, Dr. Willer said, by fighting aggressively in public, the governors may be worsening already-heightened political tension.
“Cues from party leaders are a major factor that influences Americans’ levels of toxic polarization,” he said.
A spokesman for Mr. Cox did not respond to a request for an interview with the governor.
Tension between Mr. Abbott and Mr. Pritzker has been growing over the last few years as each has found ways to insert himself into the affairs of the other’s state.
From 2022 to 2024, the Texas governor sent more than 36,000 migrants from the border to Chicago, part of his aggressive effort to target Democratic cities that had held themselves out as sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants.
Then this summer Mr. Pritzker welcomed dozens of Democratic lawmakers from Texas who left the state in order to thwart a Republican effort to redraw the state’s congressional districts, which was pushed by Mr. Trump and enthusiastically supported by Mr. Abbott. The two state leaders traded frequent barbs during the two weeks that the Texas Democrats were holed up in a hotel outside of Chicago.
Anna Griffin contributed reporting.