“There is no morality right now”: Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger on Donald Trump’s GOP

If I don’t need to tell you who Adam Kinzinger is — well, first of all, you might be a bit of a political nerd. That probably also means you saw his star turn as one of two Republican members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection, in what now feels like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Kinzinger was a six-term Republican congressman from Illinois and, by any reasonable measure, a staunch conservative who supported Donald Trump’s agenda during his first term more than 90 percent of the time. But after Jan. 6, 2021, Kinzinger belonged to a small and dwindling number of GOP members of Congress who turned on Trump and never recanted. He voted to impeach Trump (who had already left office, however reluctantly) and then voted to create the select committee that held a series of dramatic hearings throughout 2022.

Kinzinger tells director Steve Pink in the new documentary “The Last Republican” that he hoped then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t ask him to serve on the committee. In fact, that question was never asked: Pelosi called to tell Kinzinger he’d been appointed, probably understanding that as the ultimate all-American straight arrow — a former Air Force lieutenant colonel who earned six medals for combat service in Iraq and Afghanistan — he wouldn’t say no. Unlike the only other Republican member of that panel, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Kinzinger grasped the consequences right away: His political career was over.

Kinzinger didn’t run for re-election in 2022, and wouldn’t have been eligible for the Republican Party’s endorsement if he had. As “The Last Republican” details, he and Cheney were both censured by the party and effectively expelled; on a personal level, many of Kinzinger’s former colleagues, friends and extended family members no longer speak to him. As Pink’s overly ironic title suggests, Kinzinger finds himself in a lonely place that, depending on your perspective, is either, noble, pathetic or ridiculous. While the irony of Pink’s title is arguably heavy-handed, Kinzinger really does see himself as one of the few genuine standard-bearers for Reagan-era conservatism, forced to ally himself — very likely for the rest of his life — with a fractured, disunited and defeated opposition, most of whose policies he does not support.

To be clear, that last clause refers to the Democrats. I met Adam Kinzinger in Salon’s New York studio about two weeks after Donald Trump won the presidential election, an outcome he had labored to prevent. I liked him immensely. He agreed to make this movie because Pink had directed “Hot Tub Time Machine,” and let’s be honest — that’s the sort of connection that can transcend disagreements about any number of allegedly substantive issues. It’s a profound cliché to describe someone of a different political or religious persuasion as “decent,” but I can’t avoid it: This lifelong true believer in the values of American right-wing politics, struck me as both decent and kind. 

His mood seemed upbeat and cheerful, which served to remind me that the second coming of Trump is not actually the apocalypse. In occupations like politics, war and journalism, that attitude is helpful: You take a beating and learn things about fate, popular opinion and your opponents that you didn’t know before. As long as you’re still alive and there’s something to fight for, you get out of bed the next day and get back after it. Kinzinger’s problem now will be figuring out what “it” entails: He’s 46 years old, and would be relatively early in his political career if he still had one. 

What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length.

Many of the people who watch this documentary will not agree with you on a lot of political questions, but they’re going to like you a lot anyway. You made a lot of new friends by standing up to Donald Trump — and lost a lot of your old ones.

Yeah, that happens. One of the great things about it is that the director [Steve Pink] is to the far left of me. I would consider myself kind of center-right, but what we show is you can be friends with somebody you disagree with. One of the things I say is you don’t need to be friends with an insurrectionist. There’s a fine line here, but somebody that has a different view of government — honestly, it makes life kind of entertaining if you can have those kinds of spirited discussions. 

My last four or five years have been marked with losing some family members. More extended family — my close family has been good. Losing, certainly, a lot of friends, people I fought with in Iraq. And making some new friends too along the way.

Right. This conversation shouldn’t be about Adam Kinzinger’s personal pain, and that’s not what the film is about either. But It’s obvious this has been a very difficult period for you. It has to be difficult right now in a brand new way, given what happened in the presidential election.

It’s very tough because I, like a lot of people, was convinced that, no way the country can do this again. Despite the polls, which obviously showed it was close, I really believed they were under-sampling Harris voters. It’s been pretty hard to watch the country do this again, to know what I know, and frankly what everybody knows about Jan. 6, and to see, by and large, the country make a decision that that doesn’t matter. We’ve been so driven by this fear and division that somebody like Donald Trump puts out that it compelled a victory. I have a lot of concerns, but I’ve pretty much shed all of my friends that were going to let me go because of what I believed anyway, so there haven’t been any new broken relationships. It’s sad to see what the country’s going to go through for four years.

I have to assume that going back to 2021, when you decisively turned against Trump, you could never have imagined him coming back to power.

Right after Jan. 6, a guy named Fred Upton, a congressman from Michigan, told me, “You know Trump’s going to run again.” I’m like, “Fred, that’s BS. Come on, man. Let’s be serious here.” He goes, “No, he is.” He not only ran again, he won the Republican primary handily and then he fricking wins the presidency. 

No, I never saw this coming. In fact, I assumed, like, I think, most Americans, that after the Jan. 6 committee exposed what Donald Trump himself had a hand in, that the country would be like, “Yeah, we can’t do that again, because democracy really is fragile.” That’s the thing that I try to remind people, but here we are. It’s tough to watch.

You and the other members of that committee spent so much time and effort into exposing everything that happened. It was a remarkable investigation, a landmark in American history. And now it feels like the whole nation has repressed it, has refused to acknowledge how bad it was.

Yeah, it does feel like it. Look at the media environment, particularly the news environment. Half of the news media tells the truth about what happened on Jan. 6, and the other half is incentivized to suppress it. When I spoke to the Democratic National Convention, to give you an example, Fox News tuned away from my speech, from Jeff Duncan’s speech, and from Olivia Troy’s speech. Every Republican who spoke at the DNC, they turned away from. 

It’s tough to see what’s going on and to understand that America needs to be reminded of this. Hopefully that’s one of the things that the film can do, just bring back the reality of what happened. Every time I watch it I’m filled with, “Oh yeah, that’s right.” I think our consciousness suppressed it and, unfortunately, that came through on the election results.

You gave a memorable speech in one of the later committee hearings. It was almost an operatic address to the nation about what you feel our values are, about the importance of democracy and the way that transcends the temporary issues party politics. I guess my question now is: Was all that even true? You meant it, I don’t question that. But right now I’m not sure how much that stuff matters anymore. 

I don’t think it was wrong. I think the problem is that we’re a country that has suffered from a lack of leadership to remind people of the importance of democracy. This is one of the things I’ve come to really respect and realize: Whoever’s at the top of the nation, whoever is president, that person really does set the tone for the country. We unfortunately have not had somebody remind us of the importance of democracy, of the ideals of democracy. So no, I don’t think I was wrong, but I also think there’s a lot of people that need to be reminded of it. 

We can have disagreements, and again, disagreements on policy, if done right, can actually be fun. You can have differences over a beer. What we can’t have a difference on is the rules of the game. When you threaten democracy, you threaten the rules of the game. If you’re playing baseball for instance, if you’re the St. Louis Cardinals and you’re playing the Cubs, and you make the decision “I’m just going to run to third base and then run to home plate,” the game falls into chaos. Screwing with democracy means the whole game falls to chaos.

Well, the question of whether we still believe in those institutions, and how much, strikes me as very crucial. I’m sure you have disagreements with Joe Biden on policy, but when you consider that he ran as the defender of democracy and how that turned out — in that respect, was his presidency a failure?

No, I don’t think so. I think he had a fairly successful presidency. I mean, there’s a lot I disagree with him on, particularly how we left Afghanistan, although that I think largely still rests on Donald Trump. I think Joe Biden did what we generally expect of a president. He put forward some ideas, passed a lot of these ideas. Infrastructure, which I voted for, the CHIPS Act, which I voted for, those were good things. 

Merrick Garland not going after Trump criminally for a year and a half — that was a huge failure. Frankly, I think that’s part of the reason for where we’re at today. I think it was a successful presidency, but only history can judge that, because the question is: We’re going to have four years of Trump, what comes after that? In 10 years, I think we’ll be able to make a better assessment.

You saw that process unfold almost literally from the inside, so let’s talk about Merrick Garland and the DOJ. So that was absolutely a massive failure. What that just about an abundance of caution, not wanting to be seen as partisan and political?

Yeah, it was. When we did our first big hearing — not the one with the police, but the first in the series over the summer, there was kind of an “Oh crap” moment in the DOJ. We had so much information that they realized there was evidence of crime. We proved crime, and that’s when the investigation started. We were basically at the end of our investigation, and we had 10 percent of the tools that the DOJ has to get information. Had they actually started investigating when we did, they would have had all of the information that they have today — and probably before we released our findings. 

If you’re going to say that nobody is above the law, you’ve got to follow that through and investigate. Unfortunately, he didn’t. He’s probably a great guy. I’m sure he is, but I think history’s going to judge that pretty poorly.

It strikes me that certain things were predictable about that process, including the fact that there would be unexpected setbacks and delays. It seemed obvious, even from the outside, that two years was not going to be enough time. I don’t know why they didn’t understand that.

Yeah, I don’t either. Without the delays in both the classified documents case [in Florida] and the Jan. 6 case [in D.C.], those would have been adjudicated by now. They gave him almost a year to release classified documents. You have to assume that Donald Trump’s whole strategy from day one was to stall and delay and hope that he would win. Well, he won, and unfortunately these cases will now be dropped. Jack Smith’s going to release his findings, so maybe we’ll get information, but this guy is now totally exempt from any criminal prosecution. I worry not just about that, but about what message that sends to future presidents.

The statute of limitations is going to run out on these charges by the time he’s eligible for prosecution again.

It will, and also nobody will think we should reach back that far to prosecute. I wouldn’t put it past Donald Trump, at the end of his presidency, to pardon himself for everything he could potentially be prosecuted for.

What does it mean to be a Republican right now? What’s your vision for a possible future for that party?

I think what it means now to be a Republican is just that you’re driven by anger. You’re driven by division. If you look at the Republican Party and ask what are the unifying principles, most people will go back to the old days of Ronald Reagan and say, “Oh, we’re for smaller government, a powerful military.” But if you look at it, no, we’re not. They’re for spending even more than Joe Biden spent. They are for ceding Ukraine to Russia, which would have been anathema to the Republican Party just a few years ago. I think what they stand for is supporting culture war, rage, and one person, one personality, and that’s Donald Trump. Now, they’ll never admit it, but that’s the reality of it. 

Now, what’s the future of the GOP? Can it be saved? I don’t know. I don’t think the GOP can be saved in the near term, but I don’t think we should give up on it. Because the reality is that there’s probably forever only going to be two major parties in this country, and the Republican Party will be one of them. We can either write it off and lose elections, with such consequences as we’ve just had, or we can continue to fight inside. That’s why I still call myself a Republican, even though I haven’t voted Republican in four years. I haven’t changed. I’ll continue to fight for the soul of that party. It may take 10 or 15 years, maybe 20. Maybe never. But we have to fight for that.

How long is it until we start to see the current Republican Party begin to think about the future? If the Democrats win the House in two years, as almost everyone expects, then we’re halfway through a president’s second term and everybody’s looking for the next guy. At what point does Trump become a lame duck, and a succession battle starts?

I think in a way he’s already a lame duck. Obviously, he’s not going to come up again. You’re going to have jockeying behind the scenes to be the next Donald Trump, or the next iteration of whatever the GOP is. 

There’s also something unique about him, which is he controls the base like no other president has. If you think about George W. Bush toward the end of his second term, Republicans were falling away. That won’t happen with Trump. All those Republicans who should be falling away will still have to face re-election even though Donald Trump doesn’t. So that’s a concern.

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What I observed at the Republican convention in 2024 was a party that has deliberately severed itself from its own history. You saw nothing at all there about George W. Bush and very little about Reagan, and those were two-term Republican Presidents. That’s really weird, to have divorced yourself from that history so completely.

IWhat’s interesting is, I get called a RINO, meaning “Republican in Name Only.” The reality is the entire Republican Party today is the RINO. They’re Republicans in name only. They hold the title to the Republican Party, a lot of them still think they’re holding a legacy, but that’s exactly right, it’s gone.

The things that Republicans should be most proud of, they run away from. We were the party that freed the slaves. We were the party that built the interstate system. We were the party that believed in federal infrastructure. We believed in a small government, but with an important role for the federal government.We believe in a strong national defense. None of that exists today in the GOP. What does exist is culture war. 

In the ’80s, an unholy alliance was made between the Republican Party and the Christian right to fight for taking out abortion rights and other things, and that unholy alliance overtook the GOP. If you were a social-issue voter in the ’80s, you’re probably still a Republican voter today. If you were an economic Republican, you’ve gone to the Democrats. Kind of the same thing has happened in the Democratic Party as well. If you were a social-issue Democrat, you’ve stayed with the Democrats. If you were an economic Democrat, the unions and the middle class, you’re by and large going to the GOP now.

What do you perceive that the Kamala Harris campaign and the current Democrats did wrong? 

First of all, I think a lot of Republicans did end up voting Democratic this time. The problem is, a lot of Democrats voted Republican, and so it kind of washed that out. This is what I think has happened, frankly, over the last 10 years. 

There were really two issues that doomed the Democrats in hindsight. One is, if you have a college degree, you’re most likely to vote Democratic. If you don’t, you’re going to vote Republican. The other thing is, if you’re female, you’re going to vote Democratic, and  you’re male, you’re going to vote Republican, generally speaking. 

Let’s take the gender issue. For the last 15 years, anything masculine had been called “toxic.” The term masculine, you had to stay away from it. We couldn’t talk about masculinity, and that created a lot of animosity in young men. Men under the age of 25 that are like, “What is my role in this world? I feel this energy that men feel, but I’m told that that’s toxic.” Donald Trump comes along in that vacuum and he presents real toxic masculinity, actual toxic masculinity. In the absence of any other version, that draws young men, and this is where I think it’s not necessarily a Democratic issue, it’s frankly a male issue. We have to present a positive version of masculinity. 

The other thing is that the Democrats have got to come up with an agenda for the working class again.

I’m sure you disagree with Bernie Sanders on a wide range of issues, but in his two campaigns he was able to attract working-class voters that the Democrats were otherwise losing. That’s important, isn’t it?

Yeah, it is. I’m not sure if Bernie Sanders’ brand of politics could have gotten a majority of Americans, but I think — if you take his energy and his ability to talk, he’s like Donald Trump except he actually has a moral center. He was speaking like that, just straight up to people. Take that energy of Bernie Sanders with good solid policy and you can win elections forever.

Why didn’t the Republicans who knew that what had happened on Jan. 6, 2021, was unacceptable, and knew who was responsible, do anything? What happened that made that energy completely dissipate?

Raw power. Raw power. That’s all it is. If Mitch McConnell had voted to remove Trump, you would have gotten enough Republican senators. He believed that Trump was done and he wanted to avoid that pain. The biggest sinner in this is Kevin McCarthy, because for three weeks between Jan. 6 and when Kevin McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago, the Republican Party did not know what its future was. This was the opportunity for those of us that voted to impeach to basically take over the party, and unfortunately, the other impeachers did not join me in that. 

When McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago, that changed everything. And he did it for one reason. He wanted to be speaker, and he knew he could not take on Donald Trump and win the speakership. Kevin McCarthy owns Trump as much as Trump owns Trump.

Did you find McCarthy’s fate satisfying, in a certain dark way? Ultimately he could not outrun the wackos in his own party?

He surrendered himself to them, andwhen he was surrendering himself, I was like, “You’re going to be speaker for eight months. Great, congrats. You’re in the history books, but that’s it.” So yeah, I’ll be honest. It it was a little bit of a schadenfreude moment.

What can you tell me about the current speaker, Mike Johnson? How well do you know him?

I didn’t know him well in Congress. He was pretty new while I was there, and he’s risen in the ranks pretty quickly. Very obviously, he’s a religious conservative. He was actually one of the drivers to Jan. 6. He and I got into some arguments over email. He was trying to get all of us to sign onto some lawsuit, an amicus brief when Texas was trying to throw out the [2020] election, and he came out of nowhere. 

Obviously, he’s going to have a tough speakership this term, because they’re only going to have a one- or two-vote majority. He’s been able to hold that together so far.

How bad do you think the second Trump term is going to get? 

I do believe it’s going to be a mess. My hope is, and this is the best-case scenario, it’s just a government that’s incompetent. I really am concerned about Ukraine, for instance. What does this mean for Ukraine? 

The worst thing is if it’s not an incompetent government, if it’s really a move by him and his people to seize power. I think there will be an election in four years, I don’t think we have to worry about that. But the damage that’s going to be done to the guardrails and institutions could be long-lasting. I’m also concerned when you cross these red lines, things that you never thought politicians would do. They do it now, and then other politicians cross those red lines and eventually you cross too many.

I understand, on a human level, why Joe Biden pardoned his son. I don’t feel the need to judge that. But in a political sense, was that crossing a red line?

I think a little bit. If I was president and that was my son and they had come after him because he was my son, I would have pardoned him too. It’s understandable. The problem is, when you do that and you say, “Well, Donald Trump does it 10 times worse,” which he does, let’s be clear — that doesn’t give us an excuse then to turn around and do that. That said, the pardon power is a legal power of the presidency. Even when Donald Trump inevitably pardons all the Jan. 6-ers, I’m going to say, “I don’t like it, but he was clear and America voted for it.”

What is the role of morality in politics now? Is there still room in both parties for morals and principles and ethics?

I think on the Republican side, there is no morality right now. Is there room for it? Yes. I think there is still morality in the Democratic Party. One of the things that I’ve appreciated over the last four years is my new alliance with liberals, and what I call this is an alliance to defend democracy. When you’re in a trench and an enemy is five meters away or 50 meters away, you’re going to focus on that five-meter enemy, and that’s is the threat to democracy. You go to Ukraine and you’re going to see people on the left and the right that are fighting together to defend their country. That’s where we’re at now. I think there is still morality left in the Democratic Party, and I think there has to be morality. Otherwise politics just becomes an exercise of power, which it generally is — but I still think it’s driven by good people who go into it for the right reasons.