“You basically have one vote in 2024. Do you support democracy or do you not support democracy? And no other issue in my mind matters,” says our guest this week. Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman, found himself a pariah of sorts after he voted to impeach Donald Trump, following the former president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Kinzinger was one of two Republicans tapped to be on the January 6th committee after the 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. He stepped away from politics this year and recently authored “Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country,” a memoir all about his life and political career. Kinzinger joins WITHpod to discuss the transformation of the Republican Party, crossing political lines during the House Impeachment vote, why he feels Trump avoids in-person confrontation, preserving American democracy and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Adam Kinzinger: I want to see for 2024, what I’m calling, an uncomfortable alliance. You basically have one vote in ‘24. Do you support democracy, or do you not support democracy? And no other issue in my mind matters than that. And so I think you’re seeing these kind of, well, I will call them the Biden Republicans. And I will tell you a little of this stuff is, you know, you grow up a hardcore Republican, thinking that the intentions of the left are bad intentions.
And when you start to realize, when I start to see the left as the defenders of democracy, when I start to see the left as the defenders of Ukraine, for God’s sakes, the people that will actually take on Russia, it has softened my view of the left because all of a sudden I’m like, their motivations are actually pretty good. They’re not bad people.
Chris Hayes: Hello, and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
I am speaking to you, and this is going to be a little slightly dated by the time you hear it, but bear with me because it’s evergreen. I’m speaking on the day that the Republican Conference has finally, after three weeks, decided on a new Speaker of the House, Louisiana Republican by the name of Mike Johnson, who is pretty hard right, sort of down the line, very conservative lawmaker. And, you know, who knows maybe by the time you heard this, it’s blown up and there’s another crisis.
But I think we are relatively safe, and I think that one of the things, there was a lot of back and forth in this bizarre, you know, spectacle of this leader list, three weeks. But one of the kinds of defining points was the influence of Donald Trump in the party and the degree to which supporting the American Constitutional Republic and voting to certify the 2020 election was essentially a disqualifying vote for leadership and a kind of litmus test issue.
Now, there were others who tried to become speaker who were very, very pro-Trump, MAGA, like Jim Jordan, who couldn’t get over the line. So, it’s not like that was exclusively the only litmus test. But it was very clear when the number three in the caucus, Tom Emmer, ran for speaker, this is after Kevin McCarthy was unceremoniously deposed by a motion to vacate, initiated by Matt Gaetz, with one vote, which is what he extracted as a negotiation in the speakership battle, right?
So, he extracted that from Kevin McCarthy, then he pulled the trigger, then he dismissed him. Then they went to number two, Steve Scalise, who won the internal conference vote, never actually stood for election for as yet sort of unexplained reasons. He just couldn’t get the votes. They then went through Jordan. Jordan didn’t work. So, then Tom Emmer was a kind of natural next person, he’s number three, and Tom Emmer’s very conservative.
It’s not like he’s a squish, you know, his voting record and where he is on issues. But Tom Emmer did vote to certify the election. A minority of the Republican caucus did that, but he was one of the votes who did. And immediately Donald Trump came out like in a break from his civil fraud trial in utterly classic fashion. Like he’s like in the courtroom, like pulling up truth social to like take a shot at Emmer.
Basically, he’s like the guy is a RINO. And next thing you know, after four hours as the speaker designate, he announces he’s not running. And it just became clear that, you know, that is one of the most important litmus test for Republican politics is, do you believe the election was stolen? Did you support Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn them? And that’s creepy as hell.
And I have to say like my view on this, and I’ve said this on the show, like I view (ph) as engaged as a kind of in this sort of, high stakes battle for the future of American democracy in which there’s a kind of popular front on the side of democracy that spans from Bill Kristol to Noam Chomsky. That is a big tent of people with very different ideological views. But in the end, they’re all lined up on the side of preserving the constitutional republic against the people that would want to subvert it.
And one of the things you saw on the January 6 committee was this coalition in committee form because one of the things that happened was Kevin McCarthy nominated a few people to serve on that committee. Remember the history here, there was a select committee that was going to happen, that was negotiated with Republican leadership, and it was going to be more like the 9-11 committee, equal parts, right? A 50-50 committee. That then was Donald Trump like gave the sign to get rid of it. Kevin McCarthy killed it.
So then the Democrats were like, all right, we’re going to have this committee. Kevin McCarthy named a few people to that committee. I think Jordan was one of them, if I recall correctly. Nancy Pelosi was like, yes, I’m just going to step in here and say like, this guy who is part of the plot being investigated can’t be on the committee. Kevin McCarthy responded by being like, fine, we’re taking all our people off the committee. Democrats said, okay, we’re going to have our committee and we’re going to appoint Republicans and appointed Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.
And the reason those two people were appointed was because, and again, these people are both conservatives. I mean Liz Cheney, my God, very, very conservative, but we’re both on the right side of this question of preserving the constitutional republic. And on the right side of the question of should the person who wins the election be the next president or should the person who lost the election be the next president? To me, a very clear question that it’s not hard to be on the right side of but they were on the right side of and made them sort of pariahs in their party.
And Kinzinger in particular is a really, I mean both Cheney and Kinzinger are interesting figures in terms of their ideological trajectory, their political trajectory. Kinzinger is, you know, when he was elected in 2010 in that Tea Party election, he’s young, he’s sort of telegenic, he has a service record, he was very conservative, he’s very good communicator, he’s good on television. You would sort of view him as a kind of like up and coming rising star and managed to end up a pariah basically by the end of his time as a Republican, again, simply because of his outspokenness in defense of American democracy against its enemies in the person of Donald Trump.
And ultimately declined to run again after it became clear, I think, that in his Republican district, he was, you know, not gonna win a primary against some MAGA-endorsed candidate. He now has a book out called Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country. And it’s a great pleasure to welcome Adam Kinzinger to the program. How are you?
Adam Kinzinger: Hey, it’s good to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Chris Hayes: Did I get anything wrong in that intro?
Adam Kinzinger: No, that was basically just about completely right, except that I was appointed to the committee, but I really didn’t want to do it. I’m glad I did but I was like, God, no, please, no. This is going to be crazy.
Chris Hayes: Yes, you must have recognized it was a little bit of a, like when you were appointed, you must have known at that moment, this is going to be career ending or altering in some way.
Adam Kinzinger: Yes, for sure. I mean I knew that like, well, I guess to an extent, I’d always had hope that there would be like a great awakening, I guess, we’ll call it in the GOP, which is like, we can’t do things like overthrow the government. I think I lost hope that was gonna happen in the near term, the second that McCarthy went down to Mar-a-Lago.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Kinzinger: I’m actually sitting in South Florida right now and I can feel him. But I also knew like, I had the time, my kid was what, maybe 10 months old, 6 months old, something like that and I’m like, how could I ever, ever look at my kid and tell him to do the right thing, when I turned down going on this committee? So, it was like for me, it was a no brainer. I knew it was the end of politics at least for now and I was fine with it. I was fine with it.
Chris Hayes: I want to talk about what proceeded that and I want to talk about your career. But since it is sort of fresh in mind right now and we have this Mike Johnson news. And again, when people are listening to this, it will be a little afterwards, but it will still be relevant. I’m curious as someone who is in that conference, has relationships with people there, understands how things go, like just how you processed all that. If it was surprising, if it was not surprising, what you sort of thought of the three weeks of chaos.
Adam Kinzinger: So, all that’s happened is basically now you’re seeing out in the open what really has existed at some level for 12 years. And so —
Chris Hayes: Huh.
Adam Kinzinger: — one of my biggest concerns with like, now I’m gonna call them the moderates from here out. Let’s be clear, there’s no moderates left, but we’ll say like moderates in tone and in governance and recognizing the need to work together with Democrats, for instance. For the most part, and I’ll include myself in this, we were not willing to be legislative terrorists.
So if every member of Congress basically is holding a grenade, whoever is willing to actually pull the pin on that grenade is the most powerful person in that room. And that was your Matt Gaetzs, your Jim Jordans, et cetera. What I think surprised me over the last few weeks was that there actually was a group of people that held out against Jim Jordan. And they all got death threats, they got the pressure.
I saw so many people that have relented to death threats and pressure in the past. I didn’t think they would. The second Mike Johnson was named, I kind of go, uh-oh, because he doesn’t come with the baggage of Jim Jordan. He is Jim Jordan, like he is Jim Jordan, but he doesn’t come with his baggage, and it gives exhausted Republicans, exhausted moderates, quote-unquote, an opportunity to find an out, and they all found that out.
And I’ve been in contact with a lot of the people that voted against Jim Jordan, trying to stiffen their spine. And I tried to stiffen their spine on Johnson and be like, dude, you guys can’t do this. You can’t let him basically be the Jim Jordan victory. And I didn’t get a lot of texts back. So, I knew we were pretty much toast at that point.
Chris Hayes: Yes, I mean, from my perspective, again this is, I’m not a Republican. I don’t have roots (ph).
Adam Kinzinger: Really? Surprising.
Chris Hayes: Taking the Republican leadership except for the country, which is to say, the person the Republicans have as a leader is not gonna share my politics. But it does seem to me like what I was rooting for was someone who had voted to certify the election. That to me is really this bright line. Chip Roy is my favorite example of someone who’s very, very conservative and voted the right way on that vote and took a lot of heat for it and defended it. I mean I really don’t love Chip Roy’s politics, but that to me is like the big test vote.
Adam Kinzinger: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But it was also clear, I mean the moment that Emmer wins, Trump just bringing it down and how much Trump is laser focused on that. Like —
Adam Kinzinger: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — he wants that to be the litmus test, right?
Adam Kinzinger: Absolutely. So, I don’t even think narcissism, you know, I obviously described Trump as a narcissist, which everybody agrees, I’m sure. But I don’t even think that’s strong enough of a word.
Chris Hayes: I agree.
Adam Kinzinger: Because a narcissism still to some extent would even think about his legacy when it comes to the country, probably most presidents to some extent were narcissists.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Kinzinger: This guy only thing he care, he would watch the, and I mean this, he would literally watch the country burn down, if he was at the center of it and people were praising him for the torching. And the crazy thing about Emmer, you know, I get along with Emmer well enough. He’s very much defended Donald Trump. Let you keep in mind, he was in charge of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
He always told me when I would go talk to him on the floor and say things like, hey, you guys are saying crazy crap out of the NRCC. You know, in essence, calling the election story. He’s like, yeah, good Adam. He goes, use that, use that. You can use it. You can run against us. But you know, okay, I’m like, well, I don’t think you’re getting my point here, Tom.
So, I mean that’s the kind of stuff I deal with. It’s like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. But the funny thing is, Tom Emmer really started sucking up to Donald Trump the day before the speaker vote. And then, literally, I’m sure Donald Trump was nice to him on the phone, like, thanks, Tom. And then literally tweets in the courtroom, like, Tom is a garbage, he’s garbage. And I’m sure Tom is just like, what? What’d I do, man?
Chris Hayes: That’s actually an interesting aspect of him. Well, I mean, is there any interesting aspect of Donald Trump at this point? I’m not sure there is.
Adam Kinzinger: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But something I think that’s underappreciated, and maybe you can talk to this a little bit, is as ruthless as he is, he actually doesn’t like conflict in person. Like he does a lot of, like everything is glad-handing in person, and then it’s the stab in the back. But he actually doesn’t have the stones, if you will, to like actually beat, like which is a really important quality. People talked about Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy and different kinds of styles of leadership.
One of the things I think that Pelosi, the reason she engendered respect in that caucus, is she would level to you to your face. Like if you were gonna have it out about something or she didn’t like what you were doing, she was gonna tell you that and you were gonna have the confrontation and know where each of you stood. But he doesn’t actually have that quality, right?
Adam Kinzinger: Absolutely not. Okay, so a quick example is John Boehner. And I remember so many times sitting in Boehner’s office, having a cigarette with him just because you can with John Boehner. And I’m like, I can get myself through this. And he’ll just sit there and I’ll be like, hey, John, you know, I want to position on the intel committee or something. And he’d take a drag and go, yes, it’s not happening. It’s like, okay, thanks, man.
Chris Hayes: Right, he wouldn’t say, sure, yeah, we’ll look into it and then you find out —
Adam Kinzinger: Right.
Chris Hayes: — later. Like it’s like, you’re just being told what the deal is.
Adam Kinzinger: Yes. And you respect that, right? So with Trump, it was an interesting story, and I talked about this a little bit in the book, which is the very first time I met Donald Trump, you know, I didn’t vote for him in 2016. And I — he had made some trip through Illinois and told one of the bigwigs there, like tell Kinzinger to go blank himself and you know.
So, I’m expecting now, it’s probably March, I go into the Oval Office, and I think it’s on Syria or Afghanistan or something, and I expect he’s going to chew me out. And at that point, I’m like, all right, I’ll take a chewing out. He’s the president. You know, I didn’t support him. And he looks at me and everybody else in the room is probably six, seven of us and he goes, you’re great on television.
And I was just like, oh, thanks, Mr. President. He goes, no, really, you’re great. The whole meeting, for 50% of the meeting, he was staring at me, and he was talking about to others about how good I was on television. Never once said he didn’t support me. And I realized what he does. He hates confrontation. He wants you to like him, okay? That’s all he wants you to do.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Kinzinger: And that’s why he fires people by tweet, by the way.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Kinzinger: But he also, and this is where you can see somebody like, Dan Crenshaw or the best is Elise Stefanik and you’re like, how did they change on a dime? Because he draws you into his circle, and actually guys, Donald Trump is fun to be around. I hate to say it.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Kinzinger: He’s a fun thing (ph).
Chris Hayes: No, people have said that, yes.
Adam Kinzinger: Yes. He draws you into your circle and you feel important, and he tells you he’s watching and most people just sell out. I mean this is him in a nutshell.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Kinzinger: I used the, it’s kind of a crude example, but I say, you know, when you’re in high school and you’re emotionally kind of dumb and you’re not well-developed and you like ask a girl out to the prom and she says no. All of a sudden, in your mind, you want to go to the prom with her even more. And if she says yes, you’re like, oh, well, why is she saying yes to me? Because you’re a high school idiot. Well, that’s kind of how he is still with people. If you’re not on his side, he really wants you on his side. And if you are, he’ll throw you under the bus.
Chris Hayes: That is really interesting, right. I think that’s actually really an important with sort of drawing into the circle because you’ve watched this happen with people. And you’re watching it happen, you’re like, this will not work out. I mean like Kevin McCarthy being a great example. Like we all know, we all see it, we all watched this happen and it happens again and again. I do also think, here’s another theory and I’d love for you to weigh in on this.
He’s smarter than he looks. And I do think there’s a way that a lot of people have had interactions where like they think they’re gonna get over on him because there is something about him that comes off as kind of dumb or a little like he’s not really processing. Like he doesn’t seem that like with it or cagey. He seems like he’s so caught in the vice of his own narcissism and that glad-handing but he’s very cunning. And so people think they’re the ones who are gonna play him and he plays them. And I think that’s a real pattern.
Adam Kinzinger: I think so too. And I think my good friend Charlie Sykes describes it as Trump’s lizard brain.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Kinzinger: And it’s like his ability, he may not be able to sit down and compete with you in a mathletics competition —
Chris Hayes: No.
Adam Kinzinger: — or something, but he can sit down and understands like, he’s really good at this, understanding like anger that’s out there, feeling audiences, feeling people and reflecting it back to people. It’s kind of like if you look up, you know, the symptoms of like adult children of alcoholics, they’re very good at —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Kinzinger: — in essence, reflecting emotion back to people because they have to learn how to manage like that. And he’s, to some extent, got those capabilities. He can tell like, okay, I’m standing in front of this crowd. I’m kind of losing them. So, I’m going to throw out an immigrant’s thing or I’m standing in front of this crowd and, you know. I heard Donald Trump, by the way, I was sitting in the Oval Office when he told us, yes, next term I’m gonna have to reform Social Security because it’s not sustainable.
And I remember thinking, okay, that will last until his first speech for reelection. And that’s exactly what happened. His first speech, he’s standing in front of a bunch of blue hairs in Florida or wherever, and he goes, I’m never touching your Social Security.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Kinzinger: Like, yes, that’s Donald Trump in a nutshell.
Chris Hayes: So, you were elected in 2010. How did you get into politics? Why do you wanna go into politics?
Adam Kinzinger: You know, everybody has like something that’s kind of authored into them when they’re a baby that like, you know, everybody has an unnatural interest of whatever. And I always say you can kind of take that interest in the kid and it will probably project their career. When I was 6, I lived in Jacksonville, Florida. We were going to a church. I went to a church there where a guy was running for mayor. And His name was John Lewis and he had hot pink yard signs because it’s the 80s, right, and that’s cool. Probably like those cool letters.
Chris Hayes: Mm-hmm.
Adam Kinzinger: And I just was obsessed. I was obsessed with the fanfare of it. And from there, I just kind of, as I grew up, kind of grew to understand politics. And like politics and service were always big issues to me and big things I wanted to do. And so I don’t know if there was necessarily a point where I can say, yeah, I, all of a sudden, took an interest at this moment, except that drive home from church at 6 years old, seeing that first yard sign.
Chris Hayes: Hot pink yard sign in Jacksonville, Florida.
Adam Kinzinger: Yes, yes. Yes, way cool, man. That’s like right on the precipice of the Cool Cans from Pepsi too.
Chris Hayes: And how did your politics form? You said you went to church, you were in Jacksonville, you served in the US Armed Forces. Where did you get your politics from?
Adam Kinzinger: So, you know, my parents are Republicans and they’re interested in Republicans. My mom is a public school teacher, my dad ran homeless shelters, did non-for-profit. And he’s actually, what I would call, compassionate conservatism and before that was kind of out of vogue. I grew up admiring Ronald Reagan as a kid, right. He was the first president I ever consciously remembered. I loved the idea of America and America’s role in the world. And I went through my iterations.
I voted libertarian once in college because I thought it was cool. I went through the iterations of like playing around with becoming a liberal or playing around with being too far to the right to tick people off. And I think I settled on who I was, really. Actually, you know. before I got into politics, but even during elected office, when I was in Congress and I started to realize like these number of people that like to just fight and make soundbites and be angry, I’m like, I don’t wanna be that.
I can remember specifically to a hearing with Hillary Clinton on Benghazi and my side was just tearing her a new one (ph), I think completely unfairly. And I actually was really nice to her and just asked her a couple of questions. And that became how I wanted to do politics is like just still be maybe the last grown up in the room. But in terms of my viewpoints, like my time in the military, which I’m getting ready to retire from, but I’m still in and just recognizing that America has a real special place.
And I’ll say on top of that, our democracy, our soft power is our ability to do democracy well. And there are millions of people that live in really tough places around the world that are desperate for us to get it right, because it’s their example. So, I think that’s sort of how it developed.
I’m a man of faith. I don’t talk about it a ton because I take the approach of like, my job isn’t to be a preacher. My job is to represent 700,000 people that think differently than me. But I’ve become very, very concerned with Christian nationalism and the rise of Christian nationalism because I think that is directly in contradiction to what, frankly, I believe and what I’ve studied.
Chris Hayes: It’s interesting. I think, I don’t know if people listening to this, one of the things that I’ve always found interesting as a political reporter, and particularly when I was younger, is how humbling running for Congress is.
Adam Kinzinger: Yes.
Chris Hayes: It’s not really glorious. And you’re in rooms sometimes of 12 people. I’ll never forget, I think I’ve told this story in the podcast before, one of the first congressional candidates I covered was running in a primary against Rahm Emanuel for what would be the seat that he would win in Chicago, a woman named Nancy Kozak (ph). And I spent the day with her and I remember her going to a bingo hall on the northwest side, which was it’s mostly very Polish-dominant area.
And we were just in this bingo hall, which I think at the time you could still smoke cigarettes in. And she’s just going, person to person, shaking hands and introducing her name to people who are just like, can you get out of my way? I’m trying to hear the numbers. Like she was a very distant second to the bingo numbers. And I was young and had always been interested in politics. And I always remember that moment being like, whoa, this is not glory. This is the opposite of glory.
And then, I remember thinking, that’s good, like it should be humbling. It should be humbling. These are the people that you’re gonna serve and represent. So, I’m curious, here’s my question with that long windup. Did you feel the early emanations of the Trumpist impulses in the people you were interacting with in Republican politics prior to that 2015, 2016 period?
Adam Kinzinger: Yes, I certainly did. And, you know, by the way, just quickly on the humbling side of things, it’s so true. I mean, you know, I’d go to event, only now do all the events I do actually sell out, you know. All you got to do is January 6 and then you can sell out events. It would be my biggest fear is like, all right, dude, I got a fundraiser tonight and like five people sometimes show up.
Chris Hayes: Oh yes.
Adam Kinzinger: And then it’s scheduled for an hour and a half. And you’re like, I can’t do an hour and a half with five people.
Chris Hayes: That can be (inaudible).
Adam Kinzinger: Okay, or the pancake breakfast when everybody has syrup on their hands and you got to shake it. You know, those are the things you go through. But I did see this coming. And I think part of the reason I wrote the book, and you know, it’s an arrogant experience to write a book because you’re like, why would anybody care about my life? Except that I realized that my life can kind of show the iterations of where the party went. And, you know, you would see, you know, sometimes hear people in the dark corner, you know, say a racist term or, you know, have such mistrust for immigrants.
That’s how it kind of started or Barack Obama is really a Muslim, that kind of stuff. And what Donald Trump did is, I don’t think he created, I think he definitely grew that, but I think he made it okay to say out loud. And what would happen at all these, you know, Lincoln Day Dinners, which is the big GOP fundraisers, you’d show up and there’d always be one corner of weirdos sitting over there, that are like, you know, defund the Fed or whatever, the Ron Paul people.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Kinzinger: And then next year, they were the people in the whole building, because that idea, the craziest idea you would hear would be a mainstream idea the next year. And I saw this growing, and I frankly refused to accept that we couldn’t defeat that because we’d defeated it all the time. And in hindsight, I should have certainly known.
Chris Hayes: Again, this is something I’ve talked about before. But I think a lot about the left and 9/11 truth after 9/11 —
Adam Kinzinger: Right.
Chris Hayes: — when I was 24, 25, because you would encounter it everywhere.
Adam Kinzinger: Mm-hmm.
Chris Hayes: Every left event and it was people and again, they were comrades. They were people who I shared values with and also like opposed the bombing of Afghanistan, opposed the war in Iraq and didn’t want these things to happen. We shared that. But then you would get into it and be like, what you’re saying is great, like it’s nuts, like (inaudible).
Adam Kinzinger: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And you would have these factional fights. Ultimately, that was squelched as opposed to incur, you know. Like it really was — it was a factional fight that happened in which like my side emerged victorious basically.
Adam Kinzinger: Right.
Chris Hayes: And, again, it was a factional fight about an empirical fact. I mean that was part of what was weird about it. Like the big lie, who won the 2020 election? Who did 9/11? It’s not a fight over values or principles. You can be like the most Quaker pacifist in the world, right, but it’s still just a factual question of who did 9/11. It was Al-Qaeda. You can be the most conservative person in the world. And it’s still just a factual question of like whether Joe Biden beat Donald Trump or not.
And that factional dispute played out. And I guess my question is like, when you think about the wrong faction winning this factional dispute, right, within the coalition, was it inevitable? Was there a moment where it could have gone a different way? Like, do you run the playback of like, this was the key, like third and 16 where we needed to convert and we didn’t, or was it just like overdetermined?
Adam Kinzinger: No, I think we could have stopped it. I mean you think about, even the left used to be the anti-vaxxers, the far left. And now it’s like —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Kinzinger: — the far right. But here’s what happened, and I thought about this a ton, and so maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong. But I am convinced that when you’re in a position of leadership, there’s a key word to that, which is leader. And when you have, okay, so let’s just take Donald Trump as the example. He gets indicted on, what, a quadrillion felonies or something like that. What happens?
Well, people’s knee-jerk reaction is to defend Donald Trump. Okay, that’s fine, I guess to an extent, we can understand that. But then they watched the Republican debate or they watched Fox and they see, what are they saying on that? And when all the second tier leaders, the second tier influencers, the only first tier being Donald Trump, reaffirmed what Donald Trump is saying, that becomes fact.
When every candidate for president sits on the stage of the Republican debate and says, this is a witch-hunt against Donald Trump, you better believe then everybody is gonna believe it’s a witch-hunt and they’re gonna rally behind him. If everybody on that stage would have said, listen, we all love Donald Trump and his policies, but this has gone too far. He’s wrong, vote for one of us, I think you could have made an impact.
Chris Hayes: Hmm.
Adam Kinzinger: So if I go back to 2015, Donald Trump, yes, there were way too many other candidates in that race in 2015, 2016. That was a huge issue. But Then at the point he gets the nomination, I mean the Republican party could have refused to see them. Everybody could have led and said, this is wrong. We’re gonna vote for Hillary. I’m sorry, guys. I know you don’t love Hillary, but this guy is tragic. You could have cut this out, but they didn’t. Instead, they learned to go along to survive in the cancer and feed the cancer sugar and then wonder why it’s overtaking the body.
Chris Hayes: So, I totally agree with that. I do think like, well, I think it’s both, right? It’s sort of overdetermined by a bunch of structural factors. One of which I want to pick your brain on. But I also think it’s key moments of leadership. One that I keep coming back to, that I’m sort of obsessed with, is McConnell and the second impeachment.
Because I actually think of all the moments of missed opportunities, here’s this guy. He’s sort of at his politically weakest. He has just done, in front of the whole country McConnell a violent coup attempt. You can convict him on his impeachment and remove his ability to hold higher office, which is fully contemplated by the Constitution. And to me, the correct remedy for the infraction, in some ways even more than prison, I mean that’s sort of a separate question.
Adam Kinzinger: Sure.
Chris Hayes: The most important thing is like, that you can’t give him power again, that to me is the biggest missed moment. Because I actually think in a world in which they rally around and they convict him, he’s not the figure he is now. What do you think?
Adam Kinzinger: Oh, a hundred percent agree with you. There were two events that happened very quickly in a row. One was that, and then, the other one would be, which happy to talk about is, Kevin at Mar-a-Lago.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Kinzinger: But with McConnell, okay and this is where, and I talked about this a little in the book, about my shame of kind of voting against the first impeachment and why I voted against it, because I was convinced Donald Trump did bad things. And I took a little nuanced thing, which is I felt like Democrats put an artificial timeline on it, which I did feel. And then I was like, okay, I’ll use that as the excuse to vote against it.
And that happened in the second impeachment in the House. You had a lot of people, take Mike Gallagher for instance, that I knew wanted to vote to impeach him the second time. But instead said, oh, you know, we’re impeaching him on whatever it was, incitement to insurrection. And technically, we can’t prove that it is incitement to insurrection.
And so McConnell then, very politically smartly, I think just smartly tactically, decided to delay the trial in the Senate until Trump was out. And then, gosh, I certainly wish Donald Trump shouldn’t have done that, but he’s not president now, so we can’t impeach him. And that’s what he did. That was his little shameful moment.
And had he come out and voted for it, I think Donald Trump would have been seriously removed from office. I mean, it was so obvious what had happened. But also to think nobody contemplated at that moment, including me, Fred Upton told me Donald Trump is gonna run again. And I’m like, come on, Fred, you’re crazy. He’s not gonna run again. I don’t think anybody contemplated that he would actually had the —
Chris Hayes: Hmm.
Adam Kinzinger: — complete lack of shame to run again.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: You mentioned before threats and you’ve talked about threats. You talked about security stuff and people calling your house. And there’s been lots of reporting about this of different members of Congress, people like you who voted for that second impeachment. Mitt Romney has talked about it in terms of senators. And we just saw a version of this with the Jim Jordan situation, which was very interesting where basically a bunch of people that came out against Jim Jordan started reporting they were receiving death threats, security, you know, threats to your life, security situation.
Other members of Congress who voted for that second impeachment and have crossed Donald Trump in any way have talked about it this last week where Jim Jordan was briefly the front-runner for speaker endorsed by Donald Trump. The members of the Republican Conference that came out against him started very publicly announcing and complaining about the fact they were on the receiving end of death threats.
Mitt Romney in the new book with McKay Coppins talks about members of the U.S. Senate talking about the same thing. Can you talk a little bit about how present this sort of menace, threat, physical fear was and is as a tool of sort of Trump coercion?
Adam Kinzinger: I think it’s an important tool, not a good one, but an important tool for Trump. Because that’s why I said, you know, I was very surprised that Jim Jordan, that the opposition to Jim Jordan held. But it’s also why they made the determination to hold, but they were not willing to fight on anybody else. They wouldn’t fight on Mike Johnson because they were exhausted and didn’t want to go through this again.
And I think it’s important, you think of the culture of, frankly, the kind of the right, the far right, which was born in this idea that like government is sort of an enemy of the people. It’s a necessary evil. You know, the whole second amendment isn’t about your right to hunt. It’s about your right to overthrow the government, which I don’t necessarily agree with that theory of course. But that leads to drinking at night, you know, getting tuned up by watching Sean Hannity or at a time Tucker Carlson, and then allowing you to believe that your job now is to use violence to protect this country.
And what happens is everybody, to some extent, that’s not a complete sycophant for Trump, goes through that. They may even fight back through that. They may release the death threats as we saw. But then, that scares them to death when they have to do it again. I mean I’ve been through it. Look, when I made the decision to do the January 6 Committee, I knew it would lead to a broad increase in these threats.
And I never even thought twice about doing it, but it was something that I had to recognize for my family. And there are people that have told me straight up, they didn’t want to deal with the death threats. And I’ll tell you what, if your fear is death threats, and you don’t want to do the right thing, you’re in the wrong business nowadays. Go to a different business and let somebody with actual courage come and do the right thing.
Chris Hayes: Yes, I mean I agree with that. But I would just say one point in addition, which is there’s fear and there’s hassle. Like when you talk about exhausting, like there’s the fear that someone’s gonna do something and there’s fear, particularly if you have, like you do, you have young children, you have family members you worry about. You might not be physically fearful for yourself, you might think it’s my calling to do this, whatever happens physically to me, but I don’t wanna put my kids in danger. That’s a completely, totally rational calculation.
But I also think having been around people, and again, I said something about this when the anti-Jordan caucus was getting these, was like, try to think what a day in the life of Ilhan Omar is like. Like when she’s the subject of like one of these barrages, like think about what her security situation looks like or Judge Tanya Chutkan, right?
Adam Kinzinger: Mm-hmm.
Chris Hayes: Like or, you know, whoever, Letitia James, like on and on and on, Dr. Anthony Fauci, that it’s both scary, but it’s also just exhausting.
Adam Kinzinger: It is.
Chris Hayes: Like just what you have to do, the hassle that is added to your life. You know, members of Congress have some security, but mostly live like normies.
Adam Kinzinger: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like you go to the grocery store, you buy stuff, whatever, you go pick your kid up, you ferry him around, all of a sudden have security layers. And that itself imposes a cost, a tax on people, even if they’re not scared of it.
Adam Kinzinger: Yes and I’ll tell you, it’s like, so imagine, and I think the thing that scares me more is like, still, when I get death threats or got death threats, it’s like, there’s still a level of kind of untouchability people think with you. Like, oh, I don’t know where he lives, I don’t know where he is, and there’s still that. The scary thing is when it happens to local elected officials who then can’t get the resources.
But look, I got basically a 24-hour security detail when we really started that second tranche of hearings in January 6th. And anybody that thinks that’s cool, let me dispel you of that notion now. Because yes, they get to drive you around everywhere, but I like to drive. And I realized like my car hadn’t been driven in eight months. Secondly, you know, I want to meet my friends at the bar in D.C.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Kinzinger: I have a bunch of friends coming into town. And you’re out and you’re like, well, it’s now after midnight and we kind of want to drink until 1:00. But then these guys who’ve got to be here at 7:00 to take me into work tomorrow, they’re staying up with me. And all of a sudden your calculation is going through —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Kinzinger: — and you walk in with a security detail and no matter how much you tried to be kind of anonymous, now you certainly aren’t anonymous. But yes, members of Congress live regular lives and I still chuckle when I’m, like you probably get this some (ph) too. You’re like at the airport and people come up to you and they’re like, why are you at the airport? Because they think you’re like in some special like tube that actually sends you, watches you somehow to somewhere you’re going. You take an airplane like a regular person, but yeah, that’s how it works, unless you become speaker.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, unless you want to see (ph) it, yes. No, I mean I take the subway every day, so I see people all the time. So, I think that’s part of it, right? That sort of the air of menace, the sort of, there’s an interesting, what you’re describing, as I’m sort of thinking through, right, there’s like, there’s the carrots and the sticks, right? There’s the push and the pull. There’s the honey and the vinegar. There’s the kind of like him identifying you and trying to bring you into a circle.
And then there’s the death threats when you turn against him. Like there’s these different coercive means that are playing and alternating and kind of working off each other, right, to produce this. There’s another aspect to this, so there’s some leadership failure. I want to talk about this trust issue. And you represented a suburban Chicago district, right?
Adam Kinzinger: Yes.
Chris Hayes: One of the defining features we’ve seen of politics all across the OECD, particularly in the US, is this sort of polarization along educational attainment, where people without higher education are going to the right and that’s happening in, you know, it’s happening in the U.K., it’s happening in Germany and in Austria and in Italy. And then, people with educational, you know, college, post-grad degrees are moving to the center left, right?
We’re seeing that in the U.S. Trump is a huge sort of activating force for that kind of polarization. I’m curious, this trust question, like, polarizing around trust. They’re all crooks, they’re all corrupt. The globalist uniparty and the plandemic and Dr. Fauci, that kind of thinking, which is I think related to some of these educational polarization issues.
Like, did you see that manifesting in your district? Did you see people in your district who were like you, who had been kind of, for lack of a better word, Romney Republicans, just being completely put off by the, for lack of a better word, kind of like aesthetics and vibes of Trumpism?
Adam Kinzinger: Yes, I mean you do see that. And I think, you know, one of the biggest, I think, motivating things, particularly on the last thing we’re talking about is tribalism really exists. People feel very isolated. They feel lonely. And when their tribe starts to move, you either move with it or you get pushed out of that tribe. And so what I would see is, you know, let’s say the early days of Donald Trump, you know, I’d go to these meetings and people would respectfully listen to me talking about how Donald Trump is completely unfit for the presidency.
And they may be respectful about it. But then you start getting these people that demand, in essence, you know, 100 percent loyalty to whatever that view is. And now to even express doubt, you can be kicked out of a tribe, so you have a choice to make. And I watched a lot of people either quit politics out of frustration. I’m talking about just like donors and people interested or completely buy into the brain worms. I mean, it is educational, but you’ll be amazed at the number of people that are like, you know, worth nine figures, you know —
Chris Hayes: Mm-hmm.
Adam Kinzinger: — in their life that are all in on the Donald Trump thing, that are all in belief that there’s like this one world order or that COVID wasn’t a real thing. And I think, yes, the education thing is an issue, but I also think there’s just something, there’s some brain worms and fear. People use fear to compel action. And I’ll tell you what, Republicans became really good at harnessing the dark art of fear because it is the most compelling thing to move people to action. The problem is true leaders have to know when to use fear and when to not use fear.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: When you talk about brain worms, how big a factor is Fox? I mean Fox has a kind of monopoly that nothing else really has. You know, the people that watch my show, like they watch CNN, they read The New York Times, they listen to NPR, they read The Wall Street Journal, they’re getting a ton of different stuff. And I’m one of the places they get information from.
All the data suggests that that’s really not true of conservatives. Where they’re getting their information is much more constrained, and Fox dominates it in a way that there’s nothing like it in the sort of broad center left. How much effect does that have?
Adam Kinzinger: Huge, I think it’s the ball game to an extent because it tickles like your anger or erogenous zone just to leave it on in the background and find out everything that makes you mad and what Hillary Clinton did today or what Barack Obama did. And I go to tell you like, honestly, I haven’t watched Fox in years. But there’d be points where I’d have it on and they’d be talking about the border crisis or something and you feel your own anger kind of growing because it’s an art form. They’re really good at it.
Chris Hayes: Sure.
Adam Kinzinger: And not just in how they addict people to that fear and to that dopamine hit, and obviously you have to have bigger and bigger dopamine hits too, it also exempts people from real information. Why is it, if you ask most Fox viewers about Donald Trump’s indictments and some of the facts around him, they won’t know him. Why? Because Fox doesn’t talk about it. And if it does talk about it, it talks about it in the thing of like this Democratic attorney general is going after poor Donald Trump.
And so yes, it’s a brainwashing, but it’s also a sanitization of information that doesn’t agree with what you believe. And again, that puts people, when you have different competing views, you can make up your own mind. When you only have one viewpoint given to you, and then you’re told that the Democrats, look, when I talk about Christian nationalism, like Christian nationalists like Jim Jordan, they truly believe that people like you are actually working for the devil.
Chris Hayes: Mm-hmm.
Adam Kinzinger: I had people that, told me I was actually working directly for the devil. They believe this stuff and it’s very frightening.
Chris Hayes: Yes, I always say that genuine belief is underestimated as a explainer of politicians actions. Like —
Adam Kinzinger: It’s true.
Chris Hayes: — people really do have ideological beliefs. Speaking of which, what is your life like now? Like are you sad to be out of this? Are you relieved? Have you like, are you gonna like take up painting? How old are you?
Adam Kinzinger: Forty-five.
Chris Hayes: Yes, we’re basically exactly the same age. And I’m gonna do this as probably as long as I can. I like what I do and it’s fulfilling and important to me. But also if it went away tomorrow, I’d find something else to do.
Adam Kinzinger: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So, I’m curious how you think about it.
Adam Kinzinger: So, it’s interesting, so the last two years of the House really took a personal impact on me. And I talked about this a little bit because I think it’s important for people to understand. During all the January 6th stuff, it’s like being in combat where you’re just like in the trenches, you’re fighting. Nobody has PTSD at war because you’re at war, you’re acting. It’s when the guns go silent that stuff kind of hits.
And so I’ve spent the last 10 months, my family and I really taken an inventory of the impact it had, the friendships lost, the family lost, that kind of stuff. And so I’ve enjoyed it. I work for CNN now, I’m doing speaking around the country. I’ve got this book. It’s given me an opportunity to take a deep breath and kind of take inventory. In terms of what’s next and I’ve got an organization, Country First, nonpartisan in terms of what’s next, I really don’t know. And I have the ability, I have the privilege of being able to make a good salary now, so I can kind of relax on that, but I don’t know.
Do I want to get back into politics? I think maybe. I don’t know where I fit anymore in the political spectrum. And so that’s a big question, but yes, life is a lot better, and I don’t miss the House for a single day. The only time that I kind of feel like maybe I miss it is, because I know I could be making a much bigger deal about, for instance, Ukraine funding and denying people the speakership that are unwilling to put Ukraine funding on the floor. And I don’t have the voice to be able to do that in such a tight majority right now.
Chris Hayes: When you say you don’t know where you fit in the spectrum, one of the things that I think has been hard because of Donald Trump has forced the issue on polarizing along Trump lines, to find a place for, Romney is kind of sort of the only, and he’s leaving, right, but he’s kind of the only figure who is like, he’s never Trump, but he’s a real dyed in the world Republican.
Adam Kinzinger: Mm-hmm.
Chris Hayes: Like he’s not, there’s nothing, he just basically has the same politics I think he had in 2012, more or less. You know, they’re again, they’re not my politics. It’s because he’s so polarizing, like what you’ve seen at the voter level, right, is that the voters that are never Trumpers in places like your ex-district, have basically just become Biden voters and Democrats, more or less.
Adam Kinzinger: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I mean, you see this with abortion, really, right?
Adam Kinzinger: Mm-hmm.
Chris Hayes: These are people that, there’s a huge chunk of people who are kind of anti-Trump and also pro-life, who have become anti-Trump and also like not super psyched about the road decision and are voting. We’re seeing this, you know, the way they’re voting, they are tending towards the Democratic camp. So, I wonder like that swath of sort of, for lack of a better word, suburban Kinzinger Republicans, where do you see them going? What do you see? What trajectory do you think, like the folks in your old district, et cetera?
Adam Kinzinger: Well, I think the trajectory I’d like to see, that I think ultimately happens is either there is a thriving kind of moderate to conservative democratic faction that could actually, I mean, for instance, you want to win Texas, you’re probably got to put up a fairly conservative Democrat to win state-wide in Texas.
Chris Hayes: Mm-hmm.
Adam Kinzinger: I’d like to see that, or I’d like to see Republicans lose so much, so hard and so often that they wake up and say we actually need to be a big tent party. I wanna see for 2024, what I’m calling an uncomfortable alliance, you basically have one vote in ‘24. Do you support democracy or do you not support democracy? And no other issue in my mind matters than that.
And so I think you’re seeing these kind of, I’ll call them the Biden Republicans. And I’ll tell you a little of this stuff is, you grow up a hardcore Republican, thinking that the intentions of the left are bad intentions. And when you start to realize, when I start to see the left as the defenders of democracy, when I start to see the left as the defenders of Ukraine, for God’s sakes, the people that will actually take on Russia, it has softened my view of the left —
Chris Hayes: Hmm.
Adam Kinzinger: — because all of a sudden I’m like, their motivations are actually pretty good. They’re not bad people. And so that’s where things like voting rights, since I’ve been out of Congress, I’ve changed on voting rights because I’m like, you know what? Republicans actually are a threat to people’s right to vote. I didn’t see that when I was in.
Chris Hayes: That’s really interesting because what you’re describing in part is the sociological process of political coalition and ideological formation, right? And this feeling like you’re dealing with people in good faith or that you can trust them is a huge part of what all this is about. People are- always going to disagree. They disagree within factions. I mean isagreement is the engine of politics.
Adam Kinzinger: Mm-hmm.
Chris Hayes: It’s what politics is. The question of whether you really fear the other person’s intentions, if you feel like you can trust them, you can respect them, you could talk to them, that’s how sort of coalitions form. That’s a very interesting point of like, and I think I’ve seen this in the other direction when I talked to Jamie Raskin about you and Liz Cheney, who he just has incredible amounts of respect for.
Adam Kinzinger: Mm-hmm.
Chris Hayes: Because of the personal relationship and because working up close and feeling like I trust these people have the country’s interest at heart, even when I don’t agree with them.
Adam Kinzinger: Yes, it’s amazing. So like on the committee, I had always been friends with Adam Schiff, you know and —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Adam Kinzinger: — Raskin to an extent. But you sit there and all of a sudden, you’re both talking about the importance of democracy. You recognize that like, yes, Jamie Raskin is the smartest guy in the room. He’ll tell you that. But he means well and you realize like, Adam Schiff is actually pretty funny, right?
I dubbed him Adam Senior immediately, so that that’s what we refer to him in the committee, so I could be Adam Junior. And so there’s always that like, you’re having fun, you’re telling jokes. I’d always thought like the left, you couldn’t tell a slightly off-color joke because they’ll get all offended. It’s like, no, they’re funny too. Like everybody is funny.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Adam Kinzinger: And they’re good people. And I think if we could see that in a larger scale, and that’s actually a biggest threat to somebody like Donald Trump who takes huge advantage of making the other side be an inhuman enemy, and that’s frightening.
Chris Hayes: Let me ask you this sort of final look forward on 2024. You say there’s one vote, which I sort of agree with, one defining issue here. One thing that I take solace in is, it’s been hard to replicate the political success of Trump without Trump. That people that have tried to do it have largely failed and particularly failed when they’re dealing in contested environments. And Trump himself failed in 2020 —
Adam Kinzinger: Mm-hmm.
Chris Hayes: — quite famously. That this idea that like, you don’t have to worry that like somehow there’s some political advantage to being like a jerk, which is a very strange political insight that a lot of people seem to share right now, but doesn’t really scan to me.
Adam Kinzinger: Right.
Chris Hayes: I mean like I communicate publicly for a living and like, I try to be likable. Yes, this doesn’t do me any good if people think I’m an asshole. Like —
Adam Kinzinger: Mm-hmm.
Chris Hayes: — why would I want them to think that?
Adam Kinzinger: Mm-hmm.
Chris Hayes: That the results in 2022 and the fact that this has been a hard to replicate model says something deep and hopeful about the American public. And what do you think of that?
Adam Kinzinger: I really agree with you. I mean take how controversial of a figure I am now, I can only count maybe once or twice, even in the last three years, that anybody has kind of confronted me in public, right? I had one guy sit down next to me. The one time I didn’t have a security guy with me at the airport, sat down next to me and he’s like, oh, you’re doing great on the committee. I’m like, thank you. And he goes, but you don’t really believe that, right, and you know. But people in person are still friendly.
They still treat them, so they still do that well. I think the other thing I take solace in, and I would have said this something differently three months ago, is Ron DeSantis has collapsed, right? Nikki Haley is gaining a little steam, and I disagree with a lot of some of the things she says, but she’s trying to be a little more optimistic. But Vivek Ramaswamy was the one I was watching and afraid of because this guy is nothing but a pure charlatan. Everybody knows it.
And I’m like, man, if he doesn’t have a ceiling, this is showing the model works. And I think he has a ceiling. And so my hope is that when Donald Trump is no longer around, whatever that looks like, that his movement dies with him too. But that takes actual effort and actual work to get there too. And I don’t think that’s a natural thing. And I’ll say just kind of lastly on that, Donald Trump, I don’t think ever intended to be president. He’s like, I’m gonna go run.
Chris Hayes: No.
Adam Kinzinger: I’m gonna be a jerk. and I’m going to become more famous for it. And he happened to get in front of a wave that people didn’t see, which was the country wanted somebody to break the system. And he was that guy. I think there’s a feeling out there that’s really deep, that we don’t know it and you won’t know it until political scientists can look back and say it happened, there’s a sense of somebody to come along and heal the country, I believe.
And when that right person comes along, everybody will be like, oh yeah, why didn’t we see that out there in the first place? That’s my optimistic hope, that that’s out there because we’ve just been running our engines on redline too long.
Chris Hayes: Adam Kinzinger served as a Republican in the House of Representatives from 2011 to January 2023, representing Illinois’s 16th Congressional District. I really enjoyed that, Adam. Thank you very much.
Adam Kinzinger: Yes, that was great. Thank you.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Adam Kinzinger. The book is called Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country. It’s that time of the year when we’re gearing up for our WITHpod holiday mailbag episode. Send over your thoughts, feedback to withpod@gmail.com. We’ll try to get as many of your comments and questions as possible. Again, the email is withpod@ gmail.com. You can also get in touch with us on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, using the hashtag withpod, search for WITHpod on TikTok. Find me at @chrislhayes on threads and BlueSky.
“Why Is This Happening” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. Engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to mbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?