There’s no room in the GOP anymore for Adam Kinzinger, who burned MAGA bridges by daring to hold Pres. Trump accountable for the January 6 th insurrection. But within a potential Kamala Harris administration? Maybe so.
The vice president recently pledged, if elected, to appoint at least one Republican to her cabinet. In an interview with Deadline at the Toronto International Film Festival, the former Congressman from Illinois said if offered a position, he would accept. “Certainly, yeah,” he told us.
“I mean, look, there’s no greater honor than serving an administration. And obviously I’ve supported Kamala, I’m endorsing her.” Kinzinger is the focus of the documentary The Last Republican , which held its world premiere at TIFF on Saturday.
He came by our Toronto studio with director Steve Pink, a Hollywood filmmaker (and ardent progressive) best known for directing Hot Tub Time Machine . Kinzinger was approached by many suitors hoping to tell his story after he famously served on the January 6 th Congressional investigating committee; he chose Pink because of that much-loved 2010 time-traveling comedy. “It was just at my squadron [in the Air National Guard], we always quote Hot Tub Time Machine ,” Kinzinger said.
“And when I found out that he directed and wrote Hot Tub Time Machine , I was like, all right, we’ll do this.” Pink had to reckon with the chasm that separates him from his protagonist in terms of their political philosophies. “Adam did something really courageous, something I admired at a time when our country’s in crisis and I had to marry those things in my head,” Pink explained.
“I had to kind get past my own politics so that I could dive in and tell that story.” Pink offered his own endorsement of Kinzinger joining the Harris administration, should she win in November. “I’m down.
Of course I would, because he would realize the wisdom of our party,” Pink joked. “He would realize that us progressives and Democrats had it right all along. I hate saying this in front of you, but Adam’s a great human being, and you want leaders who are great human beings.
” Continuing in that more serious vein, he said, “Finding leaders who you can trust, and even if you disagree with them politically — which clearly we do, and Adam would have a lot of opposing views, even obviously with a Harris administration — but he can be a voice in the room that speaks to millions and millions of people who hold his views. And I think that’s important.” We asked Kinzinger for his prediction on the presidential election.
“It’s literally a coin toss,” he said. “I think if you’d asked me two months ago [before Joe Biden got out of the race], unfortunately I would’ve said 90 percent chance it’s Donald Trump. I think it’s a coin toss.
If I had to bet all my money on one side, agnostically, I would say it’s going to be Kamala. And I think that would obviously be great for the country. I think it would be great to destroy the cancer that exists in the Republican Party, but I think we need to be careful.
A Democrat has to win the popular vote by 3 or 4 percent to win the Electoral College. It’s a structural disadvantage.” In the documentary, an acquisition title at TIFF, Kinzinger says he declined to run for re-election in 2022 knowing he could not win a primary as an anti-Trump Republican (Rep.
Liz Cheney, Kinzinger’s fellow Republican on the January 6 th committee, lost her primary against a Trump acolyte in 2022 by a wide margin). These days, Kinzinger gets a lot of love from Democrats – although he’s still a conservative – but the MAGA wing of the Republican Party has turned on him with ugly ferocity. Check out social media and it won’t take a moment to see the level of hatred he gets from Trump supporters.
The film contains audio of numerous people threatening to kill him. “The thing is the death threats weren’t just against me. I can take that.
They were against my wife, against ultimately when my kid was born, against him,” he said. [His son Christian is two-a-half]. “What I see is like, okay, this is a brain rot.
This is not what we think of when we think of good humans. Something is going on here. They’re obviously being programmed or being angered.
And that’s why it’s so important to do the right thing and hope that history judges correctly because that means we ultimately would’ve won.” Watch the full conversation in the video above. Deadline Studio at TIFF is sponsored by Final Draft.
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