Adam Kinzinger: Renegade

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. It is Halloween, and you don’t need me to tell you that it’s pretty scary out there. So we are joined by Adam Kinzinger, former congressman in Illinois, whose new book, Renegade, defending democracy and liberty in our divided country is out today. So first of all, Adam, Thank you for making the time to be with us because I see that you’re pretty much everywhere this week.

Yeah. But, you know, what? The Bulwark podcast with Charlie Sykes? I mean, who couldn’t be there? Plus now that I get to see you, it’s like a it’s handsome overwhelming.

Well, there are a lot of things we need to talk. We need to talk about, the new fifth string speaker. We need to talk about, the war in the Middle East. We need to talk about your critique of politics, but what I really was struck by about your book. Let me give you my my short review.

What I really appreciated was how raw it was, how personal it was, and how open you were about the transition. You had bought into a lot of this and are admitting that you were part of this as I was. And you had a very interesting sound bite yesterday. I wanna just play this. You were on CNN where you’re a contributor now.

With Anderson Cooper, and you told this little story. Listen to this.

So I had family that sent a certified letter disowning me. They said, I’ve lost the trust of great men like Sean Hannity, just funny, but they believe that. Okay. So talk to me about that, Adam.

Because I think what a lot of people forget is that people who became renegades in the Republican Party, it wasn’t just a political matter that there was a personal cost, and you had your own tell me about this. You had your own family send you a certified letter.

Yeah. I mean, you know, we talk about brain worms. This is brain worms. So, like, you know, I lived in Shannon, Illinois, and I would go down and visit my folks in Bloomington, maybe once a month. Right?

So I I go down on this once a month journey, and it happens to be the time that my dad’s basically his kind of cousins, big, a big group of them This certified letter shows up to me, to my parents’ house. I’m like, oh, okay. Well, interesting. Good time. And I start reading it.

And The first two words were Oh my, and I was, you know, naive enough to think they were gonna be like, oh my, how brave you have been. And it says, Oh, my, what a disappointment you are to us and to god. That was how it opened. Mhmm. And then it just went on.

You’ve lost the trust of great men, like, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and like a few others in there. And I’m like, you know, if you ever wonder if it’s a cult, All you have to do is just look at what is the thing that they are upset at me about, and it wasn’t much about principle. It was all about losing the trust of great men like Sean Amity. And Yeah. You know, I laugh about it because to me it is just so ridiculous, but since I got out of Congress, you know, I use the analogy of nobody has PTSD while they’re in combat.

It’s when you’re out. And it’s it’s been kind of coming to grips with the impact that’s had. And, you know, things like my co pilot in Iraq, you know, one of the guys I should be the closest with, sending me a text a year ago that says, he’s ashamed to have ever flown with me and ever served with.

Really? Why? Yeah. Why? Because I don’t

know, because I told him the truth about January sixth or or I’m not in this cult. And, yeah, I mean, it’s a it’s a real impact. I wasn’t even the one that released that letter, by the way. She’s so crazy that the one that led that that she released it. Somehow thinking it would turn people, but I say that because everybody’s got a story like this.

And and I’m sure Thanksgiving’s gonna have even more.

Yeah. Exactly. Let me read you a passage from your book. This is actually from the introduction when I was talking about that it was kind of raw. This is what I was thinking of when I first read the book.

You’re right. I feel some responsibility for January six and the rise of Marjorie Taylor Green and her ilk if only because I was a participant in and with to the GOP’s gradual descent into a dysfunctional and destructive force in our politics, intoxicated by my status, and addicted to the level of attention I made compromises to, let’s face it, feed my ego, and sense of importance The correction I made is I embraced my inner renegade and voted to impeach a president of my own party came late, but it did arrive. Now this is one of the things about politics that I think that people don’t fully understand, which is just the role of status and ego. I mean, I remember years ago, reading John Dean’s book where he was talking about how, you know, in the Nixon White House, how he, you know, got sucked in. And he tells the story of being on an airplane.

And when the airplane lands to the secret service or the marshals come on, as a mister Dean, you know, we wanna, you know, have you come out first because you’re such an important guy, and that goes to your head. So this is part of it because as people are trying to figure out, why do people make these compromise. So talk to me about that passage because that’s pretty personal that you actually say I was part of this, and I made these compromises because I wanted to stay important.

I think it’s essential because if you look at let’s let’s take somebody like, Elise Defonic, okay, who was Yes. This Sarah Longwell of normalcy, this, you know, icon of in the ilk of Paul Ryan. And literally, she wasn’t one of those that took few years to change. She literally on a dime. And I think it was the impeach, the first impeachment or something.

She came out in defense of Donald Trump. And I think she legitimately believed her defense, but then she got all kinds of accolades from the people she desperately wanted it from. And realized all of a sudden, oh, I can be famous this way, and she is. I mean, she’s arguably considered for vice president. And so you know, from my experience, it was like, so twenty eleven, you know, I go on I’m on Face the Nation as a freshman.

My goodness. I go on Fox News. I was on Greta van susteren show every Monday for, I think, a period of about six months to a year. And every time you, you know, take your earpiece off, take the mic, shake the hand of the host and walk out. The first thing you do is pull out your cell phone because it’s been buzzed the whole time, and it’s all your friends telling you how great you are and how awesome it was to see you.

And then The first time you get recognized at the airport and somebody wants to get their picture taken with you. It’s all very intoxicating. It’s like a drug. Right? It’s like It’s like nicotine.

You want you take a little. You want more. You want more. And it’s only when you can recognize that and break with it. And all of a sudden, say that you’re soul is more important and your legacy is more important than that.

Can you recognize it? But I think too many people have instead said my legacy has to be the fame. And can’t think of myself without it. So it’s, yeah, it’s a very raw and and very human admission, but I think it’s one that frankly affects almost anybody in politics, whether they admit it or not.

And yet, you’re more famous now than ever.

Yeah. Kind of unintentionally. Yeah.

Unintentionally having lost, you know, members of your family and their respective. So what was breaking point for you. You were a conservative Christian who ran because you were inspired by Ronald Reagan. You were, you know, very much in that tradition. I mean, you go back to twenty eleven, and you were one of that class of twenty ten.

Right? I mean, you were comfortable with the tea party. You were comfortable with Christian conservatives, you thought of yourself as being very much part of the mainstream. What was the moment you said? I’m willing to break with that.

I’m not gonna be part of that. I’m going to give all that up.

So it was interesting. So throughout kind of the whole, let’s say, twenty eleven I guess, twenty ten, including the campaign to twenty sixteen. You know, I was always fighting the fight against the, what, Bainer called the exotic like, you know, at the time, he was like, speaking and, you know, the few people, but we were we were generally winning that battle. Right? So I was engaged in that battle.

It was when Donald Trump came along. It’s something I actually just realized today. And I talked about in the in the book how I went to this republican retreat and got pretty hammered one night. And I came to realize the reason mainly that that happened is I guess this is when I started the break and I’ll get to the full break, but, you know, Donald Trump gets elected. We all go to Philadelphia.

Republican members of Congress for this like retreat. And I start seeing my friends and people that I respected that went from a week ago being really concerned with Donald Trump being president. To being enthused that he was president. Oh my gosh. This is great.

We can do this. He’s awesome.

Genuinely enthused, not just pretending to be enthused. It may be internalized. Okay.

Yes. They internalized it, and they, you know, they they came to grips with he’s there, and now we can do all this big stuff. And I may have a chance at power. That’s when I started to realize, like, this is gonna be dangerous. Now, I don’t think, by the way, any of those actually believe, for instance, the election was truly stolen.

But some of them got really deep. I mean, look at somebody like a Billy Long, for instance, he was pretty moderate that ended up, you know, being one of Donald Trump’s biggest fans begging for his support. But the official break, you know, I didn’t vote for Trump in sixty, and I voted for him in twenty, which is weird. I’m the only person in the country that did that. And the big break obviously was January sixth or actually it was that election.

And that night when Donald Trump tweeted something like stop the vote. Stop the voting. This is being stolen. And he said that night, frankly, this is being stolen. Because the thing that struck me is I realize how fragile democracies are, and the only thing you need for it to survive It’s just like a basic level of trust in the electoral system.

That’s it. Everything else you can disagree on. When you destroy that, it’s gone.

Yeah. But you knew who Donald Trump was before that. Right? So you had voted against him in twenty sixteen. You took a lot of shit for that.

A lot.

We voted against the first impeachment. So all along, you knew who Donald Trump was. So talk to me about the compromises you had to make. What was going on in your mind? You’re thinking this guy is a complete disaster.

And yet, this is my team Yeah. You say at one point, you had gotten so much crap for voting against him in twenty sixteen. You didn’t wanna go through that again.

Yeah. That’s the whole reason I voted for him in twenty twenty. It was I didn’t think he’d be a good president, you know. I obviously knew he wasn’t a good president. I knew what he had done with Vladimir Putin.

I I could kinda put Sab on that wound a little bit to myself by saying, well, you know, when he said Putin was great, I spoke out against it. I spoke out when he retweeted you know, pastor Jefferies about civil war. But I have to come to grips with the fact that, yeah, speaking out’s important, but ultimately, I did enable him. You know, to a certain point. And how do you justify it?

Well, again, you look back and say, well, I did speak out against him. This is my team. If I do something too big now, I’m not gonna win. Somebody worse is gonna replace me. You go through all of that stuff, and then ultimately it comes down to I still wanted to be a US congressman, and I knew what it took.

I knew that I had to win a Republican primary in Illinois sixteenth district, but There was definitely that point then when it’s like, you know, when I got back from my rack and started to run, I said, if we’re gonna ask young people to be willing to die for this country, I have to be willing to give my wife, you know, for existential things too. And I I’ve jokingly said I thought it would be like a vote on social security reform. Not necessarily democracy, but it got to that point where I just said, I cannot be because I don’t make a commitment to any of the seven hundred thousand people I represent. The only commitment I make to the constitution. That’s it.

Let’s just stick with this period of time. So you vote for him in twenty twenty, but by January, February of twenty twenty one, you are voting to impeach him. And we were one of ten Republicans in the house, along with Lee Cheney and others, who voted to impeach him. Did you think that vote was going to cost you your seat? Did you, like, wake up and you say, okay, I’m gonna strap this on me and I’m gonna blow myself up or not?

What do you think?

I guess I didn’t fully know yet if it would cost my seat because I, you know, I I guess I was still optimistic enough to believe that a January sixth would take this guy down. Right? I mean, there was a part of me that thought you know, maybe I’m kind of leading this new Republican party now, leading the charge against, you know, what we used to be, but I also knew that This was not the safe thing to do, but I knew this was the thing that was worth it. And I think I’ve said with you before the day before the impeachment I thought we’d hit twenty five. You know, people like Mike Gallagher who were

in Wisconsin.

Yeah. Mike Gallagher from Wisconsin, even Nancy Mace was gonna be a yes. And then they started to express to me their concern about reelection. And that’s when I knew I was excited to get ten at that point. So I guess in a way I did know it would cost me.

I but I remember Fred Ron DeSantis telling me shortly after that that he thought Trump was gonna run again and I thought he was insane. I’m like, there’s no I mean, come on, you know, this guy did a January sixth.

This is interesting because every once in a while, we encounter people on the other side of the aisle. Will say, well, this was all inevitable. Nothing surprising about this at all. But the reality is that for a lot of Republicans, they did think maybe they didn’t have to vote for impeachment because surely this was it for Donald Trump. Right?

So Yeah. How surprising is it? I mean, you watched up close and personal. How surprising is it to have watched what has happened? We could go back to twenty fifteen, what’s happened to the Conservative Movement and the Republican Party.

But let’s just focus on this Since January seventh two thousand twenty one, the decision that Kevin McCarthy made, decision that Elise Tefonic made, the decision that one Republican after another has made the fact that Mike Pence was dead on arrival because the one courageous thing that he did became the unforgivable sin. Because I think that even the Ron DeSantis of the world are kinda looking around going, are you kidding me after January six, after all of the indictments The guy is still dominant in this party. He is still the Apex predator. I mean, how amazing is this?

It is amazing. And I think, look, It’s amazing because I know these people. Yeah. You know, let’s take Mitch McConnell who I think in as hard as a decent guy. I think he means well.

He’s a tactician. And I think he thought, boy, the best thing I can do is not remove Donald Trump because he’s gone anyway. I can preserve my majority’s dead anyway. You know, but he’s the reason that Donald Trump didn’t get removed. Right?

It’s all these decisions that were made. The person that surprised me the most Charlie Sykes still Kevin McCarthy because I mean, his big thing was he wanted to put the Republican Party on the map for climate change. He wanted the Republican Party to be the party of Silicon Valley. Like, he had all these, like, kind of, you know, progressive politically, not actually progressive, but progressive politically ideas and then he sold it all out for Trump. And the biggest surprise of course is when he showed up to Mar a lago and resurrected him.

Yeah. Like on the run to San decide when he started running, I think he said, I’m gonna be Donald Trump because Donald Trump’s gonna be gone, but I can maintain that thing people love about him. Right. But he doesn’t go away. And part of the reason Charlie Sykes because the second tier influencers, which is everybody that’s on the stage running for president of the United States, is who people also look to for opinions.

And when every one of them including Mike Pence, by the way, says that this is a witch hunt against Donald Trump and the DOJ is a two tiered system of justice with the exception of Chris Charlie Sykes saying that. There’s no doubt people are gonna believe it then because everybody else they trust is saying the same thing Trump.

You opened the book in the introduction with the fiasco of Kevin McCarthy’s rise to the speakership, the fact that it took the fifteen votes, the fact that he made to make these compromises with all of the crazies. And between the time you wrote that, and now, of course, we’ve seen the spectacular fall of Kevin McCarthy, which in so many ways was foreordained. Right? I mean, it was predictable from the weakness. So You watched Kevin McCarthy make those compromises decide to go down and kiss the ring at Mar a lago because he thought that was going to save him.

That was going to give him the majority and Here we are today. I mean, we’ve gone from what we thought was the dysfunction of the fifteen ballots for Kevin McCarthy. And now we have the fifth string speaker who you’ve described as Jim Jordan and Drag, who is clearly still Matt Gates’s bitch. Right? Full throated election denier.

Somebody I mean, you sat on the January sixth committee. Here is somebody who was right front and center in Donald Trump’s attempts to overthrow the election. So we thought things were bad, and and the Kevin McCarthy was weak. And now we’ve gone to the fifth string, Mike Johnson. How did we get here?

Who’s the most powerful person in a room? So let’s say you put ten of us in a room, everybody has a hand grenade. Okay? We’re all equally powerful. If one person is willing to pull the pen and drop the grenade, they’re the most powerful person in the room.

Right? It doesn’t matter how tall you are, doesn’t matter how much political power you’ve had. And that’s what we have enabled in the Republican Party for a long time. The stuff that we saw with this battle for speaker None of it was new. None of the dynamics were new.

They were always kind of the we’ll call them the moderates. They’re not moderate, but they’re monitored in in tone. The moderates. There was always the crazy caucus and then the kinda eighty percent that just wanted to just survive. That’s always existed.

The difference is now it was put out in public. When Kevin had to cut because he had such a narrow majority, he had to cut all those things. He basically got in a room with everybody that pulled the pin on a grenade. And and they all had different goals. And he said, okay.

If you put the pins back, you know, whatever. And then, so his political death was inevitable, then The fact that we got to a point where the only way you would be a even viable candidate for speaker was to deny the election.

Wait.

And that was split screen on the news with Jenna Ellis tearfully speaking the fact that she lied to the American people about the very same thing. The fact that there were like four people that have already taken plea agreements, the fact that everybody knows Donald Trump is guilty But yet, the thing that only thing that could qualify you for speaker to start is that you basically were contradicting what these people were confessing to. That’s the moment we’re in. So Mike Johnson, and this is like, I think I kind of predicted this when his name was floated was very impressed the moderates pushed back against Jordan because I thought they would capitulate. They they helped, but I knew they couldn’t do it for

five minutes. Yeah.

They held for five minutes. He couldn’t do it twice. Mike Johnson, by the way. I remember. I didn’t know him well, but I remember him coming up to me trying to get me to sign on.

Had this lawsuit, you know, for Texas. And I’m just like, Mike.

The totally bogus Texas lawsuit that would have thrown out all of the votes of everybody in Wisconsin, for example.

Yep. And and by the way, a little known fact about that, Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney had a conversation. And Liz is like Kevin. You’re not signing that right. He’s like, oh, of course not Liz.

That’s crazy. So the next day, the list comes out. Kevin’s not on it. And he puts out a press release that says I was inadvertently left off. That’s the kind of courage Kevin McCarthy had, by the way.

Yeah. I am their leader. Those are my people. I need to go after them. So Mike Johnson, one of his first things that he’s doing is, and I wanna get back to the bigger picture, but I know you had some thoughts on this.

So the question, what kind of a speaker he would be He’s made it clear that he will, you know, not vote on Ukraine aid and his the Israel aid package. He’s decoupling those two aid packages, but He’s also playing this stupid game now with the Israel aid package, at least this morning, saying that he wants to offset the cost by slashing IRS enforcement, which would actually increase the deficit. What do you think about that?

So first off, on just the splitting the aid, if dumb and I think Mike is trying to figure out how to lean now at the same time because he’s kinda given multiple feelings on this. But on the Israel stuff, he’s actually tactically, I think this is dumb, just tactically because it’s gonna give an excuse for the senate to vote no. And I would have voted no on package you by the way.

Really?

They’ll vote no, and now they’ll be able to jam the house with, you know, what frankly needs to be done, which is Ukraine and Israel. And this is just This is par for the course. It actually does surprise me though a little bit because I would have thought that they would have done at least Israel without any offsets the fact that they’re right setting with the IRS. What it goes to show Charlie Sykes how unserious they are because why? It’s the IRS.

Of course, because you can go on Fox News and attack the IRS. That’s why they’re using it.

It’s a great talking point.

Yeah. That’s all it is.

And I wrote about this in my newsletter. The unseriousness is that it’s a great talking point for the base, but it doesn’t actually offset the cost. They pick the one spending cut that will actually blow up the debit by thirty billion dollars. Okay. Yeah.

So let’s take a deep breath and go back because your book is a memoir of how you got here your personal story. It is a great read. But what I think is also interesting as I said right at the beginning is is the confessional. And, of course, you know, you know that there are people of the progressives who say, you know, where’s the apology? Where’s the acknowledgement of complicity?

Well, you do that. In the book, you do write that you feel some responsibility for people like Marjorie Taylor, Green, because you didn’t fight the good fight the whole time. You’re right that you didn’t traffic and hate, but you do say that you were part of the system that did. Talk to me about that because I think a lot of people, and I would certainly put myself in this category, You knew this stuff was going on over there, but you figured, you know, why make an issue of it? Their allies, that’s the crazy uncle in the corner and we didn’t confront the extremists and the biggest.

Yeah. That’s exactly right. Because, you know, to an extent, it was this idea of it’s coalition. Right? Yeah.

We’re gonna have the crazies, the bigots, the extremists, they’re voting republican. They’re gonna vote for me in the primary maybe, and they’re gonna vote for me in the general election. So You know, if somebody says something that’s, I don’t know, racist or insane, instead of pushing back like John McCain did, for instance, when a lady called Obama Muslim, just kind of chuckle or shake your head or just say, like, I’ll look into that. I mean, that was the favorite one. It’s like, hey, did you know that, you know, the UN’s gonna kill all Christians.

It’s like, oh, really. I didn’t know how to look into that. Right? And you look at, like, do I consider myself pushing those theories? No.

But could I push back harder? Yes. Could I have, you know, gone on Fox News specifically for a hit saying that Jade Helm, which was this conspiracy theory in twenty fifteen, that Obama was gonna take over Texas that it was false. I could have. Did I do that?

No. Because I only wanted to go on Fox News for hits that actually the Fox News viewers would like. And so, yeah, all of that comes into play.

Yeah. No. I mean, I remember that as well. We, you know, we laughed at it. We rolled our eyes, but, like, why spend any time?

Because you don’t have to worry about that. Right? And we wanna come back to this because I keep thinking about all the times that we should have pushed back against that, but but we rationalize not doing it. We would tell ourselves it’s just a small number of people. It’s not that important.

And so you spent a lot of your time growing up in rural Illinois. And One of the great stories of our time has been this dramatic shift of rural voters from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party or more public. And give me some sense of what is going on because you write about this in the book that, you know, across the Midwest, places like West Virginia, what happened after twenty o eight during the the great recession, the opioid epidemic, what happened?

You know, first off, you can start with the nineties with the disappearance of manufacturing. Right? And of course, the Midwest where you and I are from heavy manufacturing area, and it’s actually made a pretty significant comeback, but still, you know, it’s it’s taken some damage compared to what it was. And and you have a lot of people in their fifties that were trained in the manufacturing that you know, lose their jobs and they’re they’re almost too old to go retrain or they think they’re too old to go retrain. And society seems to kind of push on the side and Yeah.

We can give them unemployment benefits and but that doesn’t make you feel like a useful person. And so people were turning the drugs. Right? That’s why you had a huge opioid epidemic, particularly in places like West Virginia and the Midwest. And then all of a sudden, the economy collapses and probably rightfully, you know, that you had to bail out the banks to keep the financial institution alive, but the perception also rightfully was that you know, Washington only cared about the big banks and not the little person.

And so there was this growing resentment plus the fact that any of the media you watched portrayed Christians, for instance, as, you know, crazy people or out of touch or superstitious and betrayed the, you know, the values of San Francisco or New York city. And so Donald Trump comes along, and I guess the saddest thing is he’s the biggest con artist of all of them of anything. But he comes along and he knows enough in your words in his lizard brain to put words to that angst people are feeling. So he tells West Virginia, we’re gonna put you back in the coal business. Which of course he never did.

We’re gonna return your factories. These people over there, they suck. And he put a voice to that, and that’s why I think you’ve seen this massive shift. I mean, I have an uncle that used to kinda brag that he would vote democratic sometimes. It’s now one of Trump’s biggest supporters because he just put voice to that.

And that’s what I think of big things that happen.

This is an important point because, you know, and, again, you you’re right about this. You know, these people felt unheard They didn’t see themselves portrayed. They thought they were being looked down upon. And the people were looking for somebody with an inspirational message. So these were people who looked at Ronald Reagan, looked at Barack Obama, who addressed their isolation.

They felt they were heard by them. But you’re right. What they got was a person who turned that isolation into hate. And Trump gave people a license to say racist things, anti immigrant things, anti semitic things, He basically also said, you are not responsible for this. He came up with, and again, this is the there’s a long history to this saying, you know, blame these people.

It’s the immigrants. It’s those people. And somehow that connected the Democrats look at this and they go, well, hold on. Hold on. These are people who, you know, voted for, you know, FDR who voted for Lyndon Johnson who voted for John Kennedy and Harry Truman, and they voted for Barack Obama.

Why are they not listening to us right now? We are the party of the working class and the little man And yet, that’s not the way it played out in the Midwest. And my sense is there are still a lot of Democrats that don’t understand this.

I there are. There are because And I don’t know where the shift happened, but at some point, the Democrats went from think of like a Bill Clinton who basically spoke blue collar language to where we are today. And look, Democrats get upset at me for saying this if you want. You don’t speak blue collar.

Joe Biden speaks blue collar. Right?

Yeah. He does. He does. And, you know, his he’s up against the fact that again, some people are willing to use the fire of anger that he’s not willing to use. And if Joe Biden decided, which he wouldn’t because I don’t the soul would allow it to become anti immigrant and blame the Mexicans, maybe he’d gain some ground among this.

Or if he had the ability, which I think is is tough for him. Maybe it’s advanced age. Maybe it’s just not natural to basically inspire in saying, you know, a different thing, then that’s possible. But when you have a party that they don’t necessarily embrace it, but they tolerate to leave, for instance, blaming Israel for bombing in Gaza when it’s completely untrue. Yeah.

You know, this, defum the police get mad at me for it, but there still is a option that the democratic party is against funding the police. That’s not my problem. That’s a democratic problem. That’s something that’s very important to the middle class voters in areas where you and I come from. And the other thing is just look, everybody in their heart has a battle daily between like light and dark.

Right? And it’s easy to let darkness overtake you. And when a man stands in front of you and whispers the dark parts of your heart and gives you permission to use those dark parts of your heart, it overtakes. And that’s what’s happening.

So you had an event in New York, and you’re there in by the way, you’re a family man. This is great. This is reality, by the way. Yeah. This is reality.

I have a dog here. You have, you know, because you’re a you’re a young dad. So let’s talk about the tea party because this is fascinating to me the way the tea party has morphed on the role that it played. You said in New York, the tea party had been the weird table at GOP events, but now the more extreme you can be has become the essence of how republicans show themselves to be conservative now. It’s not what you believe.

It’s become about being the craziest person in the room, the most extreme person in the room. So, for example, on the abortion issue. Well, you know, on abortion ban at fifteen weeks, no. You have to say on abortion ban at six weeks. So the tea party, I thought the tea party was a legit thing in the beginning.

It was interesting to watch how it became a grift, how it became extreme. And it became about something completely different than we thought it was about. Right?

It did. So, you know, the first tea party event I went to was in New Linux, Illinois, and there were eight or ten thousand people that showed up. So you think about that. What were those eight or ten thousand people? They were folks that were upset with Obamacare.

They were upset with government spending. They were basically Republicans. I mean, that’s just what they it was just a large group of Republicans that that were having their voice heard. And when the GOP won the majority. The vast majority of them said, okay, we did our job and they went home.

The problem is these organizations that were formed continued. And so I would go to tea party meetings after that that would have a thousand and then five hundred. And then it would end up like twenty people there. And what you had was this pairing down of the normals to the extremes that finally for the first time had a, you know, what they felt like people were paying attention to them and their crazy ideas and that became the tea party. Look, I was considered a tea party darling in twenty ten.

I never once and I even proactively push back against the idea of voting against increasing the debt limit. I said, no. Of course, you have to increase the debt limit. Everybody’s go, okay. Yeah.

That makes sense. Can you imagine saying that in front of a tea party now? And it just goes to show how it evolved from just normal kind of upset conservatives to what it is today.

I remember it is in real time watching this, and I know that it’ll be listeners who will be saying, oh, this was all astroturfing. It was all the Koch brothers or whatever. Maybe eventually it became that, but it starts off as a movement, and then it becomes this racket. I think there’s a famous quote about this, and it became this organized that was dominated by the extremists, which in many ways followed the trajectory of the Republican Party. I remember how the tea party expressed for about five minutes was actually anti Donald Trump because they kind of recognized that he had nothing to do with what they were talking about.

He was not interested in fiscal responsibility. He was the king of debt and everything. But, of course, like everybody else, they flipped. They flipped the switch. They became something else because The script demanded.

We don’t actually care about entitlements or about deficits or about debt. We care about who’s going to give us these dopamine hits. And so much of the media and so much of the organized Republican Party and the ecosystem around it became. Right? It became more and more intense, more performative.

And by the way, with dopamine hits comes money. Right? Because if you can if you can tickle that zone, people will write you a check. If you can make them fear for the life, they’ll write you a check and politics has become Hollywood not just in the fact that people can become famous now and well known. It’s become Hollywood and that it is a high profit business.

You know, it used to be you’d raise enough money. I think in my first campaign, I I’ve raised and it’s been a million and a half bucks. That wouldn’t get you through a state house race in Illinois now. Because money has become That was

a lot of money.

Yeah. It was a lot of money then. And so with the tea party, they claim that they’re about fiscal conservatism. And then all of a sudden, everybody’s getting into this cult and loving what this guy is saying. And then it’s like, oh, that’s how we can raise the cash.

I sat in the Oval office and heard Donald Trump say. Yeah. We have to, you know, reform entitlements and reform Social Security next term. And I remember thinking myself, that’s gonna last to his very first speech when he sees the blue hairs in the crowd and just says to them, oh, I’m never gonna touch your social security. And Charlie Sykes, that’s exactly what happened.

Because he didn’t care about ideas.

Let’s look ahead. Is our system prepared for what’s going to happen in twenty twenty four? I know you’ve given a lot of thought to this. We now know that Speaker Mike Johnson is gonna be presiding over the certification of the twenty twenty four election. We know what the passions are going to be, the trials, everything.

You know, this is the ultimate stress test for democracy, isn’t it?

It is. I look forward to twenty twenty eight and say I think it’s gonna be an amazing election cycle because there’s gonna have all new faces and all new energy. This one I worry about. And, you know, we can have these guardrails in democracy, you know, like often interstate, for instance, and your car can hit guardrails and stay on the bridge and not fall into the river. If a second car comes along and hits that same guardrail, it’s gonna take it off the road and you’re gonna fall into the river.

And the problem is is now, Trump and the Trump type folks have learned where the weaknesses are in the system. They accidentally tested system. I think intentionally tested it, but accidentally tested the weak points in twenty twenty. And I think now they’re gonna know exactly where the weak points are. You know, Charlie, if anybody thinks that Donald Trump can’t win, I’ve heard a lot of people that just kind of scoff when I say take him seriously.

If they think he can’t win, listen, he can win again. Nobody thought he could win in twenty sixteen. And I’m gonna tell you if he does get through and he wins this time, He’s gonna interview a hundred candidates for attorney general and only take the one that says, like, mister president, in essence, I don’t care what the constitution is. I’m gonna do whatever you want as your servant in the Department of Justice. That person is gonna get selected to be attorney general.

And we’re gonna find a system that is stressed beyond what even the founding fathers imagined it could be stressed to.

Who’s he gonna pick for a vice president? Do you think?

You know, it’s gonna be somebody like a Christy gnome or an Elise Stefanick, I think. I think Nancy Mace is auditioning for

Yeah. She’s too. Yeah.

I think it’s gonna be somebody that probably female and somebody that shows an absolute loyalty to him no matter what. And fortunately, there’s a huge list of people.

Yeah. I I wouldn’t be shocked if it was Elise Defonic. Okay. So where are you now? Adam, you’ve spent your whole political career as a conservative Republican.

You’ve broken with your party. Talk to me about being out in the political wilderness because there are some folks who feel that, okay, if you break with Trump, you now must become a liberal democrat. Where are you? How do you describe yourself?

Oh, well, I would consider myself politically the same kind of, I’d say center right, you know, moderate on some things conservative on others that I’ve always been. I’ve I’ve had to come to peace with the fact that I don’t need to be a member of a tribe because neither tribe I feel like I’m fully represented by I’ve found new allies in the Democratic Party on the issue of democracy, but I also recognize that Democrats have to fight that fight within their party too because there’s some illiberal elements within it. So I don’t know. I just consider myself homeless. I’m maintaining the label of Republican because to me, I don’t wanna lose it.

I don’t wanna give it up. I think It’s important to maintain and to fight for, but I voted Democratic last election cycle. And if it’s Trump against Biden, I intend to vote Democratic again. Charlie, I think there’s only one thing on the ballot at least in my mind, which is do you support authoritarianism or democracy? And there’s only one party that supports democracy at the moment.

So tell me a little bit about country first, the organization you founded which backs pro democracy candidates. You you back pro democracy candidates who are both Republicans and Democrats at this point. How complicated is that?

It is complicated. But, you know, because it’s it violates how everybody’s thought of politics, but Our only requirement is that you put the country above the party, particularly if you’re called to do so at the cost of your own career. We’ve started an academy that basically because I get probably get this too. A lot of people come up and say, like, how do I start into journalism or how do I start into politics? I get that a lot.

How do I run for office? Yeah. And so we’re trying to teach people. Here’s what you have to do to run for office. Here’s the considerations.

We do really good at institutional democracy building overseas. And I’ve come to now realize we have to do that at home. So that’s what country first is trying to do is to be a democracy building organization at home, and I’d encourage people to go to country one s p dot com, the number one SD dot com, and, take a look at what we’re doing.

One last question of is I put this in my newsletter today and I expect to get a lot of reaction to it. You have your own sub stack newsletter, which you devoted today to a warning to Democrats. You say that that you have a problem, and it is the number of radicals who are pro Hamas. Now talk to me about this because this is kind of circling back because my my sense is reading that is that you’re remembering what we talked about earlier, which is our failure on the right to police our whack jobs, the extremists, the way we rationalize, they’re part of the coalition. They are our allies.

They’re not that important. And, you know, as a result, look where we’re at now. So tell me why you decided that you were gonna warn the Democrats. How serious a problem do they have with this? Because they will say, there’s no problem.

There’s no problem. We’re all behind Joe Biden on Israel.

You know, the number of democratic Jewish friends I have that I have sent some of these things that have been said by other Democrats too, they’re surprised. They’re not seeing them. For some reason. And, you know, what we went through, I remember being in Congress and having, you know, Dana Rohbacher be pro rush and thinking that was insane and people like, oh, that’s just Dana Rorbacher. And then, you know, some people come along and you get a, you know, Matt Gates kind of says something pro russian and like, god, And now I’d say over fifty percent of the party is at least Russian adjacent, a sympathetic.

That happened very quickly. And when under thirty years old of the self identified Democrats are expressing more support for Palestinians and Hamas than they are in Israel. That’s a problem. That’s a ticking time bomb. Literally.

And I think Democrats have to take it seriously. This is not a an attack by a Republican against Democrats. This is a warning from a Republican that has seen what’s happened to his own party to crats to say. We’ve gotta have one healthy party and, you know, you guys are starting to cough a little bit and you need to, you know, go take your zinc or whatever and prevent this from happening.

What do they have to do about these extremes who right now seem like they’re isolated in the fever swamps?

I think keep them isolated and speak out When Rashida Tlaib, you know, for instance, blames Israel for bombing something that is quite obvious later, they didn’t bomb. The Democrats just like they called on every Republican to do. Every time Donald Trump said something, the Democrats have to disavow that and say, you know, we can’t stop somebody. We had a open Nazi that would run as a Republican and knowingly every year. We couldn’t stop that because all you have to do is get on the ballot.

Democrats can’t stop somebody from being a Democrat, but they can say that doesn’t represent our values and particularly pushing back in these colleges and universities that are poisoning the mind of young people to believe that it’s okay to murder fourteen hundred people as long as it’s in the name of anti colonialism. If they speak out to that, I can’t guarantee you’re gonna win that fight, but I guarantee you’re gonna do everything you can to win it unlike what we’ve done.

Adam Kinzinger’s new book is renegade defending democracy and liberty and our divided country. It is out today. Adam is also a senior political commentator CNN. And, as we just discussed, founded Country First, which backs pro democracy candidates. So, Adam, congratulations on the book and best of luck.

Thanks. I appreciate it. Good to be with you.

And thank you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow, and we will do this all over again. Secret Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.