In an interview Monday morning on CNN’s New Day, Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) was asked by co-host John Berman what he will tell his newborn son about Donald Trump. “I will tell him (Trump) was the worst president the United States of America ever had,” Kinzinger answered. “He was a liar and a charlatan. And he was a man with a more fragile ego than anybody I’ve ever met.”
Rep. Kinzinger, who along with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) are the only Republicans on the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, went on to say that Trump “walks around like the tough guy, but he’s the one who gets more wounded and sad than anybody I know.”
Kinzinger told CNN that when his son is older and learning history in school, he wanted to be able to tell him the story of January 6—and his role in investigating that day. “That’s going to be something in five or ten years that’s going to be hard to explain if you’re not on the side of truth.”
“I’m...going to tell him it was the moment I hope America hit the bottom of, you know, its slide towards authoritarianism and the moment we woke up,” Kinzinger said. “I hope he’s proud of what I’ve done. I’m confident he will be because, you know, short of this thing really going off the rails, this thing being our country and this experiment, I think we’re going to look back and say, ‘wow, that was a moment we might have flown too close to the sun and we can never do that again.’ That’s my hope and prayer. Because if not, we’re in real trouble.”
At a meeting in Utah, the Republican National Committee voted to censure both Kinzinger and Cheney for their participation in the January 6 investigation, with the RNC describing the committee as “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse,” a statement that led to widespread ridicule for its suggestion that the people who stormed the Capitol were expressing “legitimate political discourse.”
On CNN, Kinzinger said the censure vote “makes me sad because I think it says a lot for the party, and it says a lot to call January 6 legitimate discourse...it made me double down on my intensity to get to the bottom of this.”
“They are completely unmoored from the truth,” Kinzinger said of Republicans. “They have pledged allegiance to one man over any kind of principle...Conservatism is no longer about what you actually believe, it’s about how intensely you’re loyal to Donald Trump.”
Kinzinger went on to say “this party is not committed to the rule of law, no matter what they say. It’s not committed to democratic principles...whoever gets the most votes wins...it’s pretty frightening.
