- Former President Trump and Congressman Adam Kinzinger clashed as early as 2016, reports The New York Times.
- In 2016, Trump asked an RNC member to “convey a vulgar message about what he should do with himself”.
- When he heard the message, Kinzinger “laughed” and “invited Trump to do the same”.
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Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of the most vocal Republican critics of former President Donald Trump, clashed with the former president already in the 2016 elections, reports The New York Times.
The Times said that before the 2016 presidential election, Trump questioned Richard Porter of the Illinois Republican National Committee about Kinzinger, who he had and whether he had an opponent.
After Porter told Trump that Kinzinger didn’t have an opponent that year, Trump “poked his chest with his finger and told him to deliver Mr. Kinzinger a vulgar message about what he should do with himself”.
The Times reported that when Porter told Kinzinger about his 2016 election day conversation, Kinzinger “laughed and invited Mr. Trump to do the same”.
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Kinzinger was one of the few Republican politicians who did not support Trump’s candidacy for president in 2016 and continued to criticize and speak openly against the former president during his four-year term, and now in his post-presidency.
“I don’t see how to get to Donald Trump anymore,” Kinzinger told CNN in an interview in August 2016, the Guardian reported at the time. “Donald Trump for me is starting to cross many boundaries of the unforgivable in politics.”
Kinzinger was led to publicly denounce Trump after the ex-president’s insults and attacks on the Khans, a Gold Star family who spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in support of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, telling CNN in 2016: “I will not be in silence. He can tweet all he wants. I have to do this for my country and my party. “
Kinzinger, who represents the surely conservative 16th district of Illinois, was one of only 10 House Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment on charges of inciting the January 6 uprising and one of 11 votes to get his colleague out of the Republican Party, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Georgia of her committee assignments on February 4.
Trump was acquitted by the Senate in a trial that ended on February 13, with seven Republican senators joining all 50 Senate Democrats in the vote to condemn. The vote, 57-43, fell short of the two-thirds majority that would be required to condemn Trump.
Kinzinger was also the first House Republican to ask Trump to be removed from office by the 25th Amendment or by the impeachment process the day after the January 6 uprising.
Kinzinger recently told Anthony Fisher of Insider that, although he realizes his actions have put him at risk for a major challenge when he is re-elected in 2022, he is committed to leading the Republican Party in a new direction.
“So we have to fight like hell to restore the soul of [the Republican Party] and I’m willing to go down doing that because I think that when history looks back at this point, it’s not the people who voted not to certify the election that will be written in the history books, ”he said.
He also started a new political action committee, Country First, which aims to support other anti-Trump Republicans, like him, who want to take the party in a new direction.