In a new documentary about his final term in Congress, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger — the Illinois Republican who voted to impeach President Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection and later served on the bipartisan committee that investigated the attack — says one man is responsible for Trump’s return to power in the GOP. And it’s not Trump.
“Donald Trump was a nobody. Nobody showed up for the meeting. [Joint Base] “Andrews when he left,” Kinzinger says in “The Last Republican,” which premieres Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival. “And that’s when Kevin McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago. That changed everything.”
The allusion to McCarthy’s January 2021 meeting with the former president at his private club in Palm Beach, Florida, is just one of several criticisms of the former House speaker in the film. Kinzinger, a longtime ally and friend of McCarthy, blames the former Bakersfield congressman for allowing the “disgraced” Trump back into the political fold. (He calls the suggestion that the Mar-a-Lago meeting was a mere coincidence “nonsense.”)
“Honestly,” Kinzinger adds later in the film, “I’m less angry at Donald Trump than I am at Kevin McCarthy.”
Directed by Steve Pink (“Hot Tub Time Machine”), “The Last Republican” unpacks the Jan. 6 committee hearings and describes the consequences Kinzinger and his family suffered as a result of defying the MAGA faction of the GOP. Among them, Pink said in an interview before the documentary’s TIFF premiere, were friendships with other conservative lawmakers, including McCarthy, who offered to officiate Kinzinger’s wedding.
“Adam sacrificed a lot: his political career, some of his family ties … and then his social circle,” Pink said, referring to a scene in which McCarthy, on a call with House Republicans, summarily dismisses Kinzinger’s question about the tense atmosphere before Jan. 6. “Their split, obviously, was not just on an emotional level — it’s sad when you lose a friend — but the way the friendship ended.”
In the same interview, Kinzinger furthered his criticism of McCarthy, who left Congress shortly after being ousted as House speaker in October 2023. In the immediate aftermath of the events of Jan. 6, Kinzinger said, Republicans faced a choice, which he likened to a Western movie showdown: “Do we move forward without Trump, or do we have to hold on to Trump?”
“The second Kevin went to Mar-a-Lago, actually, the second we saw that photo… [of McCarthy with Trump] “When he showed up, it was understood that he had made his decision. Kevin made his decision, which was to resurrect Donald Trump, because Donald Trump had the money and it was the only way Kevin McCarthy could become president, because he didn’t have time to take on the MAGA elements and then be able to gather 218 votes to be president. So he made the easiest decision for him, if his only goal is to become president. And at that moment, you could literally feel the energy at the conference shift to, ‘Well, I guess we’re going to do this again. ’ And I think it’s important for people to see, obviously, in this story, that the bad guy is Donald Trump, but his main enabler is Kevin McCarthy.”
Kinzinger took McCarthy's embrace of Trump personally, not only because of their previous closeness but because he interpreted it as a way of putting individual ambition before the good of the country.
“There is no red line that he won’t cross for himself,” he told The Times. “It’s morally void. He made a deal with the devil, and like all deals with the devil, you get something in return for a while, until the devil wants what’s coming to him. And Kevin got what was coming to him when he was kicked out of office. So for all his moral failings, he got eight months of House speakership and the title of House speaker for the rest of his life. I hope it was worth it. I don’t think it was worth it.”
McCarthy could not be reached for comment.
