In a new documentary about his final term in Congress, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who voted for President Trump’s impeachment after the Jan. 6 insurrection and later served on the bipartisan committee investigating 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 nonentity. No one even showed up at [Joint Base] Andrews when he left,” Kinzinger says in “The Last Republican,” premiering Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival. “And that’s when Kevin McCarthy goes to Mar-a-Lago. That changed everything.”
The allusion to McCarthy’s Jan. 2021 meeting with the former president at his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., is just one of several swipes at the former House speaker in the film. A onetime ally and friend of McCarthy’s, Kinzinger blames the former congressman from Bakersfield for enabling the “disgraced” Trump to return to the political fold. (He calls the suggestion that the Mar-a-Lago meeting was a mere coincidence “bulls—.”)
“Honestly,” Kinzinger adds later in the film, “I’m less mad at Donald Trump than I am at Kevin McCarthy.”
Directed by Steve Pink (“Hot Tub Time Machine”), “The Last Republican” pulls back the curtain on the Jan. 6 committee hearings and depicts the consequences Kinzinger and his family suffered as a result of defying the Republican Party’s MAGA faction. Among them, Pink said in an interview ahead of the documentary’s TIFF bow, were friendships with fellow conservative legislators — including McCarthy, who offered to officiate Kinzinger’s wedding.
“Adam sacrificed a lot — in 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 Republican House members, summarily dismisses Kinzinger’s question about the tense atmosphere ahead of Jan. 6. “Their divide, obviously, was not only on an emotional level — it’s sad when you lose a friend — but the way in which the friendship ended.”
In the same interview, Kinzinger elaborated on his rebuke of McCarthy, who left Congress shortly after being ousted from the speakership in October 2023. Immediately following the events of Jan. 6, Kinzinger said, Republicans faced a choice, which he likened to a western movie standoff: “Do we move on 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 picture [of McCarthy with Trump] pop up, there was this understanding that he made his decision. Kevin made his decision, which is to resurrect Donald Trump, because Donald Trump had the money and it was the only way Kevin McCarthy could become speaker, because he did not have the time to take on the MAGA elements and then be able to put together 218 votes to be speaker. So he made the easy decision for him, if your only goal is is to attain the speakership. And so that moment, literally, you could feel the energy in the conference shift into, ‘OK, I guess we’re doing this again.’ And I think it is important for people to see obviously, in this story, the bad guy is Donald Trump, but his chief enabler is Kevin McCarthy.”
Kinzinger took McCarthy’s embrace of Trump personally, not only because of their former closeness but because he read it as placing individual ambition over the good of the country.
“There is no red line he won’t cross for himself,” he told The Times. “He is morally vacant. He made a deal with the devil, and like every deal with the devil, you get something for a little bit until the devil wants his due. And Kevin got that due when he was kicked out of office. So for all of his moral failings, he got eight months of the speakership and he got the title of speaker for the rest of his life. I hope it was worth it. I don’t think it was.”
McCarthy could not be reached for comment.
