The Bulwark Podcast - Adam Kinzinger: Renegade

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

The former congressman says he wasn't always fighting the good fight, and that he feels some responsibility for the GOP's descent into dysfunction—and the rise of people like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Adam Kinzinger joins Charlie Sykes to discuss his raw and personal new book, "Renegade." show notes: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/723495/renegade-by-adam-kinzinger-with-michael-dantonio/

If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our Tread Experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with the Michelin X-Ice Snow Tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca 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 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 handsome, overwhelming. 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 soundbite yesterday. I want to 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, which is 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. 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, we talk about brain worms. This is brain worms. So like, you know, I lived in Shanahan, Illinois, and I would go down and visit my folks in Bloomington maybe once a month.

So 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, a big group of them. This certified letter shows up to me, to my parents' house. I'm like, oh, okay, well, interesting, good timing. I start reading it, and the first two words were, oh, my. And I was naive enough to think they were going to be two words were oh my and i was you know naive enough to think they were going to 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 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 Creighton and like Sean Hannity. 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 me. Really? Why? Yeah. Why? Because I don't know, because I told him the truth about January 6th or, or I'm not in this cult. And yeah, I mean, 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 I'm sure Thanksgiving is going to 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 write, I feel some responsibility for January 6th and the rise of Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk, if only because I was a participant in and witness 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 as 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, the Secret Service or the marshals come on and say, Mr. Dean, we want to have you come out first because you're such an important guy. And it goes to your head. So this is part of it, because as people are trying to figure out, why do people make these compromises? 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 take somebody like Elise Stefanik, okay, who was this paragon of normalcy, this icon in the ilk of Paul Ryan. And literally, she wasn't one of those that took a few years to change. She literally on a dime.

And I think it was 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 2011, 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's show every Monday for, I think, a period of about six months to a year. And every time you 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 buzzing 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 nicotine. 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 your 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 I can't think of myself without it. So it's, yeah, it's a very raw 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 in the respective. So what was the breaking point for you?

You were a conservative Christian who ran because you were inspired by Ronald Reagan. You were very much in that tradition. I mean, you go back to 2011 and you were one of that class of 2010, 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 going to 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,

2011, or I guess 2010, including the campaign to 2016. You know, I was always fighting the fight against the what Boehner called the exotics, like, you know, at the time, it was like Steve King, 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 as 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. I mean, they internalized it. Okay. Yes, they internalized it. And they, you know, 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 going to 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.

And you look at somebody like a Billy Long, for instance, who was pretty moderate that ended up 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 16. I voted for him in 20, which is weird. I'm the only person in the country that did that. And the big break obviously was January 6th, 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 realized how fragile democracies are. And the only thing you need for it to survive is 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 2016. You took a lot of shit for that. You 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. You say at one point you had gotten so much crap for voting against him in 2016, you didn't want to go through that again. Yeah, that's the whole reason I voted for him in 2020 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. And I could kind of put salve 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 Jeffries 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 going to win. Somebody worse is going to 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 16th district. But there was definitely that point then when it's like, you know, when I got back from Iraq and started to run, I said, if we're going to ask young people to be willing to die for this country, I have to be willing to give my life for existential things too.

And I 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 700,000 people I represent. The only commitment I make is to the Constitution. That's it. Let's just stick with this period of time. So you vote for him in 2020. But by January, February of 2021, you are voting to impeach him. And you were one of 10 Republicans in the House, along with Liz 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 going to strap this on me and I'm going to 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 guess I was still optimistic enough to believe that a January 6th 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 vote, I thought we'd hit 25, you know, people like Mike Gallagher, who were... people like Mike Gallagher who were Wisconsin. Yeah. Mike Gallagher from Wisconsin, even Nancy Mace was going to 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 10 at that point. So I guess in a way I did know it would cost me.

but I remember Fred Upton once telling me shortly after that, that he thought Trump was going to run again. And I thought he was insane. I'm like, there's no way he's going to. I mean, come on. You know, this guy did a January 6th. This is interesting because every once in a while we encounter people on the other side of the aisle who 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 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 2015, what's happened to the conservative movement and the Republican Party, but let's just focus on this. Since January 7th, 2021, the decision that Kevin McCarthy made, the decision that Elise Stefanik 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 kind of looking around going, are you kidding me? After January 6th, 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. Let's take Mitch McConnell, who I think in his heart is a decent guy. I think he means well. He's 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. He's dead anyway. 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, is 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, was when he showed up to Mar-a-Lago and resurrected him yeah like on the ron de santa side 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 is 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 Christie saying that, there's no doubt people are going to believe it then because everybody else they trust is saying the same thing Trump is. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our tread experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with the Michelin X-Ice Snow Tire.

Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin tread experts dealer near you TreadExperts.ca slash locations. You opened the book in the introduction with the fiasco of Kevin McCarthy's rise to the speakership, the fact that it took the 15 votes, the fact that he may had 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 watch 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 15 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 Gaetz's bitch, right? A full-throated election denier. Somebody, I mean, you sat on the January 6th 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 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 the room? So let's say you put 10 of us in a room. Everybody has a hand grenade, okay? We're all equally powerful.

If one person is willing to pull the pin and drop the grenade, they're the most powerful person in the room, right? It doesn't matter how tall you are. It doesn't matter how much political power you have. 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. There were always kind of the, we'll call them the moderates. They're not moderate, but they're moderate in tone.

The moderates, there was always the crazy caucus and then the kind of 80% 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 they all had different goals. And he said, okay, if you put the pins back, you know, whatever. And then 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. 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 the 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 i was very impressed the the moderates pushed back against Jordan because I thought they would capitulate. They held, but I knew they couldn't do it for five minutes. Yeah. They held for five minutes. You 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 to 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. Yeah. 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? And 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 want to get back to the bigger picture, but I know you had some thoughts on this. So the question of what kind of a speaker he would be, he's made it clear that he will not vote on Ukraine aid and 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, it's dumb. And I think Mike is trying to figure out how to lead now at the same time, because he's kind of given multiple feelings on this, but on the Israel stuff, he's actually tactically, I think this is dumb just tactically, because it's going to give an excuse for the Senate to vote no. And I would have voted no on this package, by the way, they'll vote no. And now they'll be able to jam the house

with 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 aid without any offsets. The fact that they're offsetting with the IRS,

what it goes to show Charlie is 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 the IRS. What it goes to show, Charlie, is 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 the IRS. 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 deficit by $30 billion. 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, the progressives who say, you know, well, 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 Greene, because you didn't fight the good fight the whole time. You write 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, eh, you know, why make an issue of it? They're allies. That's the crazy uncle in the corner, and we didn't confront the extremists and the bigots. Yeah, that's exactly right, because, you know, to an extent, it was this idea of it's coalition, right? Yeah, we're going to have the crazies, the bigots, the extremists. they're voting Republican, they're going to vote for me in the primary, maybe, and they're going to 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 the lady called Obama Muslim, you 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 is going to kill all Christians? It's like, oh, really? I didn't know. I'll 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 2015 that Obama was going to 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. You know, we laughed at it. We rolled our eyes. But why spend any time? Because you don't have to worry about that, right? And we want to come back to this because I keep thinking about all the times that we should have pushed back against that. But we rationalized not doing it. We would tell ourselves it's just a small number of people 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 Republican.

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 2008 during the Great Recession, the opioid epidemic? What happened? First off, you can start with the 90s 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, it's taken some damage compared to what it was. And you have a lot of people in their 50s that were trained in the manufacturing that, you know, lose their jobs and they're almost too old to go retrained or they think they're too old to go retrained. And society

seems to kind of push them aside. And, you know, we can give them unemployment benefits. But that doesn't make you feel like a useful person. And so people were turning to 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 watch portrayed Christians, for instance, as crazy people or out of touch or superstitious. It betrayed 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 going to put you back in the coal business, which, of course, he never did. We're going to 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 kind of 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 a big thing is that happened. This is an important point because, you know, and again, you write 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, there's a long history to this, saying, 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 it, hold it. These are people who voted for FDR, who voted for Lyndon Johnson, who voted for John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman.

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. 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, 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 think his 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 tough for him, maybe it's advanced age, maybe it's just not natural to basically inspire and 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 Tlaib, for instance, blaming Israel for bombing in Gaza when it's completely

untrue, you know, this defund the police, get mad at me for it. But there still is a perception 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. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with a Michelin X-Ice snow tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires.

Find a Michelin tread experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there, treadexperts.ca. So, you had an event in New York and you're there. And by the way, you're a family man. This is great. This is reality, by the way. This is reality podcast. I have a dog here.

You have, you know, because 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 and 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, an abortion ban at 15 weeks. No, you have to say an 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 Lenox, Illinois, and there were 8,000 or 10,000 people that showed up. So you think about that. What were those 8,000 or 10,000 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 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 500, and then it would end up like 20 people there. And what you had was this paring down of the normals to the extremes that finally for the first time had 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 2010. I never once, and I even proactively pushed 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 just in real time watching this. And I know there'll be listeners who will say, 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 grift that was dominated by the extremists, which in many ways followed the trajectory of the Republican Party. I mean, I remember how the Tea Party Express 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 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 in that it is a high profit business. It used to be you'd raise enough money. I think my first campaign I raised and spent 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 reform entitlements and reform Social Security next term. And I remember thinking to myself, that's going to last to his very first speech when he sees the blue hairs in the crowd and just says to them, oh, I'm never going to touch your Social Security. And Charlie, 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 2024? I know you've given a lot of thought to this. We now know that Speaker Mike Johnson is going to be presiding over the certification of the 2024 election. We know what the passions are going to be, the trials, everything. This is the ultimate stress test for democracy, isn't it? It is. I look forward to 2028 and say I think it's going to be an amazing election cycle because

there's going to have all new faces and all new energy. This one I worry about. And we can have these guardrails in democracy, like off an 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 guard rail, it's going to take it off the road, and you're going to 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 the system, I think intentionally tested it, but accidentally tested the weak points in 2020. And I think now they're going to know exactly where the weak points are. And 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 2016. And I'm going to tell you, if he does get through and he wins this time, he's going to interview 100 candidates for attorney general and only take the one that says like, Mr. President, in essence, I don't care what the constitution is. I'm going to do whatever you want as your servant in the department of justice. That person is going to get selected to be attorney general. And we're going to find a system that is stressed beyond what even the founding fathers imagined it could be stressed to. Who's he going to find a system that is stressed beyond what even the founding fathers imagined it could be stressed to. Who's he going to pick for a vice president, do you think?

You know, it's going to be somebody like a Kristi Noem or an Elise Stefanik, I think. I think Nancy Mace is auditioning for it. She's too. I think it's going to be somebody that's probably female and somebody that shows an absolute loyalty to him no matter what. And unfortunately, there's a huge list of people. Yeah, I wouldn't be shocked if it was Elise Stefanik. Okay, so where are you now, Adam? You 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? Well, I would consider myself politically the same kind of, I'd say center-right, moderate on some things, conservative on others that I've always been. 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 want to lose it. I don't

want to 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. Because 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 back pro-democracy candidates who are both Republicans and Democrats at this point. How complicated is that? It is complicated, you know, because 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, you 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? 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 country1st.com, the number 1st.com, and take a look at what

we're doing. One last question. I put this in my newsletter today, and I expect to get a lot of reaction to it. You have your own Substack newsletter, which you devoted today to a warning to Democrats. You said 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 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 going to 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 to, they're surprised. They're not seeing this for some reason. And, you know, what we lived through, I remember being in Congress and having, you know, Dana Rohrabacher be pro-Russia and thinking that was insane. And people like, oh, that's just Dana Rohrabacher. And then, you know, some people come along and you get, you know, Matt Gaetz kind of says something pro-Russian.

And now I'd say over 50 percent of the party is at least Russian adjacent, sympathetic. That happened very quickly. And when under 30 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 an attack by a Republican against Democrats. has seen what's happened to his own party, the Democrats, to say, we've got to 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, we can't stop somebody. We had an open Nazi that would run as a Republican in Illinois 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 1,400 people as long as it's in the name of anti-colonialism. If they speak out to that, I can't guarantee you're going to win that fight, but I guarantee you're going to do everything you can to win it, unlike what we've done. Adam Kinziger's new book is Renegade, Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country. It is out today. Adam is also a senior

political commentator for 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. Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.