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- Former President Trump and Representative Adam Kinzinger clashed as early as 2016, the New York Times reports.
- In 2016, Trump asked an RNC member to “deliver a vulgar message about what to do with himself.”
- When he heard the message, Kinzinger reportedly “laughed” and “called on Trump to do the same.”
- Visit Insider’s Business section for more stories.
Illinois Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger, one of the GOP’s most critical critics of former President Donald Trump, clashed with the former president in the 2016 election, The New York Times reports.
The Times said that before the 2016 presidential election, Trump asked Illinois Republican National Committee Richard Porter about Kinzinger who had and if he had an opponent.
After Porter told Trump that Kinzinger had no opponent that year, Trump “stuck his finger in his chest and told him to deliver a rude message to Mr. Kinzinger about what he should do of himself”.
The Times reported that when Porter told Kinzinger about his conversation around Election Day 2016, Kinzinger “laughed and called on Mr. Trump to do the same.”
Read more: GOP Representative Adam Kinzinger on Acknowledging the QAnon Threat and Not Fearing a Main GOP Challenger for Voting to Remove Trump
Kinzinger was one of the few Republican politicians in office who did not support Trump’s 2016 presidential bid and continued to criticize and denounce the former president throughout his four years in office, and now in his post-presidency.
“I can’t see how I 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 a lot of the red lines of the unforgivable in politics.”
Kinzinger has been pressured 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, saying to CNN in 2016: “I won’t be silent. He can tweet anything he wants. I have to do it for my country and for my party.”
Kinzinger, who represents Illinois’ 16th Safe Tory District, was one of 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan.6 uprising and one of 11 to vote for strip her GOP colleague, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Georgia from his committee assignments on February 4.
Trump was acquitted by the Senate in a trial that ended on February 13, with seven GOP senators joining the 50 Senate Democrats to vote for a conviction. The vote, 57-43, failed to reach the two-thirds majority that would have been necessary to condemn Trump.
Kinzinger was also the first House Republican to call for Trump’s impeachment either through the 25th Amendment or through the impeachment process the day after the Jan.6 uprising.
Kinzinger recently told Insider’s Anthony Fisher that while he realizes his actions put him at risk for a primary challenge when he is re-elected in 2022, he is committed to leading the GOP in a new direction.
“So we must fight like hell to restore the soul of [the Republican Party] and I’m ready to do that because I think when history comes to mind right now, it won’t be the people who voted against certifying the election that will be in the history books ”, did he declare.
He has also created a new political action committee, Country First, which aims to support his anti-Trump Republican colleagues like himself who want to take the party in a new direction.
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