Adam Kinzinger doc ‘The Last Republican’ shows toll of opposing Trump

TORONTO — “Oh my God, are you …?” a man says, stopping in his tracks as he encounters former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, who’s leaving through the revolving door of a fancy Canadian hotel just as this man is coming in.

“Thank you for everything you’re doing,” says the man, who’s from Nevada and wants to take a selfie for his wife, who’s a big fan. Kinzinger — who’s giving off vacation-mode, newly retired politician vibes in a white-button down shirt sans tie and a nicely tailored light gray linen suit — does him one better and shoots a video, reminding the man’s wife to vote. (“Hey Heather, what’s up?”)

That bro-ish energy is serving Kinzinger well as he makes the rounds in his new gig, as the subject of a vital — and surprisingly laugh-filled — documentary, “The Last Republican,” which debuted at the Toronto Film Festival on Saturday and was directed by, of all people, Steve Pink, the man behind “Hot Tub Time Machine.” (Pink says they’re still looking for a distributor, at a time when every political film is trying to get a release before the election.)

That raunch comedy classic is the reason Kinzinger said yes to Pink’s proposal, in the tumultuous year after the Illinois Republican became a lone wolf and was then quickly forced out of his congressional seat. He was one of 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection”; one of two House Republicans to vote to form the select committee to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol; and the only House Republican to serve alongside former Montana Rep. Liz Cheney — fairly unwillingly — on that committee. As Republican Party leadership viewed it, he signed his own death warrant.

Among Democrats, he’s gotten a hero’s welcome, which he brushes off; standing up to the then-president was just upholding his oath of office. “I’m surrounded by cowards,” he says in the film.

In Toronto, Kinzinger was fresh off his prime-time slot on the last night of the Democratic National Convention, as a conservative Republican who’d somehow landed the spot as the lead-up speaker to Kamala Harris accepting the nomination.

He found out he was giving that speech 10 days before the convention, he told The Washington Post in an interview, and was sure he would be slotted into Monday night, as is traditional for speakers from the opposing party. When he found out he had a primo Thursday slot, he was nervous that 10,000 hard-core Democrats might boo him — he did vote with Trump 99% of the time during the President’s first two years in office, according to Five Thirty Eight. But, he says, “it sent me a message of, ‘Wow, I have a job to do,’ and my job was to speak to the camera, to that small group of Republicans that feel ashamed to support Trump, and say, ‘Come over.’”

“Look, my party’s lost its mind,” he said at the post-screening Q&A. “I don’t know what Donald Trump actually believes. I really don’t. I mean, he believes in himself, that’s the extent of it. But my party has just lost its idea of what America really means.”

He also reiterated his support for Harris. But he tells The Post that, while he thinks she’s got “the edge,” he’s not convinced that she’ll win. And that if she does win, it needs to be by three to five percentage points in close-call states for his former colleagues to accept the results.

And even then, he warns, “I don’t think we’re taking [the threat of violence] seriously enough.” If Harris wins by a thin margin, he believes there could be “a pressure campaign” of wild protests in swing states like Arizona, where Republican-controlled state legislatures simply refuse to execute the will of the people. “Because according to the Constitution, if the state legislature decides it’s just going to certify Trump, even if [voters] went the other way, we have to accept that in the federal government.”

Of those 10 Republicans who voted for impeachment, only two are still in Congress. They expected to have 25 votes for impeachment that day. But colleagues such as Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, who’s now a staunch Trumper, “were scared to death” for their political futures, Kinzinger said at the Q&A. “Look, there’s other work you can do if you’re going to be scared of doing the right thing. You can make more money than you can in Congress. This is the wrong job if you’re scared of doing the right thing.”

Kinzinger turned down 20 documentary offers before deciding to go with Pink, who said he was most interested in the human cost of what taking a stand had done to Kinzinger and his wife Sofia, who was seven months pregnant when they started filming. The couple also wanted footage of this important time in their lives to show to their child; they just didn’t know at the time that Pink would be filming Kinzinger’s last 14 months in office.

Kinzinger, a staunch conservative, and Pink, who refers to himself as so far left he’s “basically a communist,” have an entertaining odd-couple dynamic that often bleeds onto the screen. “I recognize you have contempt for what I believe,” Kinzinger says to Pink, who’s off-camera, in the movie. “In another situation, you would be protesting my office.”

Early on in the shoot, Kinzinger also confessed another reason he picked Pink: “Hot Tub Time Machine” is one of his favorite movies. He and his Air Force buddies used to watch it while deployed in Iraq. “I was shocked. It was great,” Pink says. “We had … humor as our common ground.”

Now, Kinzinger tells The Post, he believes he and Pink have developed a true friendship, at a time when he’s lost most of the people he thought were his friends, besides his military buddies and guys he knew in high school. And he loves their verbal sparring. He and Sofia consider Pink a “weird uncle.”

Kinzinger hasn’t changed his party affiliation, though.

As a little kid, Kinzinger was a huge fan of Ronald Reagan and a believer in “compassionate conservatism.” This is a guy who dressed up as the Republican governor of Illinois for Halloween when he was 12, made a Republican headquarters in his room, and was a Civil War re-enactor (for the North, he’s quick to point out in the movie). The film reveals an incident when, as a young adult, Kinzinger stepped in to save a woman from being stabbed to death by her boyfriend. He thinks it was a catalyst for him going into politics and that it also gave him PTSD.

Despite that Harris endorsement, Kinzinger is still someone who owns an AR-15 and once had an “A” rating from the NRA. He voted against the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act. He considers himself “a centrist on abortion,” he tells The Post, advocating for bans after 12 to 15 weeks, with some exceptions. “It’s funny, people call me a RINO now, and it’s like, I’ve moderated on stances, but that’s because of age; it wasn’t because of public pressure, right? I’m more moderate on guns now because I’m older, and it’s like, yeah, we have a gun problem in America.”

Kinzinger did not want to be on the Jan. 6 committee. “I was like, ‘Please dear Jesus, not me,’” he says in the film. He found out that then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi had tapped him when she announced it on television. (He later found a missed call at 5 a.m., when he was asleep.) He knew he couldn’t say no, even though his staff was telling him it would be political suicide. “And they were right,” he says.

Death threats coming to his house and office were immediate. He had to hire 24-hour personal security. Just before coming to Toronto, he told the audience at the Q&A, his house was swatted.

In the film, Kinzinger says he thought a lot of Republicans would come to their senses the morning after the insurrection, likening it to waking up with a bad hangover. Instead, the GOP kept on drinking. He believes the moment the party was fully lost was three weeks after Jan. 6 when Kevin McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump and basically reinstated him into the party.

“I’m less mad at Trump than Kevin McCarthy,” says Kinzinger in the doc. “Trump, he’s just nuts. That’s not a surprise.”

He and McCarthy, though, were friends — close enough that the former speaker of the House offered to officiate his wedding. But McCarthy dismissed Kinzinger’s warnings of violence before the insurrection, and afterward started calling Kinzinger and Cheney “Pelosi Republicans.” Kinzinger and McCarthy haven’t spoken since Jan. 6, 2021. “You realize those friendships were never real friendships,” Kinzinger tells The Post.

Kinzinger continues to harp on McCarthy because he hopes it affects his political future. “He is literally the guy that resurrected Trump,” Kinzinger says. “I was there. I saw what his visit to Mar-a-Lago did. I saw what his lack of leadership did.”

In the wake of speaking out, he lost family members, too. “I think it’s an important story to show what Donald Trump has done to a lot of families; I’m not unique in this,” he tells The Post.

And then, of course, there was getting censured and ousted by the Republican Party, and watching his district lines be redrawn so he’d have to go up against a MAGA opponent. (Pink captures the exact moment Kinzinger realizes he can’t run again.)

For now, the retired Kinzinger is treating his time in Toronto as a vacation with Sofia and son Christian. He’ll be back on the trail for Harris in October. His message for moderate Republicans is to turn away from the right wing. “Ostracize them,” he said at the Q&A. “Be willing to lose power, because you’ll save the soul of what you truly believe.”

He’s not ruling out running for office again, even for president, but “I really have no plan,” he says. “Like, first off, I don’t know where I belong in the spectrum. Could I be a conservative Democrat? Would the Democrats accept me? But … if in 2028 there was a need, and I thought I could run and push a message, I would do it in a heartbeat. I would love to do it.”