Karen otto adam kinzinger letter from family greg wedding illinois nyt
The Lonely Mission by Adam Kinzinger
Mr. Kinzinger, a six-term Illinois representative, censored by his party and shunned by family members, is encouraging Republicans to leave behind Donald Trump and thereby threaten his future.
Adam Kinzinger, the six-term Illinois representative, serves as enemy No. 1 as the Republican Party censures, opposes and tries to purge politicians who are not in lock step with Donald J. Trump, unwelcome not just in his party but also in his own family, some of whom have recently disowned him.
"11 members of his family sent him a handwritten two-page letter two days after Mr. Kinzinger called for the expulsion of Mr. Trump from office following the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, saying he was in cahoots with "the devil's army" for making a public break with the president.
Oh my, what a disappointment to us and to God you are! "They've published. "You were ashamed of the Kinzinger family name! ”
The letter's author was Karen Otto, the cousin of Mr. Kinzinger, who paid $7 to give it to Mr. Kinzinger's father by certified mail to ensure that the congressman saw it, which he did. She also sent copies to Republicans across Illinois, and other congressional delegation representatives of the state.
"As she said in an interview, "I wanted Adam to be shunned.
Mr. Kinzinger, a 42-year-old Air National Guard pilot serving a crescent-shaped district on the outskirts of Chicago, is at the forefront of the effort to navigate post-Trump politics. He bets that the future of his party lies in disavowing Mr. Trump and the conspiracy theories that the former president stoked, with his political career, professional relationships and kinship with a wing of his sprawling family.
Mr. Kinzinger was one of only three Republicans in the House who both voted to impeach Mr. Trump and strip Georgia's Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee positions. He asked Democrats during the House impeachment debate if he could speak for seven minutes instead of his assigned one, in order to make a more authoritative and bipartisan case against the president; the proposal was refused.
He brought his case to the mainstream media and became an omnipresent face on cable television, HBO late-night programming and podcasts. With a six-minute video declaring the need to re-format the Republican Party into something close to an idealized version of the party of George W. Bush, with a focus on lower taxes, hawkish security and social conservatism, without the complaints and conspiracy theories that have made Mr. Trump and his supporters central to the branding of the party, he began a new political action committee.
In order to do so, Mr. Kinzinger said in an interview, the fear-based strategies he wants to eliminate from the party and offer an ambitious alternative must be revealed.
"We're just afraid," he said. "The Democrats fear. Fearing for the future. Be afraid of anything. And it works for a cycle or two of elections. The problem is that this democracy is doing real harm.
Mr. Kinzinger said the inability of the Senate on Saturday to convict Mr. Trump in the impeachment trial did not stop him.
"We need to do a lot of work to restore the Republican Party," he said, "and to turn the tide on the politics of personality."
Mr. Kinzinger is now facing the classic test for political mavericks to show their independence: his stubborn and uncompromising disposition ranks the very Republicans he is seeking to attract to his task of re-establishing the party.
His anti-Trump stance has insulted his district's Republican voters, some of whom equate him to a Democrat, and disappointed Illinois Republican officials who say he cares more for his own national visibility than about his relationship with them.
Larry Smith, the chairman of the La Salle County G.O.P., which censored Mr. Kinzinger last month, said, "There doesn't seem to be a camera or a microphone he's not going to run into." "Back in the good old days, he used to talk with us."
Mr. Kinzinger does not regret his goals.
"It deserves an explanation for Central and Northern Illinois and deserves my full attention, and they'll get it," he said. But I will also concentrate on the national message to the extent I can, because in central and northern Illinois, I can transform every heart and it wouldn't make a dent on the whole party. And I think that's what that big fight is.
Mr. Kinzinger has drawn support from the Democrats, but the idea of a radical is not anyone's. He trumpets his long-standing opposition to the Affordable Care Act on his campaign website, and he is a foe of reproductive rights and higher taxes. He first secured his Congressional seat with the endorsement of Sarah Palin.
Raised in a large central Illinois family, Mr. Kinzinger was involved in politics from an early age. His father, who has 32 first cousins, ran food banks and homeless shelters in Peoria and Bloomington. He predicted he would one day be governor or president before he turned 10, Ms. Otto said, and when he was a 20-year-old sophomore at Illinois State University, he won election to the McLean County Board.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, he joined the Air Force and served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He joined the Air National Guard following his discharge, where he is now a lieutenant colonel. In the 2010 Republican wave, Mr. Kinzinger, then 32, defeated a Democratic incumbent by almost 15 percentage points and, two years later, ousted another incumbent, 10-term Republican Don Manzullo, in a primary after redistricting, with the help of Eric Cantor, then the House majority leader.
But Mr. Kinzinger was soon dispirited by the Republican Party, which he claimed was based on opposition to whatever President Barack Obama had suggested without proposing his own new ideas.
"His level of frustration has risen since he came to Congress and I believe it has been difficult for him to make sense of and participate in the Trump era," said former Kansas Representative Kevin Yoder, who was one of Mr. Kinzinger's best friends in Congress before losing a bid for re-election in 2018. As Mr. Yoder said, "That became a bridge too far for him," when allegiance to Mr. Trump became a litmus test for Republican conservatism.
Although Mr. Kinzinger never viewed himself as a loyalist to Trump, on political grounds, he rarely broke with the former president, but he was critical of him going back to the 2016 campaign, when Jeb Bush was a proxy.
Mr. Trump heard about Mr. Kinzinger's lack of faithfulness. Mr. Trump asked Richard Porter, a Republican National Committee member from Illinois, at a fund-raiser in the Chicago suburbs prior to the 2016 election, how Mr. Kinzinger would fare in his re-election campaign. He had no rival, Mr. Porter remembered telling the future president.
Mr. Trump stuck his finger in the chest, Mr. Porter said, and ordered him to give a vulgar letter to Mr. Kinzinger about what to do with himself. Mr. Kinzinger chuckled and encouraged Mr. Trump to do the same when Mr. Porter relayed the remark to Mr. Kinzinger during a discussion on Election Day.
Republicans have been trying in Illinois to guess what Mr. Kinzinger's next step would be. In the interview, Mr. Kinzinger said that the 2022 candidacy for governor or the Senate is unlikely to be sought. He's leaning towards running for re-election right now, but with redistricting looming this fall, it's unclear how his district will be rearranged by the Democratic-controlled state legislature.
What is evident is that Mr. Kinzinger finds himself at home on the wrong side of the rank-and-file Republicans. Since Jan. 6, John McGlasson, the committee member for the district of Mr. Kinzinger, said the Congressman had been "insulting with his comments."
Mr. Kinzinger was lambasted for turning on Mr. Trump by Republican voters polled in the district last week.
Richard Reinhardt, a 63-year-old retired mechanical engineer, said while eating lunch at a Thai restaurant in Rockford, 'If you want to vote as a Democrat, vote as a Democrat.' If you're a Republican, otherwise, then support our president. The first president who served me was Trump. The things he's done have inspired me.
The "hangover " of Mr. Trump's post-impeachment success, Mr. Kinzinger predicted, "will kind of wear off."
The last Republican to win statewide office in Illinois in 2014, former Gov. Bruce Rauner, said Mr. Kinzinger might find himself a victim of the bitter schism that divides the party. "Democrats will be the only winners in the war between Trump and the Republicans," Mr. Rauner said. "Character matters to some voters. It doesn't do that for most.
Mr. Kinzinger said he had no inclination to reach out to the loudest opponents in the Republican groups in his district, to whom he had not spoken in years, and said he had no influence over voters. In his family, the letter-writers, he said, are suffering from "brainwashing" by conservative churches that have deceived them.
I'm not holding anything against them," he said, "but I have little motivation or need to reach out and fix it. That's 100% to reach out to patch them, and quite frankly, I don't care whether they do or not.
Regarding his own future in the party, Mr. Kinzinger said that by the end of the summer he would know if he could remain a long-term Republican or whether he would be persuaded to change his party affiliation if it became apparent to him that Mr. Trump's allies had become a permanent majority.
"Right now the party's sick," he said. It's one thing that the party will tolerate various opinions, but it's all become this huge litmus test. So it's a chance down the road, but it's definitely not my plan, and I'm going to fight like hell to save it first.