In TIFF World Premiere ‘The Last Republican,’ Former GOP Congressman Adam Kinzinger Zings Trump, Likens Republican Party To Drunk On A Bender
EXCLUSIVE: To the delight of Democrats, and outrage of many Republicans, former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger addressed the Democratic National Convention on its final night last month, sharing his observations about the party he served for 12 years in Congress.
“The Republican Party is no longer conservative,” he said. “It has switched its allegiance from the principles that gave it purpose to a man whose only purpose is himself.”
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Any guesses who he was referring to? If there’s any doubt, it will be dispelled in the documentary The Last Republican, set to make its world premiere on Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival. Steve Pink (Hot Tub Time Machine) directed the film, an acquisition title at TIFF. We have your first look at the film in the exclusive clip below.
In the documentary, Kinzinger describes how he thought his fellow Republicans would finally and definitively flush Donald Trump out of their system following the January 6th insurrection. He had good reason to believe that. Shortly after the storming of the capitol in 2021, then House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told the House, “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, told his fellow legislators, “President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it.”
Flash forward to September 2024: Trump is once again the Republican presidential nominee, and, remarkably, enjoys the support of McCarthy and McConnell. But not of Kinzinger, who served on the congressional committee that investigated the events of January 6th, alongside Rep. Liz Cheney. Now retired from Congress, Kinzinger remains an anti-Trumper.
Kinzinger “found his party turning their back on him as they fell into step with Donald Trump,” Thom Powers, chief documentary programmer for TIFF, tells Deadline. “[He] chose not to run again as a congressman [in 2022] because he could see the political writing on the wall.”
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Powers acknowledges the tandem of Kinzinger and director Steve Pink will strike many as unusual. Politics makes for strange bedfellows, as they say, and apparently the same holds true at times in documentary.
“Pink… is probably not a director that you expect to see in TIFF docs,” Powers allows. “He chooses to give access to a Hollywood left winger in Steve Pink to tell his story. And why does he let Steve Pink tell his story? Because Adam Kinzinger is a big fan of Hot Tub Time Machine. It’s meaningful for me to see these two people who come from very different political points of view, be able to share a bond over their sense of humor and meet across an ideological divide.”
In a director’s statement, Pink writes, “As a lifelong political junkie, The Last Republican is a passion project born from my pursuit of a story that genuinely mattered to me. Surprisingly, I found that story in Congressman Adam Kinzinger, a conservative Republican whose political and personal life would ordinarily make me anti-curious. But his stand against former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party in the wake of January 6th changed all that.
“I followed Adam during the final year of his Congressional career, capturing his life through the perspective of a left-wing progressive and comedy writer-director… Although I was initially focused on Adam’s critical role during this pivotal time in American politics, as the film progressed, I also found myself re-evaluating the importance of maintaining relationships with those who hold fundamentally different views. In today’s polarized world, this idea feels incredibly meaningful to me, and underscores my belief that unless we actively embrace civil discourse for the sake of the common good, our democracy will continue to face great peril.”
The Last Republican is a production of Media Courthouse Documentary Collective, directed and produced by Pink and produced by Jason Kohn, Chapin Wilson, Robb Bindler, and Sarafina DiFelice. The director of photography is Joshua Salzman; Ted Feldman edited the film.
Submarine is handling sales of The Last Republican.
In the exclusive clip below, Kinzinger shares his thoughts about how Republican Party leaders, after initially condemning Pres. Trump for the January 6 insurrection, later fell back in line with him. He likens his party to a drunk who feels a twinge of remorse following a bender, but then looks to ease the hangover by taking another swig.
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