Jeremy Peters - Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted

I have the tough people, but they dont play it toughuntil they go to a certain point. And then it would be very bad, very bad.

President Donald J. Trump , in an interview with Breitbart News, March 13, 2019

Adam Kinzinger had a higher threshold than most for danger. But something about January 6, 2021, made the forty-two-year-old Air Force veteran uneasy as he got ready to go into work. As a combat pilot, he had flown missions in Iraq and Afghanistan during the wars. When he was in his twenties, he helped apprehend a knife-wielding man in downtown Milwaukee whod just slashed a woman in the face, chasing the man down and pinning him to the ground until police arrived. Kinzinger was one of eighty-seven Republicans swept into the House of Representatives in 2010 with the help of the Tea Partythat anvil of resentment and rage that promised to flatten Washington and Take America Back, as a popular slogan at the time summed up the movements animating spirit. Kinzinger believed that the country was a pretty dysfunctional place then.

The federal government was saddled with more than $13 trillion in debt and on the verge of implementing a costly new government-run healthcare system. Kinzinger, like many of his new colleagues, ran on a message that the Democrats and their new president, Barack Obama, were gambling with the countrys future by spending so much money. He won Sarah Palins endorsement, one of most coveted imprimaturs of maverick conservative authenticity. Kinzinger sometimes shook his head when he thought about his generationthe generation that would soon be in chargewith a kids these days sense of apprehension.

At first, many of Kinzingers fellow freshman Republicans struck him as the solution. They were willing to fight for their country, if not physically like he had, then on the field of representative democracy, which he considered the next best thing. They showed up for work in the U.S. Capitol with their foam mattresses and toothbrushes, saying they would rather live in their offices than rent an apartment and lay down roots in the swamp that was Washington. Like a liberating army, they would secure the place and then be gone. But it didnt take Kinzinger long to see an ugly, irrational side to many of his Tea Party allies. They scorned him for siding with Republican leadership in debates over spending. Fiscal hawks like Paul Ryan, a forty-one-year-old rising star from Wisconsin, were calling for enormous cuts to social programs, and yet hard-right Tea Party members wanted to cut even more. In an attempt to punish Kinzinger for the perceived betrayal, activists leaked his cellphone number online along with the numbers of other members who had gone along with the smaller cuts. Looking back on the incident years later, he realized that was when he could see the movement was more reactionary and vindictive than what he had signed up for. The beginning of the new Tea Party, he says. Whether it was the portent of something new or the moment the pretenses about the Tea Partys true character fell away, Republicans like Kinzinger could no longer deny that the insurgency they rode to power was turning on their party from within.

Kinzinger had grown alarmed about what might happen on January 6 as it became clear that President Donald Trump and his supporters would not accept defeat. He saw how Trumps most devoted followers werent becoming less enamored with him. Instead, they were taking up his latest rallying crySTOP THE STEALjust as they had with his others like BUILD THE WALL and LOCK HER UP. After multiple people were stabbed at a pro-Trump rally in Washington in December, Kinzinger thought the presidents insistence that he had been cheated of victory had gone beyond self-indulgent delusion. It might get someone killed. And the rally scheduled for the sixth, billed as the Save America Rally, seemed like the place Kinzinger thought it might happen, since that was the day the United States Congress would make official the reality that Trump and his followers refused to accept.