On Thursday, Republican former Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois addressed this week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which concluded that night. He condemned Republican nominee Donald Trump — pointing to concerns including the violence at the U.S. Capitol of January 6, 2021 — and rallied by Democratic pick Kamala Harris, currently the vice president.
“Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong,” Kinzinger said. “He is a small man pretending to be big. He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim. He puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there. […] Trump has suffocated the soul of the Republican Party. His fundamental weakness has coursed through my party like an illness, sapping our strength, softening our spine, whipping us into a fever that has untethered us from our values.”
Kinzinger targeted Republicans who might have been listening.
“Listen, to my fellow Republicans, if you still pledge allegiance to those principles, I suspect you belong here too. Because democracy knows no party. […] If you think those principles are worth defending, then I urge you: Make the right choice. Vote. Vote for our bedrock values. And vote for Kamala Harris,” he said.
The convention also heard from several other high-profile Republicans, including multiple former officials in the Trump administration. And on Thursday, Harris herself spoke, accepting the party’s 2024 presidential nomination after the rapid political developments of the preceding month in which Democrats moved their support from President Joe Biden, who withdrew from this year’s presidential race, to Harris, who the president endorsed.
Biden himself spoke at this week’s convention, as did former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, former First Lady Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and a whole host of others. And Harris is sticking to the campaign trail. She and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, were campaigning in Wisconsin the night of a roll-call vote at the Democratic convention formalizing the two’s respective nominations.
