Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) appeared on “The Late Show” on Tuesday following the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
Host Stephen Colbert asked his guests what they expected from Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday.
“Everyone is talking about lowering the temperature, and rightly so,” Colbert said. “What are the signs that he’s following that advice himself?”
“If he said, ‘I’m not going to run,’ that would be a signal to me, right?” Kinzinger, a vocal Trump critic, joked. “That’s a nice thing to say, but it probably won’t happen.”
More seriously, he continued, “If he gets up and talks about policy, talks about issues, makes speeches that he’s basically never made before, I think that’s a sign that he wants to lower the temperature.”
“I really hope so,” he added, but noted that just hours earlier, Trump had posted on Truth Social in a typical tweet calling his criminal case a “witch hunt” orchestrated by the “Democratic Justice Department.”
Trump also called the federal election interference case against him the “January 6th fraud.”
“That’s the thing to keep in mind, they’re still defending it,” said Kinzinger, who served on a House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. “You’re going to see this week that the riots on our Capitol were violent, they attacked police officers, they attacked innocent people, and they pretended it never happened.”
He added: “You can’t try to rebel during a peaceful transfer of power and then act like the other side created the environment for violence in our discussions.”
Trump was officially nominated as the party’s presidential nominee at the RNC on Monday. He was wounded in the ear when a gunman opened fire at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, killing one attendee and wounding two others.
Since then, many politicians have called on the American people to unite and refrain from political rhetoric, but efforts to calm the mood did not last until the first day of the RNC.
Some Republicans have accused Democrats of fomenting the attacks by calling Trump a threat to democracy and highlighting his authoritarian tendencies.
But authorities have yet to release information about the shooter’s motive. He is a registered Republican who once donated $15 to progressive groups.
Watch excerpts from the interview below.
