Adam Kinzinger, a former Illinois GOP congressman, said that he believes former President Donald Trump is “actually going insane,” during a recent interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
Video from the interview was shared by YouTube user Gideon Rubin and published in a Raw Story article Monday. Kinzinger was also featured as part of an Anderson Cooper 360 roundtable last week.
Kinzinger’s comments came in response to Cooper’s questions regarding a threatening post Trump put up on Truth Social. In it he said “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”
This post came shortly after Trump’s third arraignment of the year, and a judge’s warning not to threaten any potential witnesses. Trump’s third indictment is related to his frequent claims of election fraud regarding the 2020 presidential election – he’s accused of conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding and has pleaded not guilty.
In addition to public statements regarding the unfounded election fraud claims and requests for officials to change election results, the events of Jan. 6, 2021 are wrapped up in the allegations. Trump himself was in the Capitol to give a speech referencing his election fraud claims just before the deadly riot broke out. Rioters were attempting to prevent the certification of votes for current President Joe Biden, who beat Trump in the election.
Kinzinger was one of the main Republicans to participate in the House of Representatives investigation into the riot and has been a vocal critic of Trump even though the former president is a GOP darling and is now the party’s frontrunner to be a presidential candidate again in 2024. In December, the House committee announced criminal referrals for Trump.
During the recent interview with Cooper, Kinzinger noted that Trump is “good” at saying things that can have multiple meanings, a skill he said the former president has cultivated over decades. However, at this point, Kinzinger thinks Trump is “literally losing his mind – and I don’t even mean that metaphorically.”
He also said that he doesn’t view threats as “protected political speech.”
Kinzinger is not the first person to question Trump’s mental fitness. In June, The New York Times published letters to the editor from a psychiatrist and psychologist analyzing his behavior.
“This is the central problem that other mental health experts and I addressed in our 2017 book ‘The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump’ and is what makes him unfit to hold high office. He has to be right, never needs to learn from his mistakes, and must protect his inflated and fragile self-image above all else, including the nation’s security,” said Leonard L. Glass, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
“It may be helpful to reconsider Mr. Trump’s behavior as primitive, regressive and best understood outside the parameters of adult thinking,” said Priscilla F. Kauff, a clinical professor of psychology in psychiatry at Weill Medical College.
According to a People magazine preview of “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021”, Trump’s “own chief of staff was reportedly so worried by the former president’s erratic behavior in office that he purchased a book warning about his boss’s mental health.”
Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, another GOP 2024 contender, has called for a mandatory “mental competency test” for politicians over the age of 75. Trump is 77 and Biden, who is running again, is 80. Earlier this summer, an NBC poll showed that “majorities of all registered voters have concerns about both Trump’s and Biden’s mental and physical health,” and reservations about either serving as president again.