By EFE
Jun 26, 2024, 1:36 PM EDT
Washington – The American president, Democrat Joe Biden, obtained the public support this Wednesday of former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, a fierce critic of the former president of his same party Donald Trump (2017-2021).
“I am a proud conservative. I have always been it. As a proud conservative, I have always put democracy and our Constitution above all else. And thanks to my unrestricted support for democracy today, as a proud conservative, I support Joe Biden for reelection,” he said in a video.
Kinzinger, 46 years old and representative of the state of Illinois in the Lower House between 2011 and 2023, considered that Trump “poses a direct threat to all fundamental American values.”
“He doesn’t care about our country. He doesn’t care about you. She only cares about himself and will hurt anyone in his pursuit of power. We saw it when he tried to overturn an election that he knew he had lost in 2020,″ he said in reference to the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol.
That day, about 800 Trump supporters forcibly entered the headquarters of Congress while Biden’s victory at the polls was being certified. There were five dead and nearly 140 officers injured.
Trump “attacked the foundation of this nation, encouraging a violent mob of his supporters to march on the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transition of power. Now it has become even more dangerous. (…) He wants to be a dictator on the first day, in fact he has said that. And he continues to fan the flames of political violence. “There is too much at stake to sit on the sidelines,” Kinzinger warned.
For Julie Chavez, campaign manager for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the former Republican congressman represents the “countless” Americans whom the Republican Party “has abandoned.”
These people, he said, “have a place in Biden’s coalition,” who he stressed “will always fight for democracy, for the rule of law” or for working to find common ground, even when there are divergences.
Kinzinger’s support, a minority in a Republican party that even among its most critical factions has not broken ranks with Trump, comes the day before the two presidential candidates face each other in their first presidential debate of the current campaign.
The two candidates arrive at Thursday’s face-to-face meeting practically tied, although for the first time in months the current president leads his rival. According to the average of surveys prepared by the FiveThirtyEight website, he garners 40.8% of voting intentions, one tenth more than Trump.
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