‘Do you have contempt for my views?’ How a leftwing film-maker and a Republican came together

"Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. 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."

It was no surprise to hear such rhetoric cheered to the rafters at the recent Democratic national convention in Chicago. But the words were not spoken by a Democrat. They came from the mouth of a stranger in a strange land: the former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger.

It was the latest example of how the Trump era has created strange bedfellows. The former first lady Michelle Obama hugging ex-president George W Bush. Liberal audiences in Washington DC standing to applaud the arch conservative Liz Cheney. Even Trump's vice-president, Mike Pence, has earned grudging praise for defying his boss when it mattered most.

But there are few odder couples than Kinzinger and Steve Pink, a leftwing Hollywood film director who aligns himself with the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic party. They came together to make The Last Republican, a debut documentary by Pink that follows Kinzinger's year of living dangerously as a Never Trumper on Capitol Hill. It premiered at the Toronto film festival last week.

The film opens with Kinzinger expressing his and his wife's doubts about the project and telling Pink: "I recognise that you have contempt for what I believe, like, in terms of my political viewpoints. I think in any other situation you probably would be protesting my office. You're just so far left."

Pink objects that is kind of mean. Kinzinger asks: "Do you have contempt for my views, Steve?"

We do not hear Pink's reply. But in a Zoom interview from Los Angeles, the 58-year-old elaborates: "When it comes to strictly politics, I wouldn't say I hold them in contempt although, when I'm feeling belligerent, I do hold them in contempt because I have very deeply opposing views.