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For years, Rep. Steve King maintained a certain level of impunity, even when he made controversial remarks. But as he heads for a reelection fight closer than expected, he may start paying the price.
In recent days, Iowa Republican has lost support from a growing number of companies, including Purina Petcare, Land O'Lakes and Intel; Steve Stivers, chairman of the National Republican Congress Committee, faced an extraordinary reprimand; and saw a revival of funds from his Democratic opponent, former minor league pitcher, J.D. Scholten.
King has long been known for his inflammatory comments on demographic changes and immigration to America. That did not prevent him from being elected to eight terms in the House.
But in the face of a fierce opponent who raises more money, King has begun to be criticized for some of his recent actions:
• Retweeting a Nazi sympathizer. In June, King retweeted the British British nationalist Mark Collett, who described himself as a "Nazi sympathizer" and an admirer of Hitler's Germany. In the middle of criticism, King refused to apologize or delete the tweet.
• To approve a white nationalist. In mid-October, King endorsed Faith Goldy, a white nationalist mayoral candidate for Toronto, claiming that "Canada was undergoing a" white genocide "" and recited a slogan of white supremacy in a 2017 radio show. .
• Meeting with an Austrian party of the far right. During a recent trip to Europe, King met with members of an Austrian far-right party founded by a former Nazi SS officer and interviewed their website in which he referred to the "Great replacement ", a theory of the white supremacist plot.
"What does this diversity bring that we do not have already?", He declared on the website of the Austrian party for freedom. "Mexican food, Chinese food, these things are good. But what does it bring that we do not have who is worth the price? We already have a lot of diversity in the United States. "
Such comments were not really surprising. After all, King has long made similar remarks.
Although he came from Iowa, he raised a Confederate flag on his congressional desk and tried to block the addition of Harriet Tubman to the $ 20 bill. He described former President Barack Obama as "very, very urban," claiming that whites were doing more than "any other subgroup of people" to contribute to civilization and argued that counter-partisans at 39, a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, were perhaps at fault due to the deadly shock last May.
He stated that undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers include many people with "calves the size of cantaloupes" to "carry 75 kilos of marijuana across the desert," referred to the citizenship of the right to birth as part of "We can not restore our civilization with the babies of someone else." He argued that there was an "effort" to use illegal immigration to replace the children who were aborted, said that "the vast majority of mothers who say they do not have the means to have an abortion have an iPhone, which costs more "lead to a" dying civilization. "
Ironically, King could have problems partly because of the president. Trump's inflammatory remarks about immigration and demographic changes drew attention to this controversy just before the elections, preventing King from going unnoticed. House Republicans, already annoyed by Trump's debate over the end of citizenship, do not want to defend King, especially in light of the Pittsburgh shootings.
This is doubly true when King explicitly tried to link them, claiming that the far-right groups he met: "if they were in America to push the platform they were pushing, they would be Republicans ".
But in the end, King could be in trouble for the same reason that other long-time incumbents have lost: he was caught off guard.
While he was meeting a far-right group in Europe, his opponent drove a Winnebago in rural Iowa to meet voters on the fair circuit. His fundraising was way behind Scholten, who surpassed him by nearly $ 950,000. Scholten also came from nowhere to almost match King in the followers of Twitter.
And while many voters in a Conservative district who chose Trump at 61% have never been bothered by King's rhetoric, there are signs that it is to the detriment of talking about local issues.
Sioux city Newspaper, who had endorsed him in the past but who opposed his opponent this year, said in an editorial that all of King's meetings with far-right groups represented a time when he was not working at the ground for the district.
"As we said before, we would prefer that King spend less time" saving "Western civilization and making a national name as a conservative leader trying to move the nation to the right of politics. ", writes the editorial board of the newspaper. "We would prefer that he commit to becoming, for example, a more influential Congress leader in the agriculture sector."
If King loses, he may not have gone too far in his inflammatory comments, but he has not worked hard enough to win.
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