Rep. Steve King not only one using racist comments
Breaking news: House Republicans strip Iowa Congressman Steve King of his committee assignments as punishment for his racist comments.
Does that mean we’re all supposed to stand up and applaud Republicans for their bold show of courage? No way. At best, their action deserves the sound of one hand clapping.
Yes, it was right to condemn King’s outrageous comment to The New York Times: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” That statement was, indeed, way beyond what should be tolerated from any member of Congress.
But Republicans’ sudden outrage over King raises two questions.
First: Why’d they wait so long? This is nothing new for King. He has a 15-year history of making racist statements and associating with white supremacists worldwide.
Since first elected to Congress in 2002, King has been the champion of making English the official language of the United States, an inherently racist move.
As early as 2006, he claimed that 25 Americans are killed every day by undocumented immigrants — “a slow-motion Holocaust” — and proposed construction of a wall along the southern border. King was also the leading member of Congress to embrace the birther movement led by Donald Trump.
In 2013, King, who kept a Confederate flag on his office desk, led opposition to legal status for Dreamers, acknowledging that some of them might become model citizens, but: “For everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert. Those people would be legalized with the same act.”
In 2016, speaking on MSNBC at the Republican National Convention, King questioned what contribution, if any, nonwhites had made to civilization.
Meanwhile, King associated with known white supremacists. He endorsed Faith Goldy, neoNazi candidate for mayor of Toronto. He invited far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders to the Capitol.
He traveled to Europe to meet with neo-Nazi leaders in Austria and France’s Marine Le Pen, and tweeted his support for Hungary’s new authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban.
And, all that time, how did fellow Republicans treat King? Reject him? No, they loved him and embraced him. Trump campaigned for him in 2014, declaring “I am just a big fan in what he stands for.”
In 2016, Ted Cruz made him national co-chair of his presidential campaign. Last year, he was endorsed for re-election by both of Iowa’s U.S. senators, Charles Grassley and Jodi Ernst, and, again, by Trump, who praised him as maybe “the world’s most conservative human being.”
Which raises the second question: How can Republicans possibly condemn King, while condoning Trump?
That doesn’t compute. On many issues, like the wall, King was the precursor to Trump. And today they stand for the same things: anti-immigrant, white supremacists, white nationalism.
Trump simply took the King playbook into the White House — and expanded it.
It was Trump, not King, who said there were some “very fine people” among the white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.
It was Trump, not King, who called all Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. It was Trump, not King, who said we didn’t need any more immigrants from s---hole countries.
It was Trump, not King, who led the birther movement challenging the legitimacy of our first African-American president.
So Republicans don’t deserve any credit for dumping on King while turning a blind eye to equally outrageous statements and actions by Trump.
King has no power over them; Trump does. Trump inspires fear in them; King does not. So, in a display of cowardice and hypocrisy, they go after the easier target.
As Peter Wehner, former domestic policy adviser to President George W. Bush told the Times: “You can’t condemn
Steve King and not condemn Donald Trump and pretend that you’re doing the right moral and ethical thing.”
Long before King, Trump was the first to preach and practice the poison of white supremacy. To take a tough stand against racism in any form, don’t start with King, start with Trump.
Tribune Content Agency