U.S. Congressman Steve King, a nine-term Republican of Iowa, has just lost his primary to a GOP challenger. It’s a huge fall from grace: In 2014 The Des Moines Register labeled the former earth-moving company founder a “presidential kingmaker.”
But his racist, white nationalist, white supremacist, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, homophobic, transphobic, biphobic remarks and disturbing ties to far right radical European politicians – including one he endorsed who has ties to a neo-Nazi, finally caught up with him.
Iowa Republican Randy Feenstr, a state lawmaker, beat King Tuesday night.
Feenstr handily won because he offered voters a far right Christian conservative platform without the messy extremism, and because King was effectively useless after being stripped of his committee assignments after being condemned for making white supremacist remarks.
The New York Times calls King’s defeat “most likely the final political blow to one of the nation’s most divisive elected officials, whose insults of undocumented immigrants foretold the messaging of President Trump, and whose flirtations with extremism led him far from rural Iowa, to meetings with anti-Muslim crusaders in Europe and an endorsement of a Toronto mayoral candidate with neo-Nazi ties.”
Feenstr faces retired professional baseball player J. D. Scholten, a Democrat, in November.
King was infamous for his offensive comments.
In early January of 2019, King stepped too far over the line, even for the GOP.
“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” he asked in a New York Times interview, ending any question of where he stands, and branding him a white supremacist.
Until that point, King had perhaps been best-known for accusing undocumented immigrants of having “calves the size of cantaloupes” from “running drugs across the Mexican border.”
In 2018 King met with representatives of a far-right party in Austria — and used the financial backing of a Holocaust memorial group to do so.
The following year, in August, King asked, if not for rape and incest, “would there be any population left?”
He has compared transgender service members to eunuchs, predicted a race war between “hispanics and the Blacks,” and insisted that throughout history no other “subgroup of people” have contributed “more to civilization” than whites.