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With white nationalism now a main feature of the White House thanks to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller, the days of trying to cast Rep. Steve King as a fringe outlier in the GOP are over.
It’s what Speaker Paul Ryan was trying to do Tuesday, hoping we’d believe that King “misspoke” in his racist tweet even though King confirmed later that he meant every single word. When white nationalists have allies in the halls of Congress and in the Oval Office, it’s hard to argue that this isn’t the GOP mainstream now. In fact, it’s the pro-immigrant faction of the GOP that now seems to be the outlier. As a new editorial from the New York Times states, “Donald Trump is in power, and Mr. King is enjoying a moment of ideological solidarity”:
Mr. King has been at this for years. He has proposed an electrified border fence, to shock migrants like cattle. He said young immigrants have calves like cantaloupes, from hauling marijuana over the border. His foreign babies tweet is more of the same: doomsaying with a side of hate. [...]
Mr. King has long been a leader of the “hell no” caucus, a handful of far-right House Republicans who trolled Congress over immigration reform. They couldn’t remake the system on their own, but during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama years, with the collusion of congressional leaders, they shut down everyone else’s attempts to fix it. [...]
A few in his party have condemned his latest rant, but the White House has been silent. Mr. King’s worldview harmonizes nicely with that of Mr. Trump and the architects of his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim policies, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was among the hardest of Senate immigration hard-liners.
Together they are pushing an old nativists’ dream: a “self-deportation” strategy, also called “attrition through enforcement,” which envisions making America whiter by making life intolerable for unauthorized immigrants. Their crackdown is hurting not only those here illegally but also refugees, asylum seekers, even students and guest workers.
Mr. Trump has worked himself into a frenzy over immigration and crime, and insists on depicting Europe as an immigrant hellhole. [...] Mr. Trump has made his ignorance, or cynicism, quite clear. […] Meanwhile, the damage is piling up. Bomb threats terrorize mosques and synagogues; vandals attack Jewish cemeteries; confused racists attack South Asians. In these conditions, hate effloresces. In the United States, intolerance is in breakout.
Ryan and GOP leaders could take steps to discipline or expel King for his comments, but so far none of that has happened. And until it does, their lack of action speaks more to their complicity than their supposed outrage.