We presume that all the people holding their breath while waiting for the Republican Party to distance itself even the teensiest bit from Donald Trump's authoritarian, anti-American, anti-Republican pronouncements have already long since asphyxiated, so the news that the malevolent and racist Rep. Steve King has jumped aboard the Defend Vladimir Putin bandwagon will probably surprise nobody at this point.
Republican Iowa Congressman Steve King argued Sunday that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was not nearly as bad as critics charged, noting that Putin never murdered one of his prominent critics.
Republican Sen. Ben Sasse had previously in the day gently suggested that perhaps pooh-poohing away political murders by the Russian autocrat was not a swift move by President Manchild. In Trump's newly reforged party, this counts as a controversial statement. Steve King couldn't let that stand.
King also said that Putin was not as bad as Sasse was making him out to be. “Freedom of the press, dissent, I would say– Garry Kasparov now lives in the United States. He lived a long time in Russia with a very loud megaphone, and he’s still alive and well.”
It may be true that Putin's government has murdered both critical journalists and political opponents, but hey—look at this guy he hasn't murdered! He can't be that bad, right?
Because Steve King is himself both deeply stupid and an unsubtle would-be autocrat himself, Steve King appears to be unaware that Garry Kasparov has not returned to Russia since 2013 for fear of arrest, calling it "the dark reality of the situation in Russia today." His previous protests against the Russian leader had resulted in multiple arrests and two beatings, so King praising the Russian authorities for not murdering him outright, either in Moscow or in New York City, seems thin.
So there's your answer, at least from the Steve King branch of the Republican Party: If the choice to be made is distancing themselves from Donald Trump or embracing him, they continue to choose the embrace. Even if it means retooling The Party's stance on Vladimir Putin. Even if it means supporting the Republican leader as he muses that political murders aren't that far off from what we in America are already doing. And so on, and so forth.
Which is, of course, how we got here. If Steve King's seat were held by a decent man there would be no room for Donald Trump in the party. If Paul Ryan held any ideological belief powerful enough to withstand Donald Trump telling him to do the opposite, there would be no room for Donald Trump in the party. If Mitch McConnell didn't launch his own attacks on the judiciary branch by crafting a new segregationist policy to separate out the Supreme Court nomination powers of the first black president and declare them unequal to the presidents before or since, there would be no room for Donald Trump to threaten individual judges today.
But here we are. And now Rep. Steve King is telling us that if the foreign autocrat so admired by Trump was as bad as critics say, he would have killed all his political opponents, not just some of them. Should we be taking that as Republican policy statement as well?