Rep. Steve King on Trump’s immigration stance
By Alex Bregman
Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, a staunch proponent of strict immigration laws, spoke to Yahoo News Guest Anchor Stephanie Sy about Donald Trump’s position on immigration, which has come into question in recent days.
On the question of whether Trump has softened his stance on deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants, which is something Trump hinted at earlier in the week before pushing back in a new interview Thursday, King told Sy, “It’s an open question at this point, and the question has been getting opened up a little bit more in the last two or three days. I don’t see how this language turns it into a hardening, but it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s softening his position, either.”
King said if Trump is wavering on his mass deportation policy, that would be against the rule of law. He said, “I would say the question to ask Donald Trump is: Will you or will you not support a legalization of people who are in this country unlawfully today, and if you support legalization for people that are unlawfully in America, then you’ve rewarded law-breaking, and you cannot support the respect for the rule of law if you reward law-breaking.”
King also indicated that if Trump is changing his position, it could lead to a lot of his potential supporters to stay home in November. He told Sy, “Our choices really are Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, but there’s another choice out there that people exercised in 2012: 5 to 8 million evangelicals stayed home, or we’d be talking about the reelection of Mitt Romney today.” He continued, “I think Donald Trump has to watch that very carefully. Not enough evangelicals have come forward. His core base are the rule-of-law, seal-the-border and enforce-immigration-law people, and if they lose faith in him, they could stay home the same way evangelicals stayed home in 2012.”
King insisted, though, that he will vote no matter what: “I won’t stay home. I’ll go in every election that I can.”
On Hillary Clinton accusing Trump of “a steady stream of bigotry,” Rep. King said it reminded him of former president Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. He said, “It causes me to roll my eyes a little bit and exhale. How many generations of this do we have to hear? Bill Clinton started this in 1992 when he said he would name his cabinet to, quote, ‘look like America,’ and it turned out to be a color-coded quota cabinet, not a meritocracy. He found that he could build coalitions of minorities and got to enough votes that he could be elected president.”
On Trump calling Hillary Clinton a “bigot,” King was critical of the term but blamed its use on Clinton’s campaign tactics. He said to Sy, “I prefer not to use the name-calling myself, and I wouldn’t say I’m completely absolved of that. All of us have things that we carry along with us, but I do think that it cheapens the use of the word. But the word that is being hurled back at her is, I believe, being hurled back at her and not initiated by Donald Trump.”
Finally, King refused to make any predictions about who will win in November but said, “I think either one of them could implode. I think Donald Trump, though, has shown a significant resilience, so I don’t know how that actually happens. In Hillary’s case, there have been so many holes poked in her boat, it’s a wonder it’s still afloat.”
