The eight-term congressman has Donald Trump’s backing, and looks likely to be re-elected in November’s midterms despite his ties to European far-right

Nobody in Iowa is undecided, it seems, about whether Steve King, the eight-term Republican congressman, is a racist. The contention is either obviously true – or totally preposterous, depending on whom you ask.

“His comments are so negative and small, and just not very knowledgeable, and condescending,” said Peg Raney, 62, a registered Democrat from Jefferson. “He comes across as very racist.”

Dan Clark, a retired city administrator with a big “King for Congress” sign in his yard in Correctionville, interrupted his lunch to talk with a reporter. Asked whether he thought King, who is up once again for reelection this November, was racist, Clark physically recoiled.

“No, no,” he said. “I’ve never heard anybody talking that he is. He was just a common, ordinary person, not a titled person of any kind before he was first elected, so that’s just kind of what we like.”

Over two decades in Washington, King – whose 2012 campaign slogan was “one wife, one house, and one church for 40 years” – has developed deep support in Iowa’s fourth congressional district, home to shining grain bins, picturesque farms and fading small towns.

Ask people why they like King, and they point to his relatability – “you understand what he says, and you know what he means” – and his reliability on issues such as opposing abortion and promoting corn-based ethanol fuel, two top perennial concerns in the Hawkeye state.

But King also has a national, and an international, reputation, as hard-liner on immigration with a knack for testing the line between conservative messaging and what sounds to a lot of ears like hate speech.

King’s unabashed courtship of controversy has made him a hero to some back home, and won him fans far beyond the heartland, starting with Donald Trump.

“He may be the world’s most conservative human being,” Trump said of King at a recent rally in Council Bluffs. The congressman replied on Twitter: “I do my best to pull President Trump to the right:-)”

Steve King (@SteveKingIA) I’m leaving the White House from a private, 75 minute, Oval Office meeting with America’s President today. @realDonaldTrump & I covered a whole slew of our topics. My agenda was on my hand. pic.twitter.com/bEZyMuIXow

For Americans who feel that the country has gone too far to the right, and failed to confront racism, the Trump presidency has been hard going. The scion of a real estate empire built in part on racial discrimination, Trump began his campaign by stereotyping immigrants, won the election based on a 15-point majority among whites and, as president, defended white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia.

But supporters of Trump have also felt alienated, believing that the left uses the racism charge unfairly, as a cynical cudgel, and that if there is a secret hatred in play, it’s on the other side. In this context, a figure like King can benefit from a partisan circling of the wagons – not that most Republicans admit any need to do so, in King’s case.

At times, King has made statements so suggestive of racial bias – “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” he has tweeted – that he has drawn rebukes from Republican party leaders. But as King asks his district to return him to Congress again in November’s midterm elections, Republican officials and voters in Iowa are doing the opposite of distancing themselves from King, according to dozens of interviews conducted in recent weeks.

Iowa Republicans are proud of Steve King. This is the story of why.

‘He’s very dangerous’

Even in the Trump era, when the bar for shocking speech is high, King has distinguished himself by sharing opinions about “us” and “them” that have drawn expressions of embarrassment and revulsion from some constituents.

Raymond Beebe, 76, a lifelong Republican in Forest City, said he had voted for King in the past “but I’m tired of the embarrassment.”

“The comments,” Beebe said, “I mean they’re all over the place – ‘all uneducated immigrants smuggle drugs,’ ‘black people could afford abortions if they stopped buying iPhones,’ ‘no group has done better for the country than the white people’ – he’s so openly racist, and I find that very abhorrent.”

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The veteran congressman’s horizon, meanwhile, has expanded far beyond the gently sloping fields of soybeans and corn between Kiron, where he lives, and Odebolt, where he goes to church. In recent years, King, a former dirt contractor, has become a kind of American ambassador to the European far-right, although few of his constituents are aware of King’s international profile.

In the course of frequent trips abroad and by hosting at least one reciprocal trip, King has struck up alliances with controversial figures in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Holland, France and the UK. Some of those figures trade in the kinds of appeals to cultural purity and a scapegoating of immigrants and minorities in which historians hear ominous echoes of the political catastrophes of the 20th century.

Steve King (@SteveKingIA) @FraukePetry Wishing you successful vote. Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end. @geertwilderspvv pic.twitter.com/Kp6uieaMDG

King has taken his European friends’ cause to heart. In September, on his most recent of at least six trips to Austria as a member of Congress, King gave an interview to a far-right news outlet in which he decried “Nazi guilt,” saying: “bring pride back to Austria! And bring pride back in to Germany again.” By which he meant, according to his defenders, an innocent pride, of the kind any country should enjoy. King did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.

“Steve King – he’s very dangerous,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University specializing in European fascist movements. “He’s like busy as a beaver – he’s assiduously working to extend the culture of the European right to America, and to make America a partner in this effort to derail democracy.”

To many of King’s constituents in Iowa, such charges might sound outlandish, an example of an overreaction by King’s critics. But if Iowans know King better than anyone, they also have big blind spots about him. Of the dozens of Iowans the Guardian spoke with for this article, including people active in politics, only two were aware of King’s relationship with the Austrian far-right – and one of those two is running against King in next month’s election.

In a conversation by telephone from the cab of his combine as he harvested the year’s bumper crop of soybeans, Will Jones, chairman of the Republican party in Clay county, said he had not heard about King’s Austria trips.

“Truth be told, until you just said it, I’m not even aware of it – so I doubt it plays very strongly,” Jones said. “I hate to say it, but I sit here and listen to talk radio all day in the combine, and read Facebook and the news, and for me not to see something means it must not be playing that well, one way or another.”

‘People understand the message’

Discomfort in Iowa over King’s alleged racism, including among Republicans, has simmered for years, even as the fourth congressional district – which is about 95% white, solidly Republican, and conservative at that – has re-elected King over and over by double-digit margins.

King’s supporters like that he is plainspoken, consistent, working-class, church-going, aggressively pro-life, pro-small-town and tough on immigration. Almost 20 years in Washington has not changed him one bit, they say. They tell stories about his personal approachability and kindness. More than one described King as a kind of proto-Trump: the fearless anti-politician who respects people enough to tell them what he really believes. “You either love him or you hate him,” is the refrain.

“People here are very skeptical of the news because they don’t always tell the truth,” said Julie Kvale, Republican party chair in Winnebago county. “Therefore, I don’t think anything that’s said – I mean, people know Steve King. They know he’s a godly, upright man. And I just don’t believe for one second that there’s going to be anybody that defects for any reason because, Number 1, they won’t really believe it.”

But voters don’t need to take the media’s word for what King is about – as with the president, they can just read his Twitter.

“Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end,” he says. “Diversity is not our strength” he says. Illegal immigration is a “slow-rolling, slow-motion terrorist attack on the United States” and also a “slow-motion Holocaust,” he says.

Steve King (@SteveKingIA) Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies. https://t.co/4nxLipafWO

Of immigrants, King has said, “for every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” Of African Americans, he has said, “They chose to have an abortion. I would give you even money that a vast majority of mothers who say they can’t afford an abortion have an iPhone, which costs more.”

There is context to each of those statements, and if you put any one of them to a King supporter, they will explain that they are not racist statements: that when he talks about “civilization” he is not talking about race, and when he refers to “our babies” he means babies of any color – not just white babies.

“When he says that a lot of the Mexicans have calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re carrying drugs up here – well, that’s a little exaggeration, but it’s understandable,” said Karen Zander, chairman of the Republican party in Franklin county. “People understand the message. And maybe it’s crude, maybe a little mean, but it gets the point across, that illegal drugs are coming from Mexico.”

King supporters also point out that he has made statements that track as painstakingly anti-racist. For example, in explaining his statement about “other people’s babies,” King said: “If you go down the road a few generations or maybe centuries with the intermarriage, I’d like to see an America that’s just so homogenous that we look a lot the same.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest JD Scholten, Democratic candidate for Iowa’s 4th congressional district. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Other Iowans aren’t buying it. Jane Alexander, a farmer from the Jefferson area, spoke with the Guardian at a town hall event for King’s opponent in the 2018 race, Democrat JD Scholten. Asked whether King is a racist, Alexander replied, “If you talk like a duck and you swim like a duck, and you hang around with other ducks…”

Dale Huberg, party chairman in Butler county, said he had noticed “just a little” erosion in support for King among Republicans locally.

“I was putting out yard signs for people and I had one individual who’s a diehard Republican, he didn’t want a sign for Steve King,” said Huberg. “But other than that, nobody has indicated to me that they’re unhappy with him.”

Why didn’t the man want a King sign? Was it an objection to perceived racism?

“He just said he thought he was a crooked son-of-a-bitch.”

‘We live in a time when you can’t say anything’

The suspicion that some Iowans articulate about King’s appeal is that the congressman is channeling his district’s racist anxieties about the thriving immigrant communities attached to the giant packing plants in Denison, Sioux City and Storm Lake.

The need for immigrant labor on dairy farms, in the fields and in processing plants in Iowa, one of the country’s whitest states, has seen the Hispanic population of the state more than double since 2000 and the number of Asian and African Americans living in Iowa grow by at least half each. Students at the high school in Storm Lake, where King was born, are said to speak 17 different languages.

But Charley Thomson, Republican party chairman in Floyd county, said that King’s appeal to his constituents on the immigration issue was not rooted in fear or bigotry.

“I think it’s a misreading of the electorate in this district, to think they’re being driven to the polls by some animus toward outsiders,” Thomson said. “I don’t think that’s the motive at all. I think it’s concern for law and order, and a concern that we have a set of rules that we agree on and we’re going to play by them.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rep. Steve King addresses a crowd in august 2011 at the Ames Straw Poll at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Photograph: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call,Inc.

King supporters present many different understandings of what King’s words mean, while all claiming to understand him perfectly. The Guardian contacted Republican party officials in all 39 counties in King’s district, which is about 150 miles high by 200 miles wide. The Republicans who answered – 20 of them – all said King is not racist.

“All I know is that I don’t think that Congressman King is racist,” said Tim Allen, county chair in Sioux County. “He’s definitely willing to speak his mind and he doesn’t really care what anyone else thinks. I think that he says what he means.”

“The single most racist thing that happens in America today is abortion,” said Craig Williams, chairman of the Republican party in Carroll County. “Abortion affects more black people than anything else going on. Since Roe v Wade, the equivalent of 50% of today’s black Americans are gone. How much more racist can it be than that? And yet the congressman has undying support for life no matter what color they are. The man’s not a racist.”

“We live in a time when you can’t say anything. And you’re automatically called a racist, you’re automatically called a divisive person,” said Wayne Bahr, county chair in Harrison county. “I don’t think that there is a racist intent behind that. I think he’s talking about the clash of civilizations. It’s not an issue of being anti-immigration.”

The “civilization” line is a particularly flexible one in the lexicon of King, who, as an autodidact from the upper Midwest, matches any invention of Twain when he gets going on European and world history. Asked in a radio interview what he meant by the “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies” line, King said, “our stock, our country, our culture, our civilization.”

But elsewhere, King has indicated that when he is talking about “Western civilization” he is talking about “white people.” Rising to bait cast by the politics analyst Charlie Pierce in a 2016 TV interview, King said, “This ‘old white people’ business does get a little tired, Charlie. I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

“Than white people?” TV host Chris Hayes asks.

“Than, than Western civilization itself,” King replies. “It’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That’s all of Western civilization.”

Mark Leonard, Republican county chair in Ida county, said King liked to make certain provocative statements as a goad to fools.

“As a personality thing, Congressman King sometimes says things because he likes to see if it will make you upset, and then blow up and lose your cool and be stupid,” Leonard said.

Asked whether he thought King’s comment about not being able to “restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies” was racist, Leonard said, “No I don’t. I think it’s a reality.”

‘He does fit the district’

Many Iowans see the allegations that King is racist as an attack – either an attack by outsiders on a community of small towns, or an attack by the media, or by Democrats on a Republican target. The division between “us” and “them” is so sharp in the minds of many voters that a question about what is in Steve King’s heart scans as part of that larger battle – and they know which side they are on in that one.

Humboldt county Republican party secretary Dorothy Shoemaker expressed displeasure at being contacted by phone by an out-of-state reporter (albeit a reporter who grew up in what is now Iowa’s 4th district). “I wish there were a way to prevent other people from trying to poke into what we’re doing here in Iowa,” Shoemaker said.

Asked whether King is a racist, Shoemaker said, “I don’t think so at all, any more than I am. One of my college roommates was a black student from Mississippi, that was 1959 and ’60, way before the Civil Rights Act [1964]. She was an ordinary student, she didn’t wear her blackness on her sleeve. She was an ordinary student and accepted as such. So I don’t know why blacks feel they are – ah, a lot of people make their problems… [inaudible].”

Some of the stuff that’s called racism is laughable to anybody with common sense. John Fluit

“The sad part is,” said John Fluit, Republican party chairman for Lyon county, “I think everybody knows, even though it’s way less than it was 100 years ago, there is still racism out there. But they’ve, the Democratic party has done themselves a huge disservice and minorities a huge disservice by screaming ‘fire’ in the theater till ‘fire’ doesn’t mean anything anymore about racism.

“I think the average American, especially a Republican, is so tired of hearing about racism – knowing that 90% probably or whatever, a way big number, maybe not 90%, are based on false claims. Some of the stuff that’s called racism is laughable to anybody with common sense.”

In 2016, King was photographed with a Confederate battle flag on his desk in Washington. It’s not clear why the flag was there – Iowa fought with the Union and the Civil War is over – but King removed it in late 2016, after two police officers were executed outside the state capital of Des Moines, on the eve of Trump’s election, and it emerged that weeks earlier the suspect, a 46-year-old white man, had been escorted by police out of a football game at his daughter’s high school for waving a Confederate flag at a group of African American students.

“That connection to that murderer, and that incident that may or may not have had something to do with him assaulting and murdering those officers, that’s the reason I went and took that flag down off my desk,” King told the Sioux City Journal.

But not every Confederate flag has come down in Iowa’s fourth district. Walk down empty Main Street in tiny Smithland, and there is one planted in a cinder block, near the intersection with Highway 31, out front of a garage with no one inside.

Suzan Stewart, chairman of the Republican party in Woodbury County, home to Sioux City, said King has “a very, very loyal Republican base in northwest Iowa.”

“Democrats or people who want to take offense to him, they latch onto any comment that he may make, but his supporters know the whole Steve King,” said Stewart. “And like I said, I think he fits the district very well. When you really know him, you realize how well he does fit the district.”

‘Germany will take care of me’

This past summer, King traveled once again to Austria, where he appears to have met again with members of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), whose leaders Norbert Hofer, Heinz-Christian Strache and Andreas Karlsböck King hosted at Trump’s inauguration. King also visited Holocaust historical sites in Poland on the trip, which was unwittingly funded by a Holocaust memorial group that did not know about King’s plans to meet with far-right leaders, the Washington Post reported.

The FPÖ was founded in 1956 by a former SS officer. Their denials of an ongoing Nazi affiliation can seem thin: earlier this year, a party leader stepped down after it was revealed that a fraternity he led in the late 1990s distributed a songbook that joked about killing Jews. Meanwhile the party has been gaining power, assuming a junior role in Austria’s governing coalition after winning 26% of the vote in an October 2017 election – and receiving a red-carpet welcome by a US congressman to the inauguration of a US president.

Steve King (@SteveKingIA) Austrian Freedom Party leadership MP's here to celebrate Trump inauguration. Hofer, Strache, Karlsboeck w/King, Blackburn, Bachmann, etc. pic.twitter.com/Hdb86Tzg4q

“They’re extreme parties, and the FPÖ is on record as saying they want to end all immigration and they want to put sanctions against immigrants who won’t integrate,” said Ben-Ghiat, the history professor. “They want to ban Islam because they say it’s a form of fascism. These are very extreme, intransigent positions, and certainly not in harmony with democracy.”

In addition to the FPÖ, King is an enthusiastic friend of far-right figures in Europe including Geert Wilders of Holland, Frauke Petry of Germany, Marine Le Pen of France and Viktor Orban of Hungary. He has inadvertently retweeted the British neo-Nazi Mark Collett, and last week, King tweeted an endorsement of Toronto mayoral candidate Faith Goldy, who in a chummy interview last year with a neo-Nazi web site praised the conduct of white supremacists in Charlottesville.

Steve King (@SteveKingIA) Europe is waking up...Will America...in time? https://t.co/GqZ3E1lCyh

Unlike Iowa Republicans, King’s friends around the world do not display a readiness to talk politics with reporters. An emailed interview request to Goldy was met with the reply “Lol, no”. The FPÖ did not reply to multiple interview requests.

King likewise is hard to pin down, though on his Austria trip he did grant an interview to the site unzensuriert.at, described by Der Spiegel as “a right-wing populist portal for somewhat simpler minds”.

In the interview, King described personally witnessing “thousands of migrants” flowing through Hungary, Serbia and Croatia, headed for western Europe. “I talked to them and here is what I learned from them in my conversations: they are on their way into Germany,” King said. “They were going by train through Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, to Germany. The standard answer was: ‘We are going to Germany.’ How will you live? ‘Germany will take care of me’.”

King does appear to have had some kind of interaction with migrants at or near the Hungarian border, according to people close to him, but his campaign declined to elaborate on the anecdote. It was not clear what language King communicated with the migrants in, or whether he had an interpreter. (King’s first campaign platform was a call to make English the official language of Iowa – which, thanks to King, it now is.)

Also in the interview, King discussed the theory of a “Great Replacement”, which King presented as a shared concern of Austria and the United States and summarized like this: “If we continue to abort our babies and import a replacement for them in the form of young violent men, we are supplanting our culture, our civilization.”

Asked who is behind the “Great Replacement”, King replied with an anti-Semitic smear that is ascendant among figures on the right, including the president. “I guess Soros is part of your question,” King said, referring to George Soros, the Jewish Hungarian currency speculator and philanthropist. “His money floats in in such a way you can’t see the flow, but if you trace it back you can connect it to his foundation.”

King was interviewed for unzensuriert by Caroline Sommerfeld, a controversial German philosopher and an intellectual leader for the “New Right” nationalist movements in Europe.

“He’s interested in European and all these right-wing parties and right-wing movements and so on, because I think he’s searching for kind of allies,” Sommerfeld told the Guardian. “On the one hand intellectual allies, and on the other side political allies.”

If you let too many immigrants in, then this civilization will disappear Caroline Sommerfeld

Asked whether it was valid to compare the combination of notions of cultural purity and alarm at migration in King’s vision for Europe to Naziism, Sommerfeld objected that “on the leftwing political side, almost everything in political discourse is connected to the Nazi topic”, and she said King is not Nazi-aligned.

“It is easy to imagine he comes here and is giving a speech that for sure the academic left would rise up and say here is a Nazi speaking, or an ethnic nationalist, but he isn’t, neither a Nazi nor an ethnic nationalist,” Sommerfeld said.

“He’s much more of a civic nationalist, because what he is always talking about is about European and western civilization. The idea of Western civilization is for him not a question of race but it is a question of a great civilization that should not disappear.

“But if you let too many immigrants in, then this civilization will disappear.”

The word is recurrent: “civilization.” As used by King, it evokes a pure mythic past, which is now said to face a dire external threat, which also turns out to be insidiously internal. In his recent book How Fascism Works, the philosopher Jason Stanley identified such mythologizing as the shared cornerstone of anti-democratic political movements across the 20th century.

“These myths are generally based on fantasies of a non-existent past uniformity,” Stanley writes, “which survives in the traditions of the small towns and countryside that remain relatively unpolluted by the liberal decadence of the cities.”

Though King’s language may be coded, some people hear him loud and clear. When King said “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”, the Ku Klux Klan leader and neo-Nazi David Duke raved: “GOD BLESS STEVE KING!!!”

‘It’s not like we’re selling our beans to Austria’

The man who might beat Steve King is in a booth at the Hy-Vee restaurant in Jefferson, Iowa, grabbing a bite before his third town hall that day.

JD Scholten is a fifth-generation Iowan, a former professional baseball player in international leagues and a candidate who has lapped the 39 counties in Iowa’s fourth congressional district going on three times since he announced. It is hard work trying to beat Steve King. Scholten is trying to win as a Democrat in the 6 November election, in a district with an 11-point Republican slant where Trump won by a 27-point margin.

At six feet, six inches, Scholten’s slogan is “Standing tall for all!” Asked about why King has been traveling to Austria, Scholten says, “Nobody knows. Most people don’t. And it’s on taxpayer dime. And none of that’s for trade, you know? It’s not like we’re selling our beans to Austria all of a sudden.”

The Guardian asked Scholten whether Steve King is a racist.

“I don’t know,” said Scholten. “He’s extremely controversial, and I didn’t run for Congress to call him names. He’s definitely different.

“The irony of him being born in Storm Lake and growing up in Denison is something,” continued Scholten. “Because these are two of the most diverse small towns in Iowa. They’re two meat-packing towns that have accepted diversity and accepted immigration.”

What does Scholten make of all King’s “Western civilization” talk?

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Scholten. “It’s a weird vernacular. So I don’t think it necessarily hits a lot of people. We are so polarized as Americans right now, that when you hear something like that, and the other side jumps on it – the other side is like, ‘Well, we’ll defend it’.

“That’s his strategy – and that’s why he is so out there with his statements. Because he wants to get in that cultural war, so that everybody just gets back in their cave and votes with their party.

“Because he knows he has the numbers.”

As for the chances that the number of Iowa Republicans who have rejected King as a bigot – like Raymond Beebe in Forest City – could reach a critical mass, preventing his reelection, everybody says it’s an uphill fight.

“No matter how bad King is,” said Beebe, “he’s still a hard guy to beat.”

