“And it looked like this: 10 feet wide, 13 and 1/2 feet tall. It’d construct itself to be a 12-foot finished wall, just like that.” That’s Representative Steve King — “We do that with livestock all the time.” — pitching the idea of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, more than a decade before it became President Donald Trump’s central immigration policy. “The wall’s going to get built folks, just in case anybody has any question. The wall’s going to get built.” King has been a Republican member of Congress from Iowa for the past 16 years. “The gentleman from Iowa is recognized.” He’s made a name for himself as a hard-line opponent of illegal immigration and for his inflammatory, sometimes racist, statements — “We are the immigrants!” — like when he disparaged so-called “Dreamers,” children brought by their parents as undocumented immigrants, in 2013. “For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there that — they weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” King was an early and fervent supporter of Donald Trump. “He’s a quick study. He’s an astute study. And if you explain something to Donald Trump, he’s listening carefully, and you need to get it right.” And the feeling has been mutual. “He may be the world’s most conservative human being.” [cheering] Trump’s election in 2016 gave King a staunch ally in the White House. These days, the president’s statements sound like echoes of things King said years earlier. “It’s our job, here in this Congress, to decide who will be citizens, not someone in a foreign country that can sneak into the United States and have a baby and then go home with a birth certificate.” King’s ideas and public statements, which once seemed fringe, now appear in the national discourse. His views are central to the white identity politics that heavily influence the Trump administration. The Iowa congressman’s ultra-conservative ideas have been a long time in the making. “Preventing babies to be — from being born is not medicine. That’s not constructive to our culture and our civilization. If we let our birth rate get down below the replacement rate, we’re a dying civilization. And right now —” King has denied that his statements are racist and often invokes the idea of protecting our civilization. It’s a concept of national identity and racial superiority that’s a common talking point among white nationalists. In an interview on MSNBC, King himself explained. “Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?” “Than white people?” “Than Western civilization itself, that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity —” “What about Africa?” “— settled the world.” “What about Asia?” “That’s all of Western civilization.” “But what about Africa? And what about Asia?” He’s even gotten close to white nationalists outside of the U.S., appearing with far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders. King has also been to Austria several times since 2013, where he’s cozied up to the far-right Freedom Party. Back at home, King has been re-elected eight times and is considered a party kingmaker in Iowa. But the 2018 midterms were his toughest contest yet. He won by just three points. And days before the election, a member of his own party called King out as a white supremacist. After more than a decade in Congress, his rhetoric may be finally catching up with him.