The New York Times gets action! It’s been just five days since the paper published a piece about the race-baiting G.O.P. representative from Iowa, Steve King, and quoted him as saying, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

Amid the resultant outcry, Kevin McCarthy, the new House Minority Leader, promised over the weekend that King would be punished for what he had said. On Monday night, McCarthy and the G.O.P. leadership in the House stripped King of his positions on the Agriculture, Judiciary, and Small Business committees. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, said that if King didn’t understand the meaning of his words then he “should find another line of work.” Things didn’t end there.

On Tuesday morning, Liz Cheney, a representative from Wyoming and the highest-ranking woman in the House G.O.P. conference, echoed McConnell’s statement and explicitly called on King to resign. “His language questioning whether or not the notion of white supremacy is offensive is absolutely abhorrent. It’s racist,” Cheney said. “We do not support it or agree with it.” On Tuesday afternoon, the full House passed a resolution, 421–1, that was intended as a rebuke to King. It said that the chamber “once again rejects White nationalism and White supremacy as hateful expressions of intolerance that are contradictory to the values that define the people of the United States.”

Fine language, but what are we really to make of all this? To begin with, it is worth listening to the sole member of the House who voted against Tuesday’s resolution: the Chicago Democrat Bobby Rush. As Rush pointed out before the vote, King has “made a career of making racist statements.” In 2012, King compared immigrants to dogs, saying that America should take only “the pick of the litter,” and in 2013 he said that immigrants have “calves the size of cantaloupes” from hauling marijuana across the desert. More recently, he has fraternized with far-right groups in Europe and expounded the theory that “Western civilization,” which to him and his followers connotes white civilization, was about to be swamped by hordes of nonwhite immigrants and babies—a theory known on the far-right as “the Great Replacement.” (In an interview with a far-right party in Austria last year, he expostulated at length on this subject.)

In view of these precedents, which were well known in Republican circles, Rush argued that the House resolution, which didn’t even mention King’s name, should have been replaced by a formal motion of censure. Lending support to this argument was the fact that King himself was one of the representatives who voted for the resolution. “I’ve carefully studied every word in this resolution and even though I’d add some more that are stronger language, I agree with the language in it,” King said. After the vote was taken, Rush remained unimpressed. “It is not strong enough,” he said. “We need to censure Steve King.”

Another point of note is that Donald Trump, who comments on virtually everything, still hasn’t availed us of his opinions on the King controversy. When reporters asked him about it on Monday, Trump said, “I haven’t been following it. I really haven’t been following it.” That’s hard to believe. The original Times article, which was written by Trip Gabriel, demonstrates that, in demonizing immigrants and promoting race-based conspiracy theories, King helped pave the way for the nativist campaign that Trump ran in 2016, the hateful language that Trump used about undocumented migrants, and the sorts of immigration policies that he has enacted since entering the Oval Office. Trump appeared with King during the Presidential campaign and invited him to the Oval Office, where, King told Gabriel, the President boasted to the congressman about how much money he had raised for him. “Yes, Mr. President,” King replied. “But I market-tested your immigration policy for fourteen years, and that ought to be worth something.”

Perhaps Trump still thinks that he owes King something. Perhaps he doesn’t want to sound hypocritical. Just last year, he warned that immigration was “changing the culture” of Europe. Before that, he hired Steve Bannon, another recent champion of white nationalism, as his campaign manager and senior political adviser at the White House. If Trump were to try to repudiate King and his beliefs at this point, it simply wouldn’t be credible, and it might well alienate some of his more rabid supporters.

On top of that, Trump may well be sympathetic to King’s current predicament, which is one that he has some familiarity with. In August, 2017, after he said that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the violence in Charlottesville, he came under enormous pressure to correct himself. Reluctantly, he delivered a public statement in which he called racism “evil”and white supremacists “repugnant,” but he looked mightily uncomfortable doing it. According to Bob Woodward, Trump later told associates that delivering the speech was “the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made.”

Trump hasn’t made the same “mistake” again, and he’s highly unlikely to do it now. The great irony, of course, is that, unlike King, he can be as offensive as he likes about Latino migrants, black celebrities and politicians, and other minorities, without having to worry about senior Republicans on Capitol Hill supporting motions of repudiation or censure, let alone threatening his job. Just a couple of days ago, he once again referred to Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” and made a joke about the “Wounded Knee” massacre of 1890, when members of the Seventh Cavalry killed hundreds of Sioux Indians, including defenseless mothers and children. (In 1990, a century on, Congress formally apologized to the descendants of the victims but did not grant reparations or declare the site a memorial.)

On Tuesday, a reporter asked Mitch McConnell about why he had criticized King’s comments to the Times but had kept silent about the President’s expressions of racism. “Look, it’s been my practice for the last couple of years not to make sort of random observations of the President tweeting and other stuff,” McConnell replied. “Congressman King clearly uttered words that are unacceptable in America.”

That was a double standard, of course. About the only currency that McConnell recognizes is power, and Trump has a lot more of it than King does, including the power to target anyone in the Republican Party who criticizes him. So the Iowa congressman gets sanctioned, and his soul mate in the White House gets a free pass.