My, how things change so quickly these days among Republican friends. Just a few weeks ago Senator Joni Ernst and Representative Steve King of Iowa shared a warm embrace – there are photos of it all over the internet since Ernst condemned King last weekend for wondering whatever happened to good old white supremacy. And then the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, was going to take King out to the woodshed on Monday for a good talking-to about his latest utterances, the likes of which Ernst and McCarthy ignored over the past 16 years. The House Democrats, who never shed a dime trying to unseat King, now want to censure him.

The hypocrisy is epic and comic.

King, 69, has talked redneck since he ran for the Iowa senate from Kiron. Nothing new there. It got him so popular with the base to become Governor Kim Reynolds’ campaign chairman in November. Ted Cruz, who also last weekend gave King the Judas kiss with that new beard of his, used to pick off pheasants on a dude ranch near Akron with the Sage of North-west Iowa. Cruz once so admired King that the Texan said that Chuck Norris sleeps in Steve King pajamas. This as Cruz was telling a Dreamer from Storm Lake that he would deport her first thing if he were running this show.

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Pining for the good old days when Mexicans kept their heads down picking lettuce, nobody raised an objection when King and Trump repeat that Latino teens are a bunch of drug-runner-good-for-nothings. But when it allows a Democrat to come close in this little slice of Texas that is western Iowa, well, that is another matter entirely.

Dawn came on the Wednesday following the midterm election to reveal that it was not a dream: Democrat JD Scholten had come within three points of King with almost no funds. A used Winnebago camper was his campaign centerpiece and home on the road. The entire GOP establishment was shaken in its boots: voters were getting fed up with institutional racism.

'He's so openly racist': why does Iowa keep electing Steve King to Congress? Read more

The money in Des Moines talked state senator Randy Feenstra of Hull into running. He is a darling of radical conservatives, a Dordt College professor who is more polite about plans to deport millions of immigrants and turn back desperate asylum seekers. Feenstra proclaims that he walks every step with Trump but is not as “caustic” as King. That is, not as frank.

King’s brand always has been a straight shooter not afraid of what anyone thinks. He showed Trump the way to The Wall. Right after Feenstra announced, King was berating him on Twitter for disloyalty. After he was stripped of his agriculture and judiciary committee assignments by McCarthy, King declared defiantly that he had been denied his free-speech rights and that he was the victim of “a political decision that ignores the truth”. King will tell the base that he and Trump walk the lonely path alone to recovering our greatness. Feenstra and McCarthy and the rest of them are afraid of what he represents, and what is so wrong with white nationalism anyhow?

Other challengers gather. One is a popular county supervisor from populous Story county (Ames, home of Iowa State University), another a businessman from rural Shelby county. One could imagine others, and how that clears an easy path for a King renomination.

Which leaves many of us confused, chief among them Scholten. He thinks he can beat King, but he has not fully sized up Feenstra. “They really like him up there,” Scholten said of Sioux and surrounding counties, which we call Dutch country for all the conservative Hollanders.

That’s 80% of the GOP in the 39-county fourth district.

King does not need the judiciary committee to give him voice when Fox News is standing by

Yet Scholten is scheduled to speak with the Sioux county Democrats. If Republicans could clear the field for a Feenstra-King showdown (which they can’t, really), would the people who have loved King for so long abandon him for a nicer and seemingly less nutty version in Feenstra? If Trump be our guide, then no. King will not back down. Losing a committee assignment from a minority backbench is liberating to King, certainly not punishing. He does not need the judiciary committee to give him voice when Fox News is standing by – and they will stand by. He never needed the congressional campaign money before. Why would he need it now when he earns so much publicity for nothing? He knows the wingnuts will come through for him, from Austria to Alabama.

This will be a lingering problem for Ernst, facing re-election in 2020. Scholten knows it. He wants to run against her but knows how formidable any incumbent is, especially her. The entire Republican machinery that owns Iowa government will be at her shoulder. Scholten doesn’t think former governor Tom Vilsack will run. Scholten already was wedding Ernst to King irrevocably on Twitter over the weekend, along with tens of thousands of others. Those reminders will linger and amplify and stew over the next couple of years.

Steve King is every Iowa Republican’s tar baby who cannot be shaken off their boots like a bread bag that Ernst put on hers waiting for the school bus along that gravel road. Ernst could be Scholten’s opportunity. He came so close to King he has this Beto zeitgeist thing going. A betting man might lay odds that King will prevail in a primary as a visionary zealot who prepared the way for our fearless and feckless leader Trump. The Establishment is playing into King’s hands: a GOP primary scares off Scholten, who developed a pretty broad following in his introductory campaign, and King waltzes back in. It’s what King lives for. You can’t march with Trump and shrug off King. He is part of the bargain.

• Art Cullen is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of The Storm Lake Times in Northwest Iowa. He also is the author of the new book Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper (Viking).