Iowa Congressman Steve King is no stranger when it comes to making the sort of vile, indefensible statements that place him squarely in the white supremacist wing of the GOP. King has previously raged against “somebody else’s babies” threatening “our civilization,” and once told a DACA recipient raised in the United States that she was “very good at English.”


So it was perfectly in character when, on Wednesday morning, King went on CNN and suggested that the United States could pay for Donald Trump’s proposed border wall with Mexico by literally taking food away from the poorest, most disadvantaged people in the country.

Speaking with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota, King explained that not only would be comfortable using over $1.5 billion of U.S. taxpayer funds to help build the wall—despite president Trump’s repeated insistence that Mexico would be footing the bill—but that he wouldn’t stop there (emphasis mine):

“I’d throw another $5 billion on the pile, and I would find half of a billion of dollars of that right out of Planned Parenthood’s budget. And the rest of it could come out of food stamps and the entitlements that are being spread out for people who have not worked in three generations.”


For King, poor people having food to eat is of less importance than a bloated infrastructure project of dubious effectiveness, some 1,000+ miles away from his congressional district.

Truly, Steve King is a man with his constituents’ interests at heart.