The Register's editorial

It finally happened: After years of embarrassing Iowans with his white nationalist rhetoric, Iowa Congressman Steve King has apparently become a liability to national Republicans and some of the businesses that have backed him financially.

This week, days after a gunman slaughtered 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, King is paying the price for his increasingly blatant appeals to the forces of racism and xenophobia.

A major agribusiness, Land O’Lakes, announced Tuesday that its political action committee would no longer donate to King’s campaign. By the end of the day, pet food company Purina had followed suit, saying King's recent statements conflict with its values. That came a day after it was reported that Intel Corp. sent an internal company memo to employees that said its political committee would no longer donate to King.

Then, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Rep. Steve Stivers, R-Ohio, denounced King on Twitter, saying King’s recent comments and actions were “totally inappropriate.”

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Meanwhile, Iowa Republican leaders have occasionally dared to disagree with King when asked, but have not called him out for his hateful rhetoric. Gov. Kim Reynolds has kept him on as her campaign co-chairman, while muttering increasingly thin-lipped denials that she agrees with his ideological extremism.

Republican leaders could get away with that until now. The GOP has been turning a deaf ear for years as King has vilified undocumented immigrants as drug mules, palled around with alt-right international leaders and declared himself the defender of the white man’s culture.

National Republican leaders had nothing to say when King endorsed a white-supremacist candidate for mayor of Toronto, Canada. As Register columnist Rekha Basu noted, however, conservative media representatives, including writers for the Washington Examiner and Weekly Standard, called out King as “deplorable” and entirely focused on race-based politics.

More:Taxpayers fund Steve King's research on 'other people's babies'

Even so, the GOP’s upper echelon could have passed for oil paintings after it was reported that King met with the leader of a far-right Austrian group associated with the neo-Nazi movement — while on a trip paid for by a group dedicated to preserving the history of the Holocaust.

They have until now been safe in the knowledge that King’s constituents would keep sending him back to Washington, regardless of how many taxpayer dollars he spent soaking up right-wing nationalism in Europe instead of working for his district. That needs to change. Iowans should not let them brush this off with a wink and a shrug.

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King, in a tweet, blamed it all on “fake news” and “establishment Republicans and never-Trumpers.” Update: On Thursday, he strongly rejected an assertion by a member of the public who linked some of his past comments on race and immigration to a shooter who killed 11 Jews at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Sound like anyone else we know?

The day after the attack in Pittsburgh, Trump issued a series of tweets blaming the “fake news media” for hatred and division in the country. This, after he complained that the mailing of bombs to his prominent critics and media outlets was slowing the GOP momentum and after he refused to cancel a campaign rally on the day of the Tree of Life killings.

And then he worked to further inflame anti-immigrant sentiment by declaring he would try to revoke birthright citizenship for U.S.-born children of noncitizens.

It raises this question: If GOP donors and national party leaders are throwing King under the bus for pandering to the alt-right and white nationalists, why do they keep tolerating it from President Trump?

If Republicans truly want to disassociate themselves from the kind of toxic discourse that inspires violence, they need to not only dethrone King but also call out Trump.