Although many Republican lawmakers have sought to distance themselves from Donald Trump over his rhetoric following the deadly Orlando, Florida, shooting, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) on Wednesday morning expressed support for numerous ideas the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has floated.
“If the election were today I would vote for Donald Trump. And I think he’s laid out some good policies that we ought to embrace, one of them is immigration policy,” King said on CNN’s “New Day.” “I’ve heard him modify his policy on not bringing anymore Muslims in the United States, suggesting instead closer to Ted Cruz’s position, which is let’s suspend immigration from terrorist sponsoring countries, at least until we get a handle on this. I think that’s a prudent statement.”
King also said that “political correctness” was keeping the United States from responding to and preventing terrorist attacks, a view shared by Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
“What about the neighbors? What about the people that should have been watching this? They’re intimidated by political correctness,” the Republican congressman said on CNN.
When co-host Chris Cuomo asked King to clarify what he meant by that, King said that people who interacted with the suspected Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, were “suppressed” because “they thought it was criticism because he was a Muslim.”
“We had an opportunity to engage and we were suppressed because of the political correctness,” King later added. “That’s something Donald Trump has got this right, that if we are suppressed with political correctness to the point where we don’t see something and say something out of fear of being criticized of being some kind of bigot, then America is not as safe as if we had freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.”
