Rep. Steve King (R-IA) on Wednesday compared President Donald Trump to the biblical King Solomon for ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and leaving it to Congress to figure out what to do next.
King on CNN said he was still not as sure as he would like of Trump’s personal position on undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children and were granted legal protection by the program.
“I have talked with him privately about it. It’s not as clear to me as I would like it to be,” King said.
“You don’t know where the President stands on DREAMers at this point?” CNN’s Kate Bolduan asked.
“Well, I know what he said throughout the campaign. And I’m watching what’s happened since then,” King said. “He hasn’t said he wants to grant them amnesty. But he has said that he’s going to end this program in six months.”
“And he wants Congress to do something to fix it so they can be protected,” Bolduan said. “What does that tell you?”
“Well, I think that that’s a little bit of a Solomon-esque maneuver,” King said, referring to the religious parable. “He cut the baby in half and threw it to the Congress to fight over. And I didn’t want to see our Congress divided.”
King, no fan of DACA recipients himself, claimed in an infamous interview in 2013 that for every immigrant protected by the program that becomes valedictorian “there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
John Boehner, then the Republican House speaker, remarked of King: “What an asshole.”
Current House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), despite saying just four days earlier that he didn’t think Trump should end the program, on Tuesday lauded Trump for doing exactly that.
