Ted Cruz Lets His Fascist Buddy Know He's Still Got His Full Support

This hasn’t been a great week for Iowa Rep. Steve King, the House of Representatives’ premier fascist and white supremacist. Polls indicate that his Democratic challenger, J.D. Scholten, is within striking distance of King in a district no Democrat has any business winning, and yesterday, the chair of the House Republican campaign arm denounced him.

King has no need for fake friends, however. His real friends are still behind him. And one of those real friends, Bloomberg reported last night, is Sen. Ted Cruz, who’s facing his own closely fought re-election bid in Texas.

King and Cruz have been tight for years, with King offering his full-throated support of Cruz during his presidential run. Here’s King, for example, mouthing the words to a 2016 Cruz speech like it’s a goddamn Carly Rae Jepsen song.

Representative Steve King of Iowa, who has been abandoned by Republican leaders and donors over his embrace of white nationalists and for rhetoric that has been denounced as racist, said he got a supportive phone call from Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who’s facing a tough re-election battle of his own.

King, in an interview, said Cruz, a fellow Republican, called him on Wednesday. King co-chaired Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign in Iowa, the key early caucus state, which the Texan won.

Cruz campaign spokeswoman Catherine Frazier called the conversation “a personal call, and Senator Cruz told him the same thing he said to reporters today,” she said. Cruz was quoted by the Dallas Morning News as calling King’s remarks “disappointing” and divisive but he didn’t condemn the congressman.

So incredibly disappointing that Steve King would say a slightly more racist version of the same shit he’s said for years.

Cruz’s continued support of King isn’t as personally embarrassing as, say, his continued support of Trump, who has taken to calling him “Beautiful Ted” after calling his wife ugly and implying his dad helped whack John F. Kennedy. But now that King has entered his final form as a real, live neofascist who believes this country should remain as white as possible, you’d think that maybe—just maybe—one of the most visible and influential Republicans in Washington might be willing to cut King loose.

At this point, however, the failure to do so is just par for the course for both Cruz and the GOP.