King breaks with Trump on trade during GC stop

Despite his enthusiastic support for President Donald Trump on issues like curtailing illegal immigration and constructing a wall along the southern border of the United States, U.S. Representative Steve King (R-Kiron) expressed concern with the commander-in-chief’s push to impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum during a meeting with executives at Heavy Equipment Manufacturing—a bulk buyer of the aforementioned products—in Grundy Center Tuesday morning.
           
“I wouldn’t have even pushed on (the North American Free Trade Agreement), but of course, I’m seeing it from an Iowa perspective. (With) our agriculture and our manufacturing, NAFTA has been good for us,” he said. “I would’ve just let that thing chug along… Once this starts, who knows where it ends?”
           
China has been the primary target of Trump’s ire and the source of his protectionist impulses on trade, and the government of the world’s most populous nation recently announced that it would place a 25 percent retaliatory tax on pork—one of Iowa’s largest exports. Further complicating matters is the fact that the WH Group, a Chinese corporation, now owns Smithfield Foods, America’s largest pork producer.
           
“There’s a little poetic justice in that,” King said. “But this could get a lot worse before it gets better.”
           
He did, on the other hand, give the president credit for his handling of national security issues—especially in regard to North Korea—and lobbed a pejorative jab at “chubby little rocket man dictator” Kim Jong-Un.
           
“(Trump) is a smart man. There are a lot of smart people, and they aren’t really that rare of a commodity. The smart people that rise above the crowd of other smart people are the ones that are blessed with good instincts,” King said. “If you sat Obama down at the chessboard with Putin, who do you think is going to win? If you sat Trump down, it’s a whole new question, but I think he just clears the board and says ‘It’s Monopoly and chess, and I’ve got the bucks.’”
             
Although he avoided mentioning the recent spat between his campaign staffers and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor and gun control advocate Emma Gonzalez over a Facebook meme about her Cuban heritage, King still made time to expound on some of his more provocative positions, including his unabashed support for Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi—who rose to power in a 2013 military coup and recently won re-election with 97 percent of the vote after three challengers dropped out and another was arrested—and his characteristically polemical takes on migrants from Mexico and Central America. 
           
“This is an industry down there, and 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in America come from or through Mexico,” King said. “The drug smugglers and the people smugglers are in many cases one and the same. It’s an integrated industry.”
           
Echoing a sentiment that embroiled the eventual president in controversy in the early days of his campaign, King claimed that “100 percent” of Mexican girls who plan to cross the border illegally get on contraceptives because they expect to be raped.
           
“Could you be a grandfather and say ‘I’m going to buy some birth control for my granddaughter so that if she’s raped, she doesn’t get pregnant, and then I’m going to send her on the train of death 1,500 miles up here to the U.S. to break our laws?’” he asked. “And we just let that all happen, along with all the drugs—64,000 dead Americans because of opiate abuse and drug abuse last year. You don’t have to be a genius to fix this, but we can’t get there because politics say we can’t.” 
 
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