Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, on Thursday said despite the White House and House Speaker Paul Ryan’s dismissing his tweet about accepting foreigners, Republicans have been supportive of him behind the scenes.
“My colleagues have generally been coming by and patting me on the back. And a surprising number have said that they pray for me. And, meaning they support me and they agree with me, a surprising number,” King told a reporter on Thursday afternoon.
“I don’t have often have members come up and say at the end of the day, I prayed for you this morning. So they must think I’ve got a lot of arrows in my back.”
King, sharing an article from the Voice of Europe, wrote over the weekend that the author, Dutch politician Geert Wilders, understood “that culture and demographics are our destiny” and getting back to the nation’s Caucasian roots can only be done by bearing more children.
On Monday evening, King said he wishes he had more than 140 characters to explain what he meant on Sunday when he tweeted that the U.S. cannot restore its civilization with “someone else’s babies.”
“What I should have done, if I had more characters in that tweet, just added ‘you can’t rebuild our civilization with somebody else’s babies unless we adopt them,'” King told Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
House Republicans, including Carlos Curbelo, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Justin Amash all criticized King over his comments.
