Steve King: If Reports Correct ‘Trump Base Is Blown Up, Destroyed, Irreparable’

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) gave a catastrophic assessment of President Donald Trump’s reportedly hatched amnesty deal with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and other Democratic leaders Wednesday night.

King tweeted the following after the Associated Press (AP) and other outlets reported that the president told Democrats he wanted a “quick” amnesty for the 800,000 plus illegal aliens he acted to removed protections from on September 5:

@RealDonaldTrump If AP is correct, Trump base is blown up, destroyed, irreparable, and disillusioned beyond repair. No promise is credible. https://t.co/uJjxk6uX5g

— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) September 14, 2017

King, a long-time immigration hawk, told Breitbart News Washington political editor Matt Boyle that an amnesty move like the one onto which Trump reportedly signed Wednesday was “Republican suicide.” That assessment came just after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the administration’s decision to keep a major election campaign promise and phase out President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) executive order. “It was a clear campaign promise,” King said at the time, referring to an immediate end to the program upon Trump’s taking office.

Instead, after allowing DACA to trod on in its likely unconstitutional limbo for nine months, Trump finally rescinded the executive amnesty with a graceful phase out that potentially gives the illegals covered under it two and half more years of protection. Texas and eight other states dropped their already fruitful lawsuits seeking to have DACA overturned, only because of this promise.

It is unclear what, if anything, Trump leveraged from Pelosi and Schumer in exchange for amnesty. A White House official told reporters only that the topics discussed “included tax reform, border security, DACA, infrastructure and trade.” What is clear, however, is that no concessions on the president’s signature campaign promise, the southern border wall, were made.

In their own joint statement, Pelosi and Schumer wrote:

We had a very productive meeting at the White House with the President. The discussion focused on DACA. We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides.

King’s tweet came as part of an ongoing flood of outrage from the populist-nationalist right as news of Trump’s apparent betrayal of a central element of his electoral coalition coursed through the net.