King, who represents the state’s 4th District in Western Iowa, asked the White House to join the President’s entourage, but administration officials rejected the request, two officials familiar with the matter told CNN.
Republican Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Deb Fischer of Nebraska joined Trump aboard Air Force One. Ernst had not been planning to travel with the President, citing her voting schedule, but ended up flying to Iowa with Trump.
CNN has reached out to King’s office for comment.
While King has a history of making incendiary remarks around race and immigration, King was removed from his committee assignments and rebuked by members of his own party after giving an interview with The New York Times in January in which he made racist comments. In the article, King, as part of a defense of what he said was the “culture of America,” asked how certain terms had become controversial in modern discourse.
“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” he told the Times. “Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”
King said on the House floor in January that he rejected the ideology of white nationalism and he maintains that his comments were misinterpreted. The House Republican Steering Committee removed King from his committee posts shortly after the comments were publicized in January.
Despite the controversy, King refused to step aside from his post in Congress and announced in February he’ll run for reelection in 2020. He won his race in 2018 by 3.6 percentage points.
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