Why Steve King’s Supporters Are Staying Loyal
HOLSTEIN, IOWA—One of Representative Steve King’s most ardent defenders is a man named Mark Leonard. And Mark Leonard is obsessed with the Civil War.
A few times every year, the 63-year-old chair of the Ida County Republicans travels to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he gives tours and lectures dressed as General John Buford, a mustachioed Union brigadier general to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance. Leonard’s home, located about a mile north of the town’s only stoplight, is filled—filled—with paintings of Confederate soldiers. In his office alone there’s one of General Robert E. Lee on horseback, exhausted after a long day of battle; another showing Lee talking to four of his lieutenants; and a third, framed by a pair of cavalry officers’ sabers, of the general seated outside a tent: The Loneliness of Command, by Mort Künstler.
Leonard has collected the paintings for years. “I think tearing down Confederate monuments or being offended by a Confederate battle flag is one of the dumbest things the left has ever done,” he told me when I visited his house last month. “Because they don’t know who these Confederates were.” They were good men, Leonard said. Literate, loyal, God-fearing.
Leonard defends the Confederates in the same way he defends his own people, the residents of Iowa’s Fourth District, who for 16 years have sent Steve King to Congress. The racist
