Mark Robinson scandal in North Carolina injects chaos into presidential race

North Carolina is the swing state Donald Trump won the most narrowly in 2020. Now his fate is tied to Robinson, the starkest example yet of how hard it is to contain MAGA’s new standard bearers.

Mark Robinson delivers remarks prior to Donald Trump speaking at a campaign event in North Carolina. Picture: Getty Images.

No one at the tiny roadside Blue Ridge Diner knew for sure whether Mark Robinson would show up to his campaign meet and greet on Monday, nor did they know whom to ask – the GOP gubernatorial nominee’s staff had just quit en masse.

Mr Robinson’s campaign said the day before that its manager, deputy manager and a half-dozen other staffers resigned, following a report describing his allegedly antigay and racist comments a decade ago on an online pornography forum. That was the latest in a string of scandals, including the anti-abortion candidate’s acknowledgment that he had paid for his now-wife’s abortion.

North Carolina is the swing state that former President Donald Trump won the most narrowly in 2020. Now Mr Trump sees his fate tied to Mr Robinson, the starkest example yet of the standard-bearers the MAGA takeover has brought to the Republican Party, and how hard it is to contain them.

The state has become a place where all of the forces of a polarised nation intersect, from the divide between rural and urban interests, to hardened opinions about abortion.

North Carolina’s direction, potentially decisive in the presidential race, could hinge on another deeply flawed Mr Trump protégé burdening the party with extreme views.

Several top Republicans, including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, have withdrawn support for Mr Robinson. And Mr Robinson, previously lauded by Mr Trump as “Martin Luther King on steroids, ” was neither seen nor mentioned at Mr Trump’s Wilmington, N.C., rally on Saturday.

Mr Robinson, 56, spent that evening at a Fayetteville race-car track, delivering defiant remarks across a chain-link fence to the cheap seats.

Monday’s diner stop was this week’s remaining appearance on Mr Robinson’s public schedule. When he barrelled in two minutes early, a crowd of roughly three dozen cheered.

“We might have got knocked down a little bit right now,” Mr Robinson boomed in a feisty baritone, without notes or a microphone. “They might be hitting us pretty good right now. But guess what? We’re not going anywhere. We’re not quitting.”

From bizarre to more bizarre

This week marks the strangest one yet in the strange political career of Mr Robinson, the sitting lieutenant governor of North Carolina, a state that is a presidential prize on Election Day.

CNN reported last week that Mr Robinson called himself a “black Nazi” and supported reinstating slavery in online posts between 2008 and 2012. The Wall Street Journal hasn’t verified these claims.

Mr Robinson has denied making the comments. A Robinson campaign spokesman, Mike Lonergan, said late Tuesday that the campaign was investigating the “CNN smear campaign” with the help of Jesse Binnall, an attorney who has represented the Trump campaign.

In an unusual situation, the reverse coat-tails of a statewide candidate, Mr Robinson, threaten to drag down the top of the ticket. An Elon University poll released Tuesday, taken Sept. 4-13, before the CNN report, showed that Mr Robinson was trailing the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Josh Stein, by 14 points, with Mr Trump neck and neck against Vice President Kamala Harris. In recent months, Mr Trump consistently polled ahead of her.

Mr Robinson exemplifies, more so than Georgia’s failed Senate candidate Herschel Walker or Arizona’s current Senate candidate Kari Lake, the no-apologies, right-wing purists who sail through primaries but stumble in general elections.

Even before the latest scandal, Mr Robinson’s campaign was on life support, said Doug Heye, a national GOP strategist from Winston-Salem, west of Mr Robinson’s hometown of Greensboro. Now the campaign is dead, Heye said on X late Tuesday.

“When you nominate the cartoon characters,” he wrote, “they come with boatloads of problems.”

“When you nominate the cartoon characters,” Heye wrote, “they come with boatloads of problems.” https://t.co/jwWaM6MfNi

— Doug Heye (@DougHeye) September 25, 2024

Democrats are seizing the moment. The Harris campaign ran its first TV ad linking Mr Trump and Mr Robinson after CNN’s report. Mr Trump stepped up visits to North Carolina, planning to be in suburban Charlotte on Wednesday; his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, visited Charlotte on Monday.

Rep. Jeff Jackson, North Carolina’s Democratic nominee for attorney general, said he is running ads reminding voters that his opponent, Rep. Dan Bishop, previously called himself Mr Robinson’s “sidekick.” “Mark Robinson has been the most popular person for his party in our state for several years, so lots of major candidates have fallen over themselves to be pictured with him,” Jackson told supporters by email. “The blast radius is going to envelop lots of other candidates.” CNN’s report landed hours before Thursday’s state board-of-elections deadline for candidates to withdraw. Mr Robinson defied requests from party stalwarts to step aside.

Model trains

Politico reported that the posts originated from an IP address near Mr Robinson’s then-residence. The Assembly, a Raleigh-based political-news outlet, reported the user’s handle on the sites as “minisoldr,” a term frequently linked to Mr Robinson’s apparent other online activities, including Amazon.com reviews of model-train components. In his 2022 memoir, Mr Robinson called model trains his passion.

The Republican Governors Association confirmed this week that it had booked no TV time for Mr Robinson through Election Day, though his opponent, Stein, had booked millions of dollars worth.

Mr Robinson survived several previous scandals including a “throwing money away” habit he blamed in his memoir as contributing to the repossession of his family home. A North Carolina investigation found “serious deficiencies” and $132,000 in disallowed expenses at his wife’s now-closed non-profit organisation. Mr Robinson acknowledged on social media and in his memoir that in the late 1980s he paid for his girlfriend, who is now his wife, to have an abortion.

Mr Robinson stepped into politics during a Greensboro City Council meeting in 2018, when he made an impassioned speech about his journey to buy an AR-15-style gun. As Mr Robinson showed off oratory skills that won him junior-high accolades, the speech went viral.

Mark Walker, then a Republican congressman who represented Greensboro, shared the clip with Fox News. It caught the attention of Wayne LaPierre, then head of the National Rifle Association, whom Mr Robinson credits with launching his political career.

Mr Robinson won the lieutenant governor seat in 2020, and, with Mr Trump’s endorsement, carried 65% of the vote in March’s GOP primary.

‘That’s my man’ Mr Robinson’s stump speech features his experience with free-trade policies in the furniture industry, once a dominant employer in the region. At Monday’s diner stop, Mr Robinson recalled sitting down with the boss and being told his job was going to Mexico. He told the crowd he is staying in the race to fight for regular people.

“I’ve walked in your shoes,” he said. He vowed to counter media questions about “trashy lies” from the past with policy-related answers, adding, “They want to mess with me with lies; I’m going to mess with them with the truth!” Kim Greene, a 57-year-old home-health aide, waited in line as Mr Robinson signed other supporters’ T-shirts and hats, so she could take his hands in hers. “Thank you, Brother Mark,” she said. “I believe in you.” Greene, wearing a Trump T-shirt and rhinestone Trump pin, said she didn’t mind that Mr Trump seemed to be distancing himself from Mr Robinson. “He’s got his own campaign to run,” she said.

David Gragg, who is 59 and sells sports gear online, said he believed Trump likely sympathised with Mr Robinson – saying the former president had also been the subject of lies.

Gragg scoffed at “never-Trumpers” and Democrats who relish Mr Robinson’s fall. “When both sides don’t like you, that’s my man,” he said.

Dow Jones