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As the fallout continues over a CNN report about North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s past inflammatory comments on a porn website, his most prominent GOP champion, Donald Trump, has remained conspicuously silent on the matter.
CNN’s bombshell reporting on Thursday has shaken Robinson’s fellow Republicans and further threatens to sink his flagging bid for governor. But it seems the Trump campaign may be employing a “wait and see” approach to the scandal. In the wake of the report, the campaign issued a statement about the importance of winning the state in November, but it did not touch on the salacious details or mention Robinson.
According to CNN, Robinson left comments on a porn website’s message board between 2008 and 2012 in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI,” called for the return of slavery and recalled “peeping” on women in gym showers as a teenager, among other details. Robinson himself has said that the posts are not his and suggested that they were fake. He has vowed not to drop out of the race.
Although The Associated Press reported that Robinson will no longer appear with Trump at his rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, on Saturday, the campaign has not disavowed Robinson. Brian Hughes, a senior Trump campaign adviser, denied reports that the campaign has been pressuring Robinson to leave the race, and Trump’s campaign press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told NBC News that Trump is not considering pulling his endorsement of the beleaguered gubernatorial candidate.
Trump’s running mate has also refused to address the controversy. On Friday, in response to a video showing Sen. JD Vance walking past a reporter who asks about Robinson, Vance wrote on X: “My comment on Mark Robinson is that Kamala Harris cast the deciding vote on the Inflation Explosion Act and because of that a lot of Americans can’t afford groceries.”
It may be difficult for Trump to repudiate Robinson now, given the praise he has lavished on the gubernatorial candidate in the past. Despite Robinson’s history of anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-abortion and antisemitic rhetoric, Trump has spoken highly of Robinson, endorsing him as “better than Martin Luther King [Jr.]” and calling him an “outstanding person.”
“I’ve gotten to know him so well,” Trump said of Robinson in December.