A political firestorm is raging in battleground North Carolina. When Donald Trump flew in for a rally on Saturday, he wasn’t going anywhere near it.
The former president’s planned campaign event in Wilmington suddenly took on a major significance after a flood of negative attention. Republicans blame it for the demise of their gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson, and fear it will hurt Trump’s chances.
In a speech that lasted just over an hour, Trump generously greeted prominent North Carolina Republicans, including Sen. Ted Budd, Reps. Dan Bishop and David Rouzer, state Republican Party Chairman Jason Simmons, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley — and even Florida Republican Party Rep. Anna Paulina Luna.
Noticeably absent: Robinson.
The lieutenant governor’s already struggling campaign to flip the state’s governorship was derailed Thursday when CNN published a report alleging that he made lewd and inflammatory comments on a pornography website, including his interest in transgender porn and his support for the reinstatement of slavery.
Robinson has refused to step aside, and Republicans are scrambling to contain the fallout. Polls show Trump effectively tied with Vice President Kamala Harris, who has been quick to try to weaponize the scandal.
It was pure coincidence that Trump’s visit took place just days after the news broke.
The former president has not withdrawn his support for the controversial — and now embattled — lieutenant governor. And he has repeatedly praised Robinson when he has visited the state in the past — once comparing him to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “on steroids” and, as recently as last month in Asheboro, calling him “a great one.”
But Trump and his campaign have remained silent on Robinson since CNN’s story on Thursday, with Republicans increasingly concerned that the former president could be brought down by the scandal. Trump did not mention him once in his speech on Saturday, and the lieutenant governor did not attend the rally.
Republican presidential candidates have won North Carolina every four years since Jimmy Carter in 1976, with only one exception: Barack Obama in 2008. But Democrats are hopeful about 2024, where they suddenly see an opportunity in the state. Trump won North Carolina by less than 1.5 points in 2020, and the state recently elected Democrat Roy Cooper as governor twice.
“We have to win. This is a very important state,” Trump said at the rally Saturday. “If we win this state, I think it will be over quickly.”
Trump on Saturday largely stuck to his usual criticisms, from illegal immigration and the southern border to crime, the cost of living, manufacturing jobs and tariffs.
But he also devoted part of that speech to a renewed appeal to women—“let’s talk about our amazing women, OK, because women have been through a lot”—in which he vowed to end the Biden administration’s “national nightmare.” In an extended riff on a late-night, all-caps Truth Social post, Trump declared that women were poorer, less healthy, less safe, more expensive at the grocery store, more stressed, and less optimistic than they were four years earlier—but “I’m going to fix all of that, women. I’m going to fix all of that.”
“Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free,” he said. “You will no longer think about abortion, because it is now where it should always be, with the states and with the voice of the people.”
He reiterated his support for exceptions to abortion restrictions in cases of rape, incest and when the mother’s life is in danger, and in the ninth month he again falsely accused Democrats of supporting abortion.
Polls show Harris and Trump neck and neck in North Carolina, with both sides anxiously awaiting the implications of the newfound attention to Robinson for other races.
Democrats immediately rushed to tie Robinson to Trump, with Harris’ campaign launching a new ad on Friday as part of a strategy to use Robinson to win over suburban voters, black voters and moderate Republicans. The plan, according to a new memo dated Saturday: Remind voters of Trump’s relationship with Robinson and emphasize “their shared extreme agenda and rhetoric.”
“We have people running as Republicans for governor who are proud to call themselves Nazis,” Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, told a crowd in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. (One of the things Robinson reportedly posted on the message boards of a pornography website was a statement that he was a “black Nazi!”)
At a rally less than 50 miles away, his Republican counterpart, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, attempted to divert attention from the scandal.
“The media is trying to cover up the story. Literally six days ago there was a near assassination of a former and future American president and the American press is more concerned about scandals in other states than what’s happening here in Pennsylvania or the fact that Donald Trump was almost assassinated,” the GOP vice presidential candidate said in Leesport, Pennsylvania.
But Republicans in North Carolina are concerned, including about the implications of Robinson’s decline for candidates in lower positions.
The concern is much greater for state legislative candidates than for federal candidates. There is no Senate race in North Carolina this year, and — thanks to a Republican gerrymander passed last year — Democratic Reps. Jeff Jackson, Kathy Manning and Wiley Nickey were swept into what are now deep-red districts that they could barely win. All three chose not to seek re-election.
In fact, there is only a truly competitive race in one seat, a rural eastern district held by Democratic Rep. Don Davis. Democrats have already tried to link his GOP opponent, Laurie Buckhout, to Robinson, quickly accusing her of deleting a photo of the two that was posted on social media in the days following the report.
Mia McCarthy and Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.
