WASHINGTON — GOP gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson says he has “backed away” from former President Donald Trump so the North Carolina Republican’s porn site scandal doesn’t drag Trump down politically in the state ahead of the November election.
In a Wednesday interview with conservative radio host and former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka, Robinson, whose campaign has been falling apart after a CNN report unearthed disturbing comments he apparently made on a porn site forum, said he’s facing “a lot of fire” and doesn’t want to be a liability for Trump.
“So we have backed away from the president to give him his space to run his race, while we have space to run our race,” said Robinson, who is currently the state’s lieutenant governor. “We have chosen to pull ourselves back from President Trump.”
Here’s a video clip of Robinson on Gorka’s show, which was first flagged by Media Matters for America, a progressive media monitoring group.
North Carolina is a key swing state for winning the presidency. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Trump remain incredibly close there, per polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight. And there’s certainly fear among North Carolina Republicans that Robinson could hurt all of their chances.
State and national GOP officials have been scrambling to distance themselves from Robinson after last week’s bombshell report, which laid out evidence of him identifying as a “Black Nazi,” supporting slavery, describing being sexually aroused by spying on girls in public showers, and calling himself “a perv” who likes porn with transgender people in it — a sharp contrast to his public transphobic rhetoric calling for trans women to be arrested for using women’s bathrooms.
Since the story came out, Robinson’s campaign and government staff have resigned en masse, the Republican Governors Association has pulled ad funding for his campaign and local GOP officials have been deleting photos and canceling events that link them to him.
Robinson has called the report “false lies” and vowed to sue CNN, but to date, he hasn’t been able to refute the evidence presented in the story. He’s also suggested that maybe those comments really were his.
Hilariously, Trump, who has been a strong ally of Robinson’s for years, and vice versa, has been pretending not to know anything about the North Carolina Republican’s very public porn site scandal.
Asked about it Thursday by a reporter, Trump said only, “I don’t know the situation.”
Robinson suggested otherwise in his Wednesday interview: “We’ve spoken to him, had great conversations with him,” he told Gorka. “But we have chosen to [distance ourselves] because we want to make sure that he wins this state.”
Trump may try to ignore Robinson now, but the reality is the two have a long and public record of sharing stages and heaping praise on each other. In fact, the North Carolina Republican’s entire political career has been modeled after Trump’s.
Trump previously hailed Robinson, who has a long record of making sexist, racist, Islamophobic and otherwise disgusting comments, as “Martin Luther King on steroids.” He’s featured Robinson in a campaign ad. He’s described Robinson as “a star,” ”outstanding” and someone who is “going to go down as one of the great leaders in our country.”
At a September 2022 campaign event, Trump called Robinson “one of the hottest politicians in the United States of America” and “a friend of mine.”
Trump also gave the North Carolina Republican his speaking slot at the 2024 RNC convention, where Robinson called Trump “the Braveheart of our time.”
