Donald Trump has turned on Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina. Axios reports that while Trump once lavished praise on the gubernatorial candidate, calling him “one of the great leaders in our country,” he now wants voters to forget he had anything to do with Robinson. The assumption across the political media is that Robinson — who has a long history of overt misogyny, loudmouthed racism, and even Holocaust denial — has become too toxic for Trump. “Trump is being weighed down by a very unpopular Republican candidate for governor,” Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former chief of staff, told NewsNation a month ago.
Republicans made a last-ditch attempt to push Robinson out of the race on Thursday after CNN published a report linking Robinson to the username “minisoldr,” a Nazi-praising self-proclaimed “perv” who was a frequent poster at the adult forum Nude Africa. Certainly, by the standards of pre-MAGA politics, it’s hard to imagine someone who wrote this stuff surviving an hour politically after exposure. Robinson called himself a “black NAZI,” longed for a return to slavery, and lauded Adolph Hitler as a superior leader to then-President Barack Obama. All terrible stuff, of course. But it’s a little unclear why Republicans think it should be a career-ender for a MAGA politician. It all just sounds like a typical dinner conversation at Mar-a-Lago.
Perhaps Robinson’s big mistake is refusing to own his rancid commentary. Instead, he’s offering a denial approximately no one believes, telling CNN, “This is not us. These are not our words. And this is not anything that is characteristic of me.” When reminded of the overwhelming evidence that this is, indeed him (or “we,” as he apparently calls himself), Robinson went full Trump by making up a conspiracy theory on the spot: “I’m not going to get into the minutia of how somebody manufactured this, these salacious tabloid lies.”…