“Some folks need killin’.”
Every time I think the Republican Party can’t possibly sink any lower, someone like Mark Robinson comes along.
Robinson is the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, and on the face of it he would appear to represent solid racial progress in the Tar Heel State. After all, it was only 34 years ago that Jesse Helms won re-election to the U.S. Senate by running one of the most racist campaign ads ever against his African-American opponent.
Mark Robinson is African-American, and he is the Republican candidate for North Carolina governor. He has been running an uphill battle all year, but what happened this week made it less likely he will even come close.
Robinson was always a long shot. After all, this is a man who said women shouldn’t have right to vote, that slavery wasn’t such a bad thing, that gay people are filth and that the U.S. was behind the attack on Pearl Harbor.
This is a man who said Adolf Hitler was taken out of context and said that Michelle Obama was a man.
A man who has been hard-core against abortion and then admitting he and his wife had gotten an abortion early in their marriage.
And of course, that “some folks need killin’.”
Robinson makes Helms look like Abraham Lincoln.
None of that mattered to state Republicans because Robinson was the Trump-endorsed MAGA candidate. I suppose Trump thought endorsing an African-American candidate might bring him some black votes.
That was before the porn scandal.
CNN reported this week that Robinson had made a habit of visiting a 24-hour adult video store and watching transgender pornography. He made numerous posts on a pornographic website’s message board saying among other things that he had secretly watched women showering in a public gym, that transgender porn was the best because it took the man out but kept him in and that he considered himself a “black NAZI.”
This is the man Trump called “Martin Luther King on steroids” earlier this summer.
The word is that the Trump campaign is hoping Robinson will drop out of the race, but he announced today he is staying in. The deadline has passed for changing names on the election ballot, although some North Carolina Republicans say it would be less hurtful to Trump’s chances in the state if they just gave up on the gubernatorial race.
We all know what Trump will say.
“Robinson? I hardly know him. I think we met once.”
That would be a lie. Here’s what Trump said about Robinson:
“You have to cherish him. He’s like a fine wine.”