How Dumb Do They Think You Are?
Mark Robinson is barely even trying to beat the allegations. He thinks his voters won’t notice.
Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, comes to the defense of Springfield and its Haitian community in the New York Times today:
As a supporter of former President Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance, I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield. This rhetoric hurts the city and its people, and it hurts those who have spent their lives there. . . .
The Springfield I know is not the one you hear about in social media rumors. It is a city made up of good, decent, welcoming people. They are hard workers—both those who were born in this country and those who settled here because, back in their birthplace, Haiti, innocent people can be killed just for cheering on the wrong team in a soccer match. . . .
I am proud of this community, and America should be, too.
Happy Friday.
Uh, Gross
—Andrew Egger
When the rumor mill started churning yesterday that some major, potentially campaign-shaking news was coming on North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee for governor this year, people’s minds began going to truly dark places. After all, Robinson was already one of the most insanely controversial figures in today’s politics: a Holocaust denier; a modest enthusiast of political violence; a walking, talking Breitbart comments section who’d been posting unhinged stuff online for years. A story that he used to be a frequent patron of video porn stores was barely a blip in the race. What could possibly be worse?
Well, uh, we found out. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski had tracked down a bunch of old online profiles of Robinson—most notably, an account he’d frequently used to comment on a porn site, Nude Africa, in the early 2010s. Those posts included some of the most insane ranting you’ll ever see:
“I’m a black NAZI!”
“I’d take Hitler over any of the shit that’s in Washington right now!”
“Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it back. I would certainly buy a few.”
Of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Get that fucking commie bastard off the National Mall. . . . I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!”
Of a story about a woman who said she was sexually assaulted by her taxi driver: “The moral of this story . . . . . Don’t fuck a white bitch!”
There was more beyond that. What’s really incredible is that all this was the sanitized version. CNN tiptoed politely around a heap of other Robinson comments that were simply some of the most obscene, degraded sexual stuff you could imagine.
Robinson did all this under a profile that included his own name, using an account he signed up for with his personal email address and a username he used many other places on the internet. Dozens of biographical details from the comments (he sure was chatty!) make it inescapably clear that the guy behind that keyboard and the guy currently running for governor are one and the same.
Naturally Robinson still says it wasn’t him. His interview with Kaczynski last night was a remarkable exercise in willing public humiliation.1
“Look, I’m not going to get into the minutiae of how somebody manufactured these salacious tabloid lies,” Robinson said, suggesting it all could have come about “through AI.” “The things people can do with the internet now is incredible. . . . We have addressed it. We have said it’s not true. And we wish that we could move on and get busy with the business of the people of the state.”
For now, the North Carolina GOP is brazening it out. “Mark Robinson has categorically denied the allegations made by CNN but that won’t stop the Left from trying to demonize him via personal attacks,” the party said in a statement. “The Left needs this election to be a personality contest, not a policy contest because if voters are focused on policy, Republicans win on Election day.” (They didn’t get into the policy ramifications of preferring Hitler to Barack Obama.)
This all may prove the final nail in the coffin for Robinson, who was already trailing Democrat Josh Stein by between 5 and 15 points in every recent poll. How far the contagion will spread is another matter. Donald Trump is a close Robinson ally: He endorsed Robinson during the primary, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids.”2
But the political fallout is only one part of the story. The other part is the autopsy that this entire episode will provide us about the state of the Republican electorate. In pledging to plow through, in suggesting it may all be AI, in choosing to run in the first place—knowing this stuff was all out there—Robinson has offered a nasty appraisal of the voters whose support he is seeking. He thinks he can fashion his history of disturbing, angry behavior into a story in which he is the victim—and that the voters will buy it. He sees those voters as morally malleable dupes, who will cross any serious ethical line in the service of politics.
It makes sense for him to make this calculation. After all, it has never not paid off for Trump.
The question now is how those voters will react to being treated as lemmings. It’s possible they don’t change their behavior at all. It’s possible they turn on Robinson but not Trump. But, perhaps, we will see a harsher rendering here.
It’s a mind-boggling possibility: that after everything that’s happened in the last decade, after all his own intolerable scandals, the thing that ends Trump’s political career could be the grotesque behavior of some other random guy. Not getting the Capitol ransacked, not going gaga for the world’s biggest autocrats, not embracing the worst and most toxic elements in American politics—just elevating a guy who happened to be a comically racist sexual degenerate.
But there’d be a poetic justice to it all the same. Robinson is the monster Trump created. Now Trump has to survive him.
A Trump-Robinson Ticket
—William Kristol
More than two centuries ago, our Founders argued that the success of the republic they were creating would depend not just on the people of that republic but on “auxiliary precautions.” As Federalist No. 51 explains, “A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
To defeat Donald Trump, who is a threat to the constitutional republic that the Founders bequeathed us, we depend primarily on the good sense of the American people. But Trump is an effective demagogue, and close to half the American public has proven to be disturbingly resistant to grasping the nature of the threat he poses.
So it’s a good idea to take advantage of auxiliary assistance, as long as that assistance is legal, peaceful, and legitimate.
Here’s one mode of auxiliary assistance: Take advantage of the fact that other Trumpists lack Trump’s appeal. To wit: Trump is now running even in Pennsylvania, but in 2022 the Trumpist candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, lost to Josh Shapiro by 15 points. In Michigan, Trump is now also close. But in 2022, the Trumpist candidate, Tudor Dixon, lost the governor’s race to Gretchen Whitmer by more than ten points.
This provides an opportunity for Democrats to weigh down Trump’s candidacy, at least a little, by identifying him as responsible for the least attractive of his supporters. Doing so is totally legitimate. Trump has made and embraced these supporters. He’s endorsed them in primaries and general elections. He doesn’t distance himself from them, let alone repudiate them.
As Andrew notes: They’re his people. He’s responsible for their success. They can help ensure his failure.
So if many of Trump’s proteges lack his skills in demagoguery and his abilities as a con man, that’s their problem. The task in this election is also to make it Trump’s problem.
Which brings us back to Mark Robinson. He’s a long-time Trump favorite and endorsee. He wouldn’t be where he is today without Trump’s support.
In another era, his candidacy wouldn’t have survived his almost beyond-belief scandals. But he’s staying in the race. So in North Carolina, it’s perfectly proper to talk about the Trump-Robinson Republican ticket. It’s perfectly proper to run ads of Trump praising Robinson and Robinson praising Trump. It’s perfectly proper to make the election not just a referendum on Trump personally but on Trumpists.
Of course no one should be distracted from the threat posed by a second term of Trump himself as president. But Trumpism more broadly is also a threat. As are the Trumpists whom Trump has brought to prominence in the Republican party he so thoroughly dominates.
Trump’s not going to lose North Carolina by ten points, as Robinson likely will. But could he cost Trump a point or two? Yes. A dependence on directly convincing the people about Trump himself is, no doubt, the primary check on Trump’s victory. But experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. Tying Robinson to Trump is a useful auxiliary precaution.
Quick Hits
SPEAKING OF DEVIANTS: Some striking new reporting from Jose Pagliery of Notus that broke overnight:
Rep. Matt Gaetz attended a drug-fueled sex party in 2017 with the 17-year-old girl at the center of the alleged sex trafficking scandal, according to legal documents filed to a Florida federal court shortly before midnight Thursday, which cite sealed affidavits from three eyewitness testimonies.
The minor, who was a junior in high school at the time, arrived in her mother’s car for a July 15, 2017, party at the Florida home of Chris Dorworth, a lobbyist and friend of Gaetz’s, according to a court filing written by defense attorneys who interviewed witnesses as part of an ongoing civil lawsuit Dorworth brought in 2023. . . .
One eyewitness cited in the court filings, a young woman referred to as K.M., provided a sworn affidavit that claimed the teenage girl was naked, partygoers were there to “engage in sexual activities,” and “alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy . . . and marijuana” were present. The teenage girl was identified in the filings only as A.B.
TAKING THE GREAT WITH THE BAD: President Biden spoke yesterday at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., offering a message of economic cheer as stocks soared to record highs on the heels of the Federal Reserve’s 50-point rate cut Wednesday.
The event was the whole 2024 Biden experience in miniature. The speech was great, measured and responsible: “The Fed lowering interest rates isn’t a declaration of victory. It’s a declaration of progress. It’s a signal we’ve entered a new phase of our economy and our recovery.”
But it was also overshadowed by a head-scratching moment: Biden’s off-the-cuff remark that “I’ve never once spoken to the chairman of the Fed since I became president.” That clip quickly shot around the internet, accompanied by pictures and video of Biden’s Oval Office meeting with, you guessed it, Fed chair Jerome Powell in 2022.
A Biden spokesman clarified that what Biden had meant to say was that he’d never spoken to Powell about interest rates. Probably so! But it’s worth remembering that, in a universe where Biden never dropped out, we’d still be living in a presidential contest driven by one or two of these a week.
Cheap Shots
Don’t feel too bad for him; maybe he’s into that kind of thing.
He had no reason to believe at the time Robinson would take that as an insult.
DeWine can spare us the weak tea of his NYT column. He is "saddened" that Trump and Vance are hurting the good people of Springfield, but he's still a "supporter." So he's voting for two guys who he acknowledges are deliberately, and falsely, attacking his constituents. That tells you more bout him, frankly, than Trump or Vance. We know who they are, but DeWine has now told us who he is.
Let's see, we have Mark Robinson and Matt Gaetz embroiled in sex scandals of their own making, the Governor of Ohio begging his own presidential ticket to stop harassing the residents of Springfield with outright racist lies, but we have to end with Biden, no longer in the race, making a small misstatement about his interactions with Jerome Powell. What's not covered is Trump's delusional claims on FOX's Guttfeld program where he claimed he was fact checked ten or eleven times by ABC moderators and that the audience went wild...the non-existent audience. Poor Joe, he can never catch a break.