A political firestorm is engulfing battleground North Carolina. When Donald Trump flew in for a rally Saturday he wasn’t going anywhere near it.
The former president’s pre-scheduled campaign event in Wilmington suddenly took on grave importance after a barrage of negative attention that Republicans believe has doomed the campaign of their nominee for governor, Mark Robinson — and that they worry will affect Trump’s chances.
In a speech lasting just over an hour, Trump liberally meted out hellos to prominent North Carolina Republicans, including Sen. Ted Budd, Reps. Dan Bishop and David Rouzer, state GOP Chair Jason Simmons, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley — and even Florida GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna.
Conspicuously absent: Robinson.
The lieutenant governor’s already-struggling campaign to flip the state’s governor’s mansion blew up on Thursday when CNN published a report that he had made lewd and inflammatory comments on a pornographic website expressing his interest in transgender pornography and support for reinstating slavery, among other topics.
Robinson has refused to step aside, and Republicans are scrambling to contain the fallout. Polls show Trump essentially tied with Vice President Kamala Harris, who has quickly moved to weaponize the scandal.
By pure coincidence, Trump’s visit came just days after the story broke.
The former president has not rescinded his endorsement of the controversial — and now embattled — lieutenant governor. And he has repeatedly praised Robinson when he’s visited the state in the past — once likening him to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “on steroids” and, just last month in Asheboro, calling him “a great one.”
But Trump and his campaign have remained silent on Robinson since CNN’s story Thursday, with Republicans growing increasingly worried about the possibility that the former president could be dragged down by the scandal. Trump did not mention him once in his speech 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 just 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 has recently twice elected Democrat Roy Cooper for governor.
“We gotta win. This is a very important state,” Trump said at the rally Saturday. “We win this state, I think it’s going to be over fast.”
Trump largely stuck to his typical hits on Saturday, from illegal immigration and the southern border to crime, the cost of living, manufacturing jobs and tariffs.
But he also devoted a chunk of this speech to a new appeal to women – “let’s talk about our great women, all right, because women have gone through a lot” — promising to bring an end to the “national nightmare” of the Biden administration. In an extended riff on an all-caps Truth Social post from late Friday night, Trump declared women were poorer, less healthy, less safe, paying higher grocery prices, more stressed and less optimistic than they were four years prior — but “I will fix all of that, women. I will fix all of that.”
“Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free,” he said. “You will no longer be thinking about abortion, because it is now where it always had to be, with the states, and with the vote of the people.”
He again declared his support for exceptions to abortion restrictions in cases of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is at risk, and he again falsely accused Democrats of supporting abortion in the ninth month.
Polls show Harris and Trump running neck-and-neck in North Carolina, and both sides are anxiously watching to see how the new attention on Robinson will affect other races.
Democrats immediately rushed to tie Robinson to Trump, with the Harris campaign launching a new ad Friday as part of a strategy to use Robinson to help win over suburban voters, Black voters and moderate Republicans. The plan, according to a new memo Saturday: Remind voters of Trump’s relationship to Robinson, and highlight “their shared extreme agenda and rhetoric.”
“We got folks running as Republicans for governor that are proud to refer to themselves as Nazis,” Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, told a crowd in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on Saturday. (Among the things Robinson reportedly posted on a pornographic website’s message boards was a declaration that he is a “black NAZI!”)
At a rally less than 50 miles away, his Republican counterpart, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, sought to redirect attention from the scandal.
“The media is trying to bury the story. Literally six days ago there was a near-assassination on a former and future U.S. president and the American press is more worried about salacious scandals in other states than they are about what’s going on right here in Pennsylvania or the fact that Donald Trump was nearly assassinated,” the GOP vice presidential candidate said in Leesport, Pennsylvania.
But Republicans in North Carolina are worried, including about how Robinson’s slide could affect down-ballot candidates.
The concern is far more acute for state legislative candidates than federal ones. There is no Senate race in North Carolina this year and — thanks to a Republican gerrymander enacted last year — Democratic Reps. Jeff Jackson, Kathy Manning and Wiley Nickey were drawn into what are now deep-red districts they stood little chance of winning. All three chose not to seek reelection.
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 and were quick to accuse her of deleting a photo of the two posted on social media in the days after the report.
Mia McCarthy and Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.
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