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More and more mainstream Republican officials are calling on Mark Robinson, their party’s nominee for governor in North Carolina, to sue CNN if he really believes a damning report about his history of comments on an online porn site is false or step aside in the race.
Robinson was trailing his Democratic opponent, Josh Stein, before the release of the report on Thursday. CNN's article uncovered a deep history of shocking and outrageous comments apparently made by Robinson on a porn site years before he entered politics.
In the comments, the account linked to an email address and username known to be used by the Lt. Governor described himself as a “Black Nazi” while making graphic descriptions of his sexual preferences.
South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham became the latest GOP lawmaker to call on Robinson to prove his claim that CNN is lying about him on Sunday, as the leading Republican spoke on NBC’s Meet the Press.
“What I would do if I were him, I would hire me the best lawyer I could find. I’d sue the hell out of CNN because what they’re saying about him is just unbelievable,” said the senator. "The charges are beyond unnerving. If they're true, he's unfit to serve."
Graham’s urgings echoed those of Thom Tillis, a senator from North Carolina, who has called on Robinson to quit the race for governor if he can’t prove the claims are false.
“If the reporting on Mark Robinson is a total media fabrication, he needs to take immediate legal action,” Tillis wrote on Friday in a Twitter post. “If the reporting is true, he owes it to President Trump and every Republican to take accountability for his actions and put the future of NC & our party before himself.”
Republicans have been privately panicking about Robinson for months. The embattled GOP nominee for governor is down by significant margins in his race against Stein, according to all available polling, weighed down by other coverage of comments he has made expressing right-wing views about race relations, women and other issues.
Before Thursday’s report came out, the gubernatorial nominee was already battling fallout from comments he had made in 2020 — at a GOP women’s event — saying he thought women shouldn’t vote.
WATCH: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) says Mark Robinson "deserves a chance to defend himself" when asked if Donald Trump should pull his endorsement of the North Carolina Republican.@LindseyGrahamSC: "The charges are beyond unnerving. If they're true, he's unfit to serve." pic.twitter.com/74H4W52ULG
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) September 22, 2024
Stein, as a result, is on track to overperform his party’s 2020 margins in North Carolina by a wide margin; Joe Biden lost the state to Donald Trump in the last presidential election cycle, though by just about 1.4 percent of the vote. Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is already playing with similar margins in the state and has forced the GOP on defense.
The latest comments from Robinson have the potential to chip away at Trump’s standing in the state not through any direct connection between the ex-president and the Lt. Governor, though he has Trump’s endorsement.
Rather than damage the ex-president’s image directly, the scandal is more likely to drain enthusiasm from Republican voters on the margins of participation in this year’s election.
At a rally in Wilmington Saturday, Trump ignored the scandal — and Robinson — completely. The state’s highest-ranking statewide Republican official was not invited to attend the campaign event, and the ex-president did not include his onetime ally in a list of shoutouts he made during his address.
But Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, was unable to escape the embattled Robinson’s shadow on the campaign trail and seemingly backed up the Republican lieutenant governor, telling a local news reporter that the allegations weren’t “necessarily reality.”
“I believe him, I dont not believe him,” Vance said.
“[L]ook. the allegations are out there, but the allegations aren’t necessarily reality, and what I say it’s up to Mark Robinson and North Carolina whether he wants to be their governor and whether he wants to stay in the race,” he continued.
Robinson’s account was found by CNN to have made numerous comments on the site “Nude Africa”, comments which were reportedly deleted after the publication of the investigation.
In those posts, Robinson, an avowed opponent of transgender rights, expressed a fascination for “tranny on girl porn” and even seemingly admitted to what would have been a sex crime, if true: peeping on women changing in a locker room without their knowledge.
I wanted to take a minute to address the latest outrageous lies coming from my opponent’s dishonest campaign: #ncgov #ncpol pic.twitter.com/RtteVUiozr
— Mark Robinson (@markrobinsonNC) September 19, 2024
He denied the veracity of the network’s reporting in a video released on Twitter before the investigation was published, though GOP operatives such as the conservative writer Erick Erickson quickly took to social media to infer that rumors of the allegations detailed in the CNN report had been floating around.
“While I only knew the rumors of Mark Robinson’s indiscretions, many people in North Carolina have known the explicit details of his Nazi comparisons and fixation on transgender porn for years,” Erickson wrote on Friday.
Democrats, meanwhile, have reacted with glee to the news.
“It’s great news for the Democrats,” Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat, opined on Sunday when asked about Robinson on Meet the Press. “He’s the new dream candidate to run against.”
