A swing state nightmare: The Republican Senator stuck between Trump and a national disgrace

Embattled gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson was not the only Republican absent at former president Donald Trump’s rally in Wilmington, North Carolina last weekend.

While North Carolina’s junior senator Ted Budd addressed the crowd, its senior senator and longtime power broker Thom Tillis notably did not speak. In the days after CNN’s report that Robinson had allegedly commented on a porno site called Nude Africa calling himself a “black Nazi” and a “perv” who would have owned slaves if he had the chance, the incumbent lieutenant governor has vehemently denied his involvement. He has also hired a lawyer who he says will help to prove the allegations are false.

But Tillis told The Independent that Robinson needs to come forward to substantiate his claims that artificial intelligence was behind the posts.

“What I've said publicly is I think it's on Mr Robinson to demonstrate to us that he has evidence to the contrary,” he told The Independent in a brief interview on Tuesday.

It’s fair to say that there is no love lost between Tillis and Robinson. Back in 2023, Tillis endorsed Bill Graham in the primary for governor rather than Robinson, which led to Robinson calling Tillis “North Carolina’s Mitt Romney”. (That is, of course, more than a little ironic, given that Romney put North Carolina back in the Republican column during his 2012 presidential campaign after Barack Obama won it in 2008.)

Tillis denied that he endorsed Graham out of any animosity toward Robinson.

“The basis for me endorsing Graham and the primary was he has extraordinary experience, business experience,” he said. That blew up in Tillis’s face when Robinson won with overwhelming niumbers. But it doesn’t look like such a bad move now.

“[Democrats] are going to blame other people for having endorsed Robinson before these revelations ever came out,” Tillis said this week. “Everybody's going to try and associate President Trump [with him] — but there's no way on earth President Trump would endorse his person if this proves to be true and he was aware of the facts.”

Dan Bishop, the Republican congressman and candidate for attorney general, refused to comment on Robinson on Wednesday.

“I’ve already spoken to that,” Bishop, who previously backed Robinson, told The Independent when asked.

Meanwhile, Representative Jeff Jackson — Bishop’s Democratic opponent in the attorney general race — credited Tillis for speaking out.

“He has basically pulled his support from Mark Robinson,” he told The Independent. “Not many Republicans in North Carolina have done so, so credit to Thom for doing the right thing here.”

Tillis and Robinson represent different approaches to Trump, the Republican Party and the future trajectory of the GOP. Tillis in many ways embodies the pre-MAGA Republican. After North Carolina voted for Obama in 2008, Tillis — who is from the Charlotte suburb of Cornelius — got to work and helped Republicans win both houses of North Carolina’s legislature for the first time since 1898 in 2010. His political ally, former Charlotte mayor Pat McCrory, flipped the governorship in 2012. Together, they immediately passed sweeping tax cuts, voter ID laws and other major conservative priorities.

In 2014, Tillis would challenge Senator Kay Hagan, the state’s incumbent Democratic senator, who won the same year Obama won North Carolina. The race was one of the most expensive Senate campaigns in history at the time, and the attacks grew intensely personal as it heated up. Ultimately, Tillis eked out a win.

All of this to say: he climbed the ladder in the traditional manner for a Republican.

Robinson, on the other hand, largely rose to prominence in 2018 when he gave a scorching speech at the Greensboro City Council defending gun rights after the Parkland shooting. The speech went viral and it led to Robinson easily winning the lieutenant governorship in 2020. That was the same year Tillis won re-election for his second term for Senate.

Since then, Robinson has become a favorite of Trump, who called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.” At the same time, this relatively inexperienced politician has accomplished little — though he has made a number of misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic comments.

Tillis, for his part, is hardly a moderate McCain-type character. He voted to repeal Obamacare, voted for the Trump tax cuts, confirmed all three of Trump’s Supreme Court nominations and more recently helped block a tax package that would have included an expanded Child Tax Credit. Unlike his colleague, former North Carolina senator Richard Burr, Tillis did not vote to convict Trump for his actions on January 6.

However, he is a consummate dealmaker in Washington, helping to pass criminal justice reform and the bipartisan infrastructure bill during Joe Biden’s presidency. After the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Tillis and Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn worked with Democratic Senator Chris Murphy and then-Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema to pass gun legislation. His friendship with Sinema also led to them passing the Respect for Marriage Act, which included protections for same-sex and interracial couples.

In fact, Tillis likes Sinema so much that one Halloween, he dressed one of his dogs up as her.

He’s also been a major supporter of Ukraine and supported the border-Ukraine bill that Trump killed. But he was careful to couch his language as he did so, saying that supporters needed to tell Trump this was a good deal.

Such willingness to work across the aisle has earned Tillis condemnation from some circles in the GOP. Last year, the state party censured him for working with Democrats.

Tillis knows he has to walk a fine line — and he has been careful not openly criticize Trump. Two weeks after Trump repeated the lie that Haitian migrants were eating pets, for instance, Tillis deflected.

“I'm worried about the damage being done by one and a half million got-away [migrants] since Biden came into office,” he told The Independent. “And what I'm saying is, whether it's true or not, it's not near as compelling to people who have not made up their minds as [talking about] the abject failure of the border of the Biden-Harris administration.”

On Wednesday evening, Tillis posted a photo on X/Twitter of Vice President Kamala Harris with indicted New York City Mayor Eric Adams, writing: “North Carolina Democrats made it clear this week that they believe in guilt by association.” The message was pretty clear.

But there is no simple solution to the Robinson conundrum. Tillis knows much of the MAGA-fied base of the Republican Party still likes Robinson, even if Trump seems to have been creating distance since the damaging CNN story. And even if Robinson loses his own election, Tillis will still need to cater to those voters if he is to have a future in Trump’s Republican Party.