Why Isn’t Anyone Asking Trump About Mark Robinson?
How is the Republican Party not being held accountable for Mark Robinson, the party’s nominee for governor of North Carolina?
While there are plenty of MAGA partisans in the modern GOP, Robinson stands apart from the rest. As we reported in Rolling Stone five months ago, Robinson’s conspiratorial, racist, homophobic, antisemitic, and frankly batshit statements aren’t merely extreme: They are uniquely shocking, offensive, vulgar, and prejudiced — even by MAGA standards — and should be beyond the pale of political discourse.
And yet, I’m sure most Americans don’t even know his name.
Donald Trump enthusiastically supports Robinson, even calling him “better than Martin Luther King.” (Robinson is the first Black lieutenant governor in the state’s history.) And while Robinson himself is trailing badly in the polls — down by 14 points, as of Thursday — Trump is running neck-and-neck with Vice President Kamala Harris in North Carolina’s presidential race. There is zero accountability; Trump isn’t even asked about him.
Robinson hasn’t just made one or two cringey remarks. Prior to winning public office, he built his name on being an internet troll, especially on Facebook. He has spread lunatic conspiracy theories about Jews, like claiming that Jewish people created Black Panther “to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze [the Yiddish N-word] pockets” and that the Holocaust is being exaggerated for political purposes. “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered,” Robinson wrote in 2018, scare quotes included. He has said the “New World Order” is Satanic, along with the Olympics and Beyonce, while spouting the most vile, despicable things about gay people this side of the Westboro Baptist Church.
And he has views about Black people that are, well, incredibly racist. Here’s Robinson calling out Black activists and defending the concept of “white pride”:
And here’s Robinson using the term “monkey” to refer to four Black men:
This is who Trump calls “better than Martin Luther King.”
How is Trump not being asked about this and held to account for defending it? Does Robinson’s own racial ancestry excuse his spreading vile racist beliefs?
Robinson’s comments on queer people also cross every line of decency. Indeed, he seems pathologically obsessed with us. To choose one of hundreds of examples, Robinson has this to say to those who say they were “born this way” and that sexual orientation is a trait:
More recently, Robinson has doubled down on this characterization, preaching in 2021: “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth.”
And echoing J.D. Vance’s recent claims that life without children is pointless and miserable, Robinson said in a 2022 sermon that “everything that God made, from the foul odor of what the cow left behind, to the decaying body of every living creature, to the maggots that eat those dead bodies, to the flies left behind — God made all those things for a purpose. Would someone please explain to me the purpose of homosexuality?” he said. “If homosexuality is of God, what purpose does it serve? What does it make? What does it create? It creates nothing.”
Just for the record, as a queer rabbi who has written extensively on the sacredness of sexual diversity, I am happy to answer Robinson’s rhetorical question. Queer people, with or without children, are found in disproportionate numbers among cultural creatives, from ancient days (King David, for example) to our own. In addition to creating families of choice and kinship, those of us without children create enduring works of art, theater, music, and dance. We help build bonds of social cohesion, and, like the “homosexuals” found in thousands of other animal species, we tend to the wellbeing of the group, which is an evolutionary advantage — or, in traditional religious language, part of God’s design for the world.
Of course, Robinson’s theology is his own business. But when he marries that theology to the coercive and carceral power of the state, then it becomes everyone else’s too.
Finally, Robinson sees conspiracies everywhere. He has pushed that Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein were targets of an illuminati conspiracy, that Beyonce and Jay-Z are Satanists placing secret Satanic messages in their songs, that Paul Pelosi wasn’t really attacked by a home intruder, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and that Covid-19 was a plot by “globalists” to undermine Trump — to name a few.
In a post-Jan. 6 world, this demonization of others is profoundly dangerous. For example, in 2016 Robinson posted a photo of Ellen DeGeneres choking up as Obama presents her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “The look you get when a top ranking demon gives you a medal for proudly serving in Satan’s army,” the text around the photo reads.
As with Robinson’s racist, antisemitic, and homophobic beliefs, he’s entitled to be a paranoid internet troll if that’s what he wants to do with his life — but as lieutenant governor, and now a candidate for governor, he has the power to turn these lunatic beliefs into actual policies that affect people’s lives.
Believe it or not, there is still much more, summarized in the Rolling Stone article from March. He has quoted Hitler approvingly, threatened trans people with arrest “or whatever we’ve got to do to you” for using gender-appropriate bathrooms, mocked Asian accents, denigrated Muslims, denigrated women (“I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote,” he said in 2020), denigrated Parkland shooting survivors, called Michelle Obama a man, and said that mass shootings are payback for abortion. (“When you spill that innocent blood, that blood is going to come back as a stain on you and it’s going to come home to roost.”)
Even by 2024 standards, this isn’t normal — and, speaking again as a queer rabbi, I find it personally unsettling that his comments have not drawn more condemnation, and that no one is asking Trump about them.
Over the past month, there’s been an encouraging (to put it mildly) erosion in the GOP’s attempt to have it both ways — that is, to both coddle the wackadoodle fringe of the Wingnut Grievance Bubble and also persuade sane, suburban soccer moms to ignore all that stuff and focus on inflation and other issues. Thanks to Tim Walz’s succinctness and J.D. Vance’s awkwardness, it’s become harder for Republicans to run away from the weird.
Well, Mark Robinson is extremely, deeply weird. It’s past time for journalists to confront Trump about him, and for these skeletons hiding in the GOP’s closet to, at last, come out.
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