United States | A little secret, the Robinson affair

Mark Robinson has hijacked his own campaign in North Carolina

Who will go down with the would-be Republican governor?

The silhouette of Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina Mark Robinson against an American flag.
FlaggedPhotograph: Getty Images
|Boone, North Carolina

“This is Martin Luther King on steroids,” Donald Trump told a crowd in North Carolina three days before Super Tuesday. Mark Robinson, the lieutenant-governor and Republican candidate for governor whom Mr Trump was endorsing, might not like that, he went on to say. Mr Robinson, who is black, had called King an “ersatz pastor” and the civil-rights movement the “Communist Rise Movement”. On September 19th CNN unearthed comments that make it even clearer that Mr Robinson—now the party’s nominee, with less than 40 days to the election—is no justice-loving preacher. Writing on Nude Africa, a porn site, he called himself a “black NAZI”, noted he wasn’t in the Ku Klux Klan because “they don’t let blacks join” and said that if they brought back slavery, which he wished they would, he would “certainly buy a few”.

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This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “The Robinson affair”

From the September 28th 2024 edition

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