As a voting, tax-paying citizen of the troubled state of North Carolina, I have nothing against Mark Robinson or his Big Orange Brother Donald Trump. I hope that when their public careers have ended — and I pray that’s very soon — they’ll get the kind of professional help they require, including therapy, isolation and possibly anti-psychotic medication. Though anti-psychotic medications often cause dramatic weight gain, and God knows neither of them could survive that. Sitting at the top of our November ballot, aspiring to become our governor and our president, are two of the strangest, largest and most repugnant individuals who ever rose to power or prominence in the United States of America.
Trump’s weekly attempt to dominate the news cycle fell short in late September, with nothing near the front page except the 26 women who accuse him of rape or sexual assault, most of whom he flatly denies ever meeting, though many photographs contradict him. He couldn’t compete with the scandal that enveloped our Lt. Gov. Robinson, a CNN exposé of bizarre posts on a pornographic website called Nude Africa. Robinson not only described himself as “a Black Nazi,” espoused slavery (“I wish they would bring it back”) and disparaged Rev. Martin Luther King as “a f…ing commie bastard” and “Martin Lucifer Koon.” He called himself a teenaged “perv” who spied on women in gym showers and admitted a passion for porn that featured transsexuals. Robinson’s posts were expressed in language even coarser and more profane than the worst of Big Donald, exposing a mega-hypocrite who has spent his political life preaching rightwing gospel from the pulpits of evangelical churches.
Many of the posts date back more than a decade, and of course he follows his Orange Leader, denying that any of them are his. But it doesn’t take much close analysis of the CNN investigation to see that they’ve made a lawsuit-proof case against Mark Robinson. Barring a capital crime by his opponent, his campaign is finished, and wouldn’t it be sweet if he could take Trump down with him, at least in North Carolina.
Most of his staff has just resigned, and prominent Republicans have advised him to drop out of the race. In a tone that sounded like anguish, his rival, NC Attorney General Josh Stein, told The New York Times “I cannot have that man be my governor.”
What’s Robinson’s political future? He has none, most people would answer. But the more intriguing question is how such a man came to be. There is no obvious social or political narrative that could produce a Black White supremacist, as I described him in a previous column (“Tar Heel Trauma,” May 1 TPP). It’s almost as if poor Mark was stolen from his mother as an infant and raised by some chapter of the Klan or the Proud Boys as an experiment, to see if they could produce an ebony version of the classic back-roads racist known in the South as the “killer redneck.” He checks all the boxes, despising Jews, Muslims, homosexuals and school-shooting victims, as well as the civil rights movement and its heroes. “Worse than a maggot,” was his verdict on Rev. King. Women get no respect either. His only loves, to judge from his rhetoric, are guns and fetuses. Where did the Republicans ever find this sad creep, deranged and disfigured with what appears to be self-hatred? (Greensboro, North Carolina.) Among his frequent targets are Black celebrities like the Obamas, Oprah Winfrey, Al Sharpton, Bill Cosby and Serena Williams. Robinson is so weird he seems almost extraterrestrial.
After November, we can leave this strange, damaged man to the psychiatrists. But it’s not so certain that an equally demented candidate with an orange face will be joining Mr. Robinson in obscurity, or in the locked back wards where they both belong. We need to keep reminding ourselves that Robinson was not a fringe candidate who hoped to poll in double figures. He was the chosen candidate, already in prominent public office, of a national political party that represents close to half the voters in North Carolina. In our state he could pass for a candidate of the establishment.
North Carolina politics don’t often make the nation’s front pages, and when they do it’s rarely for something we’re proud of. There was our one-term congressman Madison Cawthorn, a paraplegic wild child who tried to carry a loaded pistol onto a commercial flight, and managed several attempts at sexual assault from his wheelchair. There’s congresswoman Virginia Foxx, who has set new standards for Paleolithic ignorance. And before them a man I voted for, U.S. Senator John Edwards, who sank his presidential campaign by filming a sex act with his mistress. Before them all, our Neanderthal Sen. Jesse Helms.
The most recent Tar Heel to achieve a front-page moment was the would-be assassin Ryan Routh, a psycho from Robinson’s hometown of Greensboro, who apparently plotted to shoot Trump on his golf course at Mar-a-Lago. Even those of us who deplore Routh’s homicidal impulse might empathize with his unhinging sense of alarm as this election looms. With all this unappetizing history, few of us are in the mood to wave our state flag or sing “The Old North State” (Tho’ the scorner may sneer at, and witlings defame her/ Still our hearts swell with gladness whenever we name her…”) But some good may come out of our latest debacle, the tragicomic rise and fall of Mark Robinson. In this polarized republic, there must still be a few detached, uncommitted voters who will respond to the Nude Africa posts with sheer astonishment, and take a long, hard second look at the whole Republican Party.
To see Trump and Robinson together, this mismatched set of hulking, raving monsters spitting out lies, insults and profanity, is to wonder if the Republican Party has gone off the rails entirely. It’s long been obvious that the GOP recruits and embraces the lunatic fringe. You saw them at the Capitol Jan. 6. But in this chaotic third decade of the 21st century, the MAGA-poisoned party of my forefathers has become the lunatic fringe. When J.D. Vance appeared at a Pennsylvania event organized by Lance Wallnau, an “evangelical influencer” who preaches medieval theocracy and accuses Kamala Harris of witchcraft, it marked a closer union with the unfettered, unhinged Ultra-Right than the GOP has ever risked before. When you embrace Laura Loomer and Alex Jones as your teammates, the last trace of reason is receding in your rearview mirror.
Where civilized conservatives once held court, we see a wilderness of conspiracy and paranoia, ruled by a madman and haunted by odd and threatening creatures like J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene. A great dark swamp, where fascist fantasies grow wild. In North Carolina, as in much of the South, the parties have switched identities, to the bewilderment of young and old. I’m old enough to remember when Tar Heel Republicans were some of the good guys, mostly tolerant mountain moderates who opposed the segregationist Dixiecrats. But those Jim Crow Dixiecrats are all Republicans now, and they’re the harsh kind of Republicans who would have puzzled Ronald Reagan or even Richard Nixon, who implemented Pat Buchanan’s infamous “Southern strategy.” A few years ago when this transition seemed complete, a reporter asked the great Negro League baseball player Buck Leonard, our neighbor up the road in Rocky Mount, how he could still call himself a Republican. Leonard replied “Y’all ever hear of Abraham Lincoln?”
It’s merciful that neither Mr. Leonard nor Mr. Lincoln is here to see what Mr. Trump has done to their Grand Old Party. North Carolina, which voted the high road with Barack Obama as recently as 2008, has to answer for the bizarre career of Mark Robinson. Online, a woman dismissed by a conservative website as an academic “wacko” declared that the devastation of our mountain counties by Hurricane Helene was divine punishment for our support of Donald Trump and MAGA acolytes like Robinson. But after a period of awakening that included progressive presidents from Texas, Georgia and Arkansas, much of the red-state South is backsliding toward its reactionary race-shaped roots. This runs much deeper than the dubious charms of the MAGA cult and its demented messiah. At a N.C. symposium a few years ago, focused on the legacy of the W.J. Cash classic “The Mind of the South,” the Alabama-bred New York Times editor Howell Raines suggested that his South has “a habit of political servitude, a habit of obedience that is deeply rooted in our psyche, and is influencing the political choices of voters up to this day.” The White South, Raines meant, and its weak resistance to a belligerent authoritarian might explain Trump and many other lamentable politicians—- all of them now Republicans.
Mark Robinson is a nasty piece of work. But the extent of his party’s hypocrisy was exposed when ranking Republicans including Trump, who had hailed him as “Martin Luther King on steroids,” quickly threw him under the bus. Not because the Nude Africa posts offended them, of course, but because they might have cost Trump votes in North Carolina. Robinson now carries “too much baggage,” said one Republican senator. Baggage? He’s never been accused of raping or molesting anyone, as far as I know, or convicted of multiple felonies. Comparing Trump’s baggage to Robinson’s is like comparing a shipping container to a change purse. From impeachments to felonies to public behavior that would shame a baboon, Trump invented baggage. He is baggage — way too much, I hope, for his captive party to carry across the finish line
The irony of the Republican Party’s rapid retreat from sanity is that it has always presented itself as the party of “real” Americans, of wholesome mainstream, Main Street citizens opposed to any radical change. “Normal” men and women. There’s no way to work out a common, widely accepted definition for “normal.” But aren’t most of us able to recognize what isn’t — a candidate like Donald Trump or Mark Robinson, some vulgar, flamboyant psychopath with an ego the size of Bolivia? You wouldn’t want one of them to meet your family or mow your lawn, far less dominate the Western world. That ought to be a huge advantage for the Democrats, for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. If either of them lived on your street, you could imagine waving good morning, sharing a backyard barbecue, exchanging Christmas presents. If Trump or Robinson came waddling up your driveway, you’d drop your pruning shears and run the other way.
The media, even the responsible media struggling to defeat Trump, haven’t been honest with their readers about the width and depth of the ex-president’s mental illness or spectacular unsuitability for any public office. How crazy is he? You’ve heard of projection? At a rally in Wisconsin the Orange Crusher called Kamala Harris “mentally disabled” and “mentally impaired,” prompting Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois to observe, “Whenever he says things like that, he’s talking about himself but trying to project it onto others.”
I’m grateful to The New York Times for running interviews, with photographs, of many of the women who accuse Trump of sexual assault. But in most ways, even the Times treats the 2024 presidential election as if it were the usual horse race, with two candidates to cover, two to choose from. It isn’t, not at all. There’s only one intelligent, responsible, cognitively stable adult at the top of your ballot. Her name is Harris.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2024
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