We are starting to get into the downhill portion of the 2024 election, meaning that now things speed up and move really fast, in the last six weeks of an election which Donald Trump jumped into two years ago and which Kamala Harris entered about sixty days ago. It is some match. Nobody could have predicted the events which have taken place since Joe Biden left the race and put country over personal ambition. Biden’s a great man and will be remembered as such. Trump, on the other hand, is another kind of being altogether. Here’s part of what he will be remembered for.
New ad we’re now airing across North Carolina https://t.co/NrvGNqaAYo pic.twitter.com/ECIkYpc5w6
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 20, 2024
And Trump has to get on stage tomorrow with this showing up on the North Carolina airwaves. It should be some event. Believe me, I intend to be glued to the internet and see exactly what goes down.
Mark Robinson is a disaster, to use one of Trump’s 200 vocabulary words. Simply a disaster. This is from a Nick Cattogio article, Here’s To You, Mr. Robinson. Cattogio annoys me frequently with his attacks on Joe Biden, but he does have a good handle on MAGA and that’s the case here. Remember, we live in a Through The Looking Glass world where Dick Cheney has decided that the GOP nominee is too fascist for him, so any opinion coming from anybody is fair game. GOP politics has gone completely mad in the past nine years and it’s not done yet.
Robinson is only its third-most popular black Nazi.
Well … “Nazi” might be a bit strong to describe Kanye West and Candace Owens, although only a bit. But it’s a fair cop for Robinson if this new CNN report is accurate. Allegedly, it’s how he once described himself.
Robinson is the GOP candidate for governor in North Carolina. We’ve gotten used to Republicans nominating “the craziest son of a b–ch in the race,” in the words of Rep. Thomas Massie, but Robinson’s credentials on that point are so sterling that they belong in the window at Tiffany’s. Even before CNN went digging through his internet archives and turned up comments about “Martin Lucifer Koon” and the virtues of slavery, he had built a reputation as an unusually loose cannon by the already very loose standards of right-wing populism.
Loose enough that he was apparently promoting Holocaust denial years before Republican edge lords decided that promoting Holocaust denial was cool.
Not everything unearthed by CNN was as troubling as that, but some of it might pose a political problem for Robinson regardless. “I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f—ing hot!” he once allegedly wrote on an internet forum. To each his own, but in Donald Trump’s party of culture war, it’s anyone’s guess whether finding trans women titillating is more or less forgivable at this point than being a “free-thinker” about slavery.
Although Robinson denies that he left any of the comments CNN attributed to him, the circumstantial evidence of authorship is overwhelming. (He claims it’s all a dirty trick somehow concocted via AI.) He vowed after the story broke that he wouldn’t withdraw from the race, giving the North Carolina Republican Party little choice but to stick by him.
None of which is very interesting, frankly, as Republican candidates grossing everyone out and being dutifully defended by party apparatchiks anyway is another thing we’ve all gotten used to. “Mark Robinson is wackadoodle” is a dog-bites-man story at this point in the 2024 cycle.
But there are two interesting facets to it. One is how much more credulous populists were on Thursday about the Robinson scandal du jour relative to the average Trump scandal du jour. “It’s very rare that a story on a Republican that’s treated like a bombshell by establishment media actually is one; but this one really is,” Breitbart reporter Matthew Boyle wrote of CNN’s investigation, capturing the vibe among the MAGA faithful. “It was very tough to see a pathway for Robinson before this. Now, it’s basically gone. This guy is in serious trouble.”
That begs the larger issue, is Robinson capable of affecting Trump, in a kind of reverse coattails scenario? Who knows? If you think yes, that’s because you think that there is finally going to be a bridge too far for Republican voters. They’ve managed to normalize Trump, why should Robinson be too strange to normalize?
On the other hand, and this is very worth noting, we saw Mehmet Oz go down in flames. We saw Herschel Walker go down in flames. We saw Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue go down in flames. So it does seem to be the case that there are times when a Trump endorsement does not pull the weight that it should.
Mitch McConnell has been silent about Robinson, but you know that this is exactly the kind of person he used to rail about when he talked about “unelectable candidates.”
Here’s the bottom line: Trump “leads” in North Carolina by .01 of a point. That is not a lead except in the world of mathematical abstraction. I think it’s possible that Robinson could tweak the race for Trump by enough of a margin that he could cause Trump to lose North Carolina. And losing North Carolina will mean losing the election.
Still ‘ The Best People™ ‘
Right?
orangeman didn’t enter the race two year ago. He hasn’t stopped campaigning since the day he first announced a thousand years ago. He has been fund raising non stop since that first day oh so many, many years ago. I’m so tired…..
All of us are Carol. You’re correct in saying this has been our reality for almost a decade that feels like a thousand years…I’m still trying to give a phuck but I’m running out of phucks to give. We lose this one and Hell cometh to our doorstep.
“Although Robinson denies that he left any of the comments CNN attributed to him, the circumstantial evidence of authorship is overwhelming. (He claims it’s all a dirty trick somehow concocted via AI.)”
Funny how all of this could be a “dirty trick somehow concocted by AI” (and, “AI” cannot actually “concoct” anything–a human person has to input relevant information to some sort of AI creation program) and yet reports state that Robinson went in to scrub all that unsavory history (or “dirty trick”) which still exists in various places on the internet. I’d also point out that AI might be able to concoct a lot of stuff but it’s going to be damned difficult to fake the date the material was created. It might take some time to do but proving something is AI *can* be done. (Little things like “time stamps” exist and they can be faked but, again, that leaves a digital trace that an investigator can follow.)
I don’t know if this will tank Donold, but it certainly won’t help. I imagine it has to reduce his support in terms of voters.