Yet Another Mark Robinson Eye-Popper

Newly unearthed online comments from the North Carolina Republican have him casually musing about shooting a prominent civil rights leader.

Donald Trump’s legal troubles have been out of the news lately, but they may be coming back in a major way. Per CNN:

Special counsel Jack Smith this week will be allowed to file hundreds of pages of legal arguments and evidence gathered in the 2020 election subversion and January 6 US Capitol attack criminal case against former President Donald Trump, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

The filing is likely to be the largest chunk of the case against Trump that the public will be able to see before the 2024 presidential election, and could include what prosecutors know of the former president’s interactions with then-Vice President Mike Pence and other moments in late 2020 and early 2021.

Remember back when it was going to be a tentpole of this race that Donald Trump is a felon? Hey, you never know. Happy Wednesday.

---

Mark Robinson in Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina on February 17, 2024. (Photo by Madeline Gray for The Washington Post via Getty Images.)

Mark Robinson in 2009: ‘They Should Have Shot Al Sharpton’

—Andrew Egger

Back in his pre-political days, Mark Robinson wasn’t spending all his online time trawling the forums of porn sites. He spent some time reading and commenting on small political sites too—where the opinions he shared, The Bulwark has learned, were no less unhinged.

“If the cops wanted to shoot an elderly black man they should have shot Al Sharpton,” Robinson commented in April 2009 on a NewsOne article about Sharpton participating in a police-brutality protest. “Closing his mouth would do this Nation good.”

“Obama IS a blackface step-in fectch-it [sic] for liberal white America,” Robinson wrote on the same site the same month.

“It’s Oprah the wicked witch, leading the way to sexing up the children!” he wrote beneath another article a few days later.

These comments are previously unreported. And for good reason: They’re no longer accessible on the Internet, as the comments systems Robinson used to make them are now defunct. The Bulwark was only able to access them through an archive of old comments made on sites built with the content management system WordPress. Plugging Robinson’s personal email address (the same one that multiple outlets have reported on in recent days) into that archive, we were able to find his now-infamous “minisoldr” username and the comments he left.

These additional posts underscore just how wide-ranging Robinson’s use of the “minisoldr” alias was.

They also raise questions as to how an individual comfortable deploying casually violent rhetoric managed to ascend to remarkable heights of political power. Robinson may be an extreme longshot in the current gubernatorial race. But he’s also a sitting lieutenant governor. And, as Sharpton noted to The Bulwark, Donald Trump has not yet disavowed him.

“This is a long line in despicable, self-hating, antisemitic rhetoric from a man who enjoys the support of Donald Trump and the Republican party,” Sharpton said in a statement to us. “Now, his candidate in that state has suggested cops shoot me instead of some other victim. It’s clear that someone’s life is expendable to them, especially if you disagree on the issues.”

Robinson’s campaign declined to comment.

The North Carolina Republican announced last night he has retained a law firm to “investigate the outrageous lies” from CNN, the outlet that first uncovered his porn-site comments. Whether he will actually file a lawsuit remains to be seen. (Robinson also reportedly declined other offers of outside digital-forensic help—a decision which, as we noted yesterday, reportedly contributed to his mass staff exodus last weekend.)

While Trump has not disavowed Robinson, the crowd of Republicans distancing themselves from him continues to grow.

“If Mr. Robinson doesn’t put forth facts as part of a lawsuit that would discredit the sources by the end of this week, then we’ve got to move on,” Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina told CNN yesterday. “We’ve got an election that’s 40 days away. We’ve got to move on and focus on President Trump’s success in North Carolina, legislative races, the Council of State.”

---

Strong reporting. Sharp analysis. Good faith. Try Bulwark+ out to get access to everything we do. We think you’ll like what you see.

---

Will Harris Be Able To Do Any of It?

—Andrew Egger

Here’s something we’re not talking nearly enough about: Republicans are about to retake the Senate.

Yes, endangered Democratic incumbents—folks like Jon Tester in Montana and Sherrod Brown in Ohio—are putting up strong fights. Yes, the GOP is likely to fritter away a few winnable races after putting up terrible candidates like Arizona’s Kari Lake.

But all that is likely to matter only in determining the size of the new Republican Senate majority. The basic math is just too brutal for Democrats. With gravity-defying Sen. Joe Manchin retiring, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice is all but guaranteed to give Republicans their first flip, balancing the Senate at 50 votes apiece. Stopping further GOP gains will require a perfect run across the other seven purple-to-red state seats currently under Democratic control: Montana, Ohio, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Some of these holds shouldn’t be difficult. Sen. Jacky Rosen is cruising comfortably in Nevada, and in Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego is running circles around Kari Lake. But the contests in Pennsylvania and Ohio are looking tight, and Tester’s chances look downright grim against Republican Tim Sheehy.

Democrats could compensate for one of these losses by picking up one of the two GOP seats that are theoretically in play. But Florida, where Sen. Rick Scott is up for reelection, barely seems to qualify as a swing state anymore. And while Sen. Ted Cruz might be the most unlikable guy in politics, it’s hard to imagine him faring worse in a presidential year than he did during the off-cycle blue wave of 2018, when he escaped a challenge from Beto O’Rourke with a two-point win.

For those trying to convince Trump-anxious Republican leaners to jump out of the plane and vote for Kamala Harris, the likelihood of a Republican-controlled Senate seems to be an incredibly salient fact. Maybe one they should talk about more.

Think of it this way: Which scenario will present the prospect of more alarmingly radical legislative change? Trump with a possible GOP trifecta, or a hemmed-in Harris?

And which president would have a longer leash to wield unilateral executive power: Trump, who wants to restock the entire federal labor force with loyalists and for whom the Supreme Court has already rolled out the red carpet, or Harris, who will face strict scrutiny from the conservative Court any time she tries to go it alone?

---

Quick Hits

FIRST IN MORNING SHOTS: This Thursday, former Republican members of Congress are hosting an early voting event in Alexandria, Virginia as part of their Republicans for Harris initiative. The event will include former Virginia Reps. Barbara Comstock and Denver Riggleman, as well as Olivia Troye, a former national security and COVID Task Force staffer for Vice President Mike Pence. The event is part of a broader effort to court disaffected Republicans to vote for Harris, many of whom were featured prominently during the Democratic National Convention.

—Joe Perticone

---

TRUMP’S SHRINKING ELECTORAL-COLLEGE ADVANTAGE?: JVL’s written a lot about the efficient electoral distribution of Donald Trump’s voters, which allowed him to remain competitive in the electoral college despite getting trounced in the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020. But data journalists are starting to wonder: Is that electoral-college edge shrinking? 

“According to the New York Times’s polling average,” Times analyst Nate Cohn writes this morning, “it does not seem that Kamala Harris will necessarily need to win the popular vote by much to prevail”:

The core battlegrounds are clear enough: The polls show Ms. Harris leading in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, states that would be enough for her to win the presidency provided she wins the more Democratic-leaning states and districts where she currently leads. On average, Ms. Harris is faring a hair better than Mr. Biden’s election results across these states.

The national polls, on the other hand, show Ms. Harris faring about two points worse than Mr. Biden’s results. Clearly, Mr. Trump is polling better in noncompetitive parts of the country, even as Ms. Harris shows resilience where it counts. Together, it reduces the size of Mr. Trump’s advantage in the Electoral College.

---

STORIES TO READ: Here are a few, actual, real, quick hits—as in great stories from the crew up on the site this morning:

• Will Saletan on the chutzpah of Lindsey Graham, Donald Trump and others, in Omaha.

• Mona Charen on why we should take Trump’s threat to blame the Jews if he loses quite seriously.

• Marc Caputo on how Comcast went from covering the cost of employees seeking abortions to funding the DeSantis PAC leading the fight against abortion rights.  

---

Cheap Shots