Ohio Sen. JD Vance admitted Monday that some of the posts reportedly made by Trump-aligned North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson on a porn site were “pretty gross,” adding that it’s up to Robinson to convince voters that he didn’t make them.
“What he said or didn’t say is ultimately between him and the people of North Carolina. The people of North Carolina are going to make that decision,” Vance said in Charlotte. “Now look: I’ve seen some of the statements. I haven’t seen them all. Some of them are pretty gross, to put it mildly.”
Vance then noted that Robinson has denied writing them, adding, “I think it’s up to Mark Robinson to make his case to the people of North Carolina that those weren’t his statements. And I’m going to let him make that case.”
Oddly enough, Robinson has passed up several chances to help him do just that. The lieutenant governor rejected information technology experts’ offers to look into the origin of the posts, local station WRAL reported Monday.
Besides writing about his sexual fantasies involving his sister-in-law, Robinson allegedly declared himself to be “a Black Nazi.”
“Slavery is not bad,” Robinson also wrote in a 2010 post on the online forum for “Nude Africa,” a porn site. “Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few.”
Notably, Robinson wasn’t at Vance’s speech Monday in Charlotte. The Carolina Journal reported that the Trump campaign has told him to avoid making public appearances with members of the GOP presidential ticket.
Yet Trump’s kind words for Robinson continue to reverberate in Democrats’ messaging in the battleground state.
In March, for instance, Trump praised Robinson—a Holocaust denier who has denigrated school shooting survivors and said he “want[s] to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote—as “Martin Luther King on steroids.”