North Carolina Democrat on his opponent: ‘Robinson exists because Donald Trump has lifted him up’

North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein (D), the state’s Democratic candidate for governor, said in a Sunday interview that candidates should be held accountable for continuing to support his opponent, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R), after a bombshell CNN report was published last Thursday.

“Look, Robinson exists because Donald Trump has lifted him up throughout, and candidates up and down the ballot in North Carolina need to have, they need to be held accountable for supporting Mark Robinson and being part of his entire campaign,” Stein told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” when asked what he makes of Robinson’s absence from former President Trump’s rally in North Carolina on Saturday.

“They have been supporting him, and now it looks like folks want to run away from him, but they have lifted [him]; Mark Robinson could not exist without the support of Donald Trump,” Stein continued.

CNN published an explosive report Thursday about Robinson, revealing a wide range of inflammatory comments that he reportedly made on a pornography website’s message board more than 10 years ago, including calling himself a “black NAZI” and wishing for slavery to be reinstated.

The outlet reported Robinson made these comments between 2008 and 2012, before his political career began, on a website called “Nude Africa.”

Robinson has said he will remain in the race amid concerns about the viability of his candidacy. He also alleged in a video posted to the social platform X shortly before the article’s publication that Stein’s campaign leaked the story to CNN. Robinson insisted the details of the story are false.

Immediately after the story broke Thursday, Vice President Harris’s campaign sought to tie the former president to Robinson, posting videos of Trump praising Robinson, including one notable moment from March at a rally in Greensboro, when the former president referred to the North Carolina lieutenant governor as “Martin Luther King times two.” 

“I think you’re better than Martin Luther King. I think you are Martin Luther King times two,” the former president said at the time.

Stein said Sunday that Robinson “is utterly unqualified, unfit to be the governor of North Carolina, and we’re going to do everything in our power to keep that from happening.”