North Carolina’s former lieutenant governor has admitted to posting racist and lewd comments on a porn site—actions he said he lied about to protect Donald Trump.
Mark Robinson appeared on a podcast on Thursday where he was quizzed about his denial of a CNN report during his ill-fated 2024 gubernatorial campaign.
The report claimed Robinson had used an alias on a porn site to call himself a “black NAZI” in the 2000s. The alias also described a love of transgender porn. Robinson denied that he had made that post and others in which he supported reinstating slavery and called Martin Luther King Jr. a “commie bastard.”
The Washington Post later reported that Robinson had also praised Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as a “good read” and “a real eye opener.”
Denying the reports in the closing weeks of the campaign, Robinson claimed, “This is not us. These are not our words. And this is not anything that is characteristic of me.” He filed—and later dropped—a $50 million suit against CNN, claiming he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching.”
But now, Robinson is coming clean.
“I won’t say that I completely lied, some of the things about the whole story. Some of it—there’s some truth to it,” Robinson, 57, told “After the Call” podcast host and pastor Josh Hall, adding that he had an “obsession” with pornography.
“President Trump and I had become very good friends,” Robinson then explained. “And I realized how important it was for President Trump to win that race. And I knew that we were—not only was I in the fight for my life, that the country literally was in the fight for its life.”
The story, he claimed, “wasn’t about me.”
“For the people who were doing it to me, it wasn’t about me. It was about a cause much bigger than that,” he said. “And they knew that they could use me to destroy the people around me, up to and including the president. They would do it. And so I’d make the exact same decision.”
“I certainly don’t want to be the person that costs the president of the United States the election. Didn’t want to cost anyone else their election. I guess there may be some people that feel, like, that I did,” he explained. “If I had to ignore the truth at that moment for their expediency, I felt like it was the right thing to do.”
Trump not only endorsed Robinson, but called him “better than” MLK Jr.
“This is Martin Luther King on steroids,” he said in 2024. “I told that to Mark. I said, ‘I think you’re better than Martin Luther King. I think you are Martin Luther King times two.’”
Robinson’s efforts to protect Trump from suffering a defeat in North Carolina wouldn’t have mattered. Had Trump lost the state, he still would have been reelected.
Robinson lost his race to Josh Stein, then the North Carolina attorney general, by 14 points.
Robinson, when asked if he would deny the initial report again if he could go back in time, said he would do “the exact same thing.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
