Today, voters in the wonderfully nutty state of North Carolina (state motto: Hey, Kitty Hawk is here so we’ve got that going for us! Yes, Kitty Hawk! The Wright Brothers? Anyone? Hello?) will choose their candidate for the state’s gubernatorial election this fall. And on the Republican side, the choice is clear: They will be nominating Martin Luther King Jr.
Okay, not the Martin Luther King Jr., but a man Donald Trump considers to be “Martin Luther King on steroids.” How much more of an endorsement could any politician need?
“Martin Luther King on steroids” is actually Mark Robinson, the current lieutenant governor of the Tar Heel State. He’s Black, which for Trump is enough, though in every other way possible, he resembles Martin Luther King about as much as Nags Head resembles Calcutta.
But nothing can stop Trump when he’s rolling – facts, logic, history, amphetamine withdrawal, nothing:
“Now, you know the fake news will go today and they'll take that little statement that I make, that little cute statement and they'll say, he said that this gentleman is better than Martin Luther King, this is a terrible thing, is he a racist, a bop, a bop, a bop, I'll end up being, I don't care, it doesn't matter, because the people, the people get it, Mark, the people get it, thank you Mark.”
Well sure, if MLK was a misogynist who hated gay people, thought transgender people should only get to poop outside like dogs, and touted a belief that the Holocaust gets a bad rap, Trump would be dead-on here.
Robinson has also decried King as a “communist,” so even Trump acknowledged he wasn’t sure how the lieutenant governor would take the “compliment,” but we suppose so long as Trump doesn’t suggest Robinson favors something really outlandish like unions or a living wage for the working class or a universal basic income or the right to vote or racial equality or an immediate end to the Vietnam War, he’s on solid ground here.
PREVIOUSLY! ON THIS GUY!
Besides the resemblance or lack thereof to the nation’s greatest civil rights hero, Trump got a couple of other things wrong about Robinson during his little introduction. For example, speaking of how Robinson burst onto the scene after giving a speech at a Greensboro town meeting that went viral:
“I guess he was complaining about taxes in his town and he got up and he made his speech, and they didn't care too much about what he said. They just said, this is the greatest speaker we've ever heard, would you like to run for Lieutenant Governor or something?”
Actually, Robinson spoke about guns at that meeting. In the wake of the massacre at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, Greensboro was debating whether to cancel an upcoming gun show. Not because the city’s residents had suddenly decided to renounce the Second Amendment, but because, much like the state of Colorado getting mad at the NRA for holding its convention in Denver a few weeks after Columbine, at least some people in Greensboro thought maybe it might be good for their souls to show an ounce of decency and not celebrate their Death Penises at the precise moment that a bunch of teenagers’ blood was still being squeegee’d off the floor.
Robinson disagreed, got famous, quit his job as a forklift driver, and two years later got elected lieutenant governor of North Carolina. Now he’s the odds-on favorite to be the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, and he’s got a decent chance at winning the general election. America!
Trump also noted in his speech that Robinson “is not a politician, which I think is to his advantage.” He’s right about that, Robinson is not a politician. He’s a bigot who had declared bankruptcy three times, is staunchly anti-abortion even though he once paid for his then-girlfriend to have one, and has been pursued by the Internal Revenue Service for not paying taxes —
Ohhhhhh, never mind, we see why Trump likes him. Basically, Robinson is a right-wing troll who memed his way into high office, and in a few months he might be the chief executive of his state.
Well, dumber things have happened. We’ll let you know when we think of one.
[Joe.My.God / Washington Post]
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OT: today is the day in 2004 my wife and I stood in a lone that wrapped around the Multnomah County courthouse to get a marriage license to get gay married.
Only to have it followed by an ammendment on the ballot to enshrine "one-woman-one-man marriage and have a judge then nullify ours, and all marriages performed in that short, exhilarating window.
“This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash.” - The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., 2018
(Double checks)
Oh, wait it was Mark Robinson. Sorry, I get the two of them confused.