MARK ROBINSON ISN'T A TRUMP CREATION -- HE'S CARL PALADINO 2.0

Yesterday, in a column denouncing North Carolina's Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson, David French wrote:

Trump loses now or the Republicans are lost for a generation. Maybe more.

The reason is plain: The yearslong elevation of figures like Mark Robinson and the many other outrageous MAGA personalities, along with the devolution of people in MAGA’s inner orbit — JD Vance, Elon Musk, Lindsey Graham and so very many others — has established beyond doubt that Trump has changed the Republican Party and Republican Christians far more than they have changed him.

The notion that Robinson is a star because Donald Trump made him one is conventional wisdom now. Chris Christie made the same argument on ABC yesterday:

"This was predictable. Mark Robinson's tenure in public life has shown erratic, sometimes highly offensive statements over and over again and Donald Trump supported him and endorsed him. In fact, he called him better than Martin Luther King Jr. on steroids," Christie said.

The former governor added: "This is the problem for us Republicans. As long as Donald Trump is your recruiting agent for candidates in swing states, we're going to continue to get our rear ends handed to us...."

But as I told you a couple of weeks ago, Robinson wasn't made a GOP star by Trump. He became a star in the Republican Party because, in the immediate aftermath of the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, he attended a city council hearing in Greensboro and denounced efforts to cancel a gun show, in a bombastic speech that was captured on video. Then, as New York magazine's Zak Cheney-Rice reported in June, this happened:

... a clipped version of his speech exploded across conservative messaging apps and social-media feeds.... Mark Walker, a Republican who represented Greensboro in Congress, shared the video on Facebook and racked up millions of views, which Robinson estimates helped his own following double overnight. Within the week, a private car was chauffeuring Robinson to Winston-Salem for an interview with Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade on Fox & Friends. “How can we follow you on social media,” asked Earhardt, “and will you ever run for office?”

... the National Rifle Association cast Robinson in a commercial featuring video from his speech. “Anyone who is concerned with holding onto the Second Amendment, I absolutely think they should join the NRA,” he said solemnly. The organization flew him to Dallas for its May convention, where President Donald Trump was a speaker. The commander-in-chief did not stop by Robinson’s green room, but Robinson flew home dazzled and started to parlay his underground celebrity into appearances where GOP voters might take notice.... Robinson was fêted by conservative media and gun groups so often — the World Forum on Shooting Activities flew him to Nuremberg, Germany, and gave him an award — that he quit his job at Davis Furniture, a manufacturing plant in nearby High Point.

In 2020, when Robinson ran for lieutenant governor and won, Trump didn't issue an endorsement in the race. So you should blame the gun lobby and the right-wing infosphere for Mark Robinson, not Trump.

The mainstream political world believes that the Republican Party wasn't toxic until Trump announced his presidential candidacy in 2015. But long before that happened, there was Carl Paladino.

Remember him? He was in the real estate industry in Buffalo when he decided to run for governor in the New York Republican primary. The year was 2010. In April of that year, a news outlet in western New York reported that Paladino had some toxic email habits.

Last week, we received a deluge of emails that Carl Paladino had sent to a veritable who’s who of Buffalo-area politicians, media types, hangers-on, hacks, and appointees....

Every one of these was originally sent by or forwarded by Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino. WNYMedia.net has confirmed their authenticity through several sources and different means. They’re real.

... many of the emails included anti-Obama birther claims, and others were just pictures of naked women....

Some of Paladino’s emails contain hardcore pornography. One contains a video clip involving bestiality. Other emails display an attitude of misogyny or blatant racism....

In December 2008, Paladino forwarded a message entitled “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal” including a video clip showing African tribesmen dancing in a village. This video is very popular in the white supremacist community and has been posted at the Neo-Nazi Stormfront website.

And there was this:

Five months after this story broke, Paladino won the Republican primary for governor, an upset victory over the party establishment's candidate, Rick Lazio. Paladino lost the general election to Andrew Cuomo, who was the state's attorney general and is the son of beloved ex-governor Mario Cuomo, but his vote percentage was six points higher than the total amassed by the previous Republican gubernatorial candidate, John Faso, in 2006 against Eliot Spitzer.

Paladino ran as part of the first class of Tea Party candidates. Now we remember the Tea Party embarrassments, among them Christine O'Donnell, who lost a Delaware Senate seat Republicans could have won after she beat an establisment candidate in the primary. She lost the general election for obvious reasons, including this statement aired on Bill Maher's show:

"I dabbled into witchcraft -- I never joined a coven. But I did, I did. I dabbled into witchcraft. I hung around people who were doing these things. I'm not making this stuff up. I know what they told me they do," she said.

"One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn't know it. I mean, there's little blood there and stuff like that," she said. "We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar."

Also:

O'Donnell's outspokenness on conservative social values, particularly her support for abstinence and opposition to the use of condoms and masturbation, has set her apart from many prominent Tea Party candidates, who've primarily focused on economic issues.

O'Donnell told TV talk show host Phil Donahue in 2002 that "condoms will not protect you from AIDS." And in a 2006 appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor" she said efforts to promote condom use are "anti-human."

She's also received new attention for comments she made in 1996 on MTV's "Sex in the '90s" in which she likened masturbation and pornography to adultery.

Weird, as Tim Walz would say. But Paladino and O'Donnell didn't drag down the Tea Party or the larger GOP -- Republicans gained 6 seats in the Senate and 63 in the House that year. And while most of the Republican candidates that year weren't considered unacceptably extreme -- though another loser was Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, who insisted that pregnancies are rare as a result of "legitimate rape" -- many of the rank-and-file members of the Tea Party movement were extremists and racists. Surely you remember this image, which, according to CNN in 2009, had been "popping up in e-mails, on Web sites and at Tea Party protests for weeks":

By 2010, only 41% of Tea Party members were certain that Barack Obama had been born in America, according to a CBS poll. But none of this prevented a GOP rout in the 2010 midterms.

The Tea Party was a collection of Mark Robinsons who were funded by the Koch network and relentlessly promoted on Fox News. Trump made the GOP realize that its candidates can be just as racist and conspiratorial as its base voters and win Republican primaries (and, often, general elections). But the party was becoming what it is now years before Trump entered politics.