At a Rally in North Carolina, Trump Avoids Topic A: Mark Robinson

Through an awkward quirk of scheduling former President Donald J. Trump found himself headlining a rally in North Carolina on Saturday just two days after the man he endorsed to become the state’s next governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, was accused of making a series of disturbing posts on a pornographic website.

In the lead-up to the rally, there was a great deal of curiosity in political circles about how Mr. Trump, who had called Mr. Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids,” might react to an explosive CNN report that Mr. Robinson had once called himself a “black NAZI” and defended slavery years ago on a pornographic forum.

The answer? He wouldn’t.

Speaking for just over an hour at a boisterous rally on an airport tarmac in Wilmington, N.C., Mr. Trump made no mention of Mr. Robinson or the scandal surrounding him, even as he gave shout-outs to a number of the state’s officials and politicians. And Mr. Robinson, who has denied the accusations, was conspicuous by his absence.

Instead, Mr. Trump delivered a fairly standard rally speech, attacking Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats on the economy and immigration while digressing to criticize Ms. Harris’s livestreamed event this week with Oprah Winfrey; to call her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, “weird”; to say that he would ask Elon Musk to help him send rockets to Mars; and to claim falsely that an Olympic boxer was transgender.

One of the only speakers at Saturday’s rally to acknowledge the controversy engulfing Mr. Robinson was Representative Dan Bishop, the Republican candidate for state attorney general, who called the revelations “a meticulously timed and coordinated character assassination.”

Building on his effort to make immigration, an area where voters are dissatisfied with Democrats, the central issue of the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump announced that he would push Congress to pass legislation outlawing so-called sanctuary cities, places that limit how local law enforcement can cooperate with federal immigration authorities. During his presidency, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that tried to withhold federal grants to such locales, an effort that was blocked by federal courts.