At a rally in North Carolina, Trump avoids Topic A: Mark Robinson

WILMINGTON, N.C. – Through an awkward quirk of scheduling, former President Donald 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 Trump, who had called Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids,” might react to an explosive CNN report that 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, North Carolina, Trump made no mention of Robinson or the scandal surrounding him, even as he gave shoutouts to a number of the state’s officials and politicians. And Robinson, who has denied the accusations, was conspicuous by his absence.

Instead, Trump delivered a fairly standard rally speech, attacking Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats on the economy and immigration while digressing to criticize Harris’ livestreamed event this past 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 Robinson was Rep. 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, 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, Trump issued an executive order that tried to withhold federal grants to such locales, an effort that was blocked by federal courts.

Trump, who has vowed to conduct an enormous deportation operation if elected, said he would deploy federal law enforcement agencies to “hunt down” and “capture” those in the country illegally.

But Trump omitted any mention of Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, a group that he falsely claimed at the presidential debate this month had been eating people’s pets. On Wednesday night, Trump said he planned to visit Springfield in the “next two weeks.” Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, wrote in a guest essay in the New York Times on Friday that as a supporter of Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, he was “saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield.”

Faced with polls that have showed him losing ground to Harris with female voters, Trump made a direct appeal to women, repeating claims that he had made in a lengthy all-caps social media post overnight insisting that women were “more stressed and depressed and unhappy than they were four years ago.”

Trump has taken credit for appointing three Supreme Court justices who voted in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion and led to bans or abortion restrictions in 22 states. A large share of voters in swing states, particularly women, have said abortion will be central to their decision in November. But as he spoke about women at the rally, Trump said, “You will no longer be thinking about abortion, because it is now where it always had to be: with the states and with the vote of the people.”

Trump also repeated the false claim that his political opponents support the “execution of a baby after birth.” Infanticide is illegal in all 50 states.

Dante Murphy, a Baptist minister who lives in Wilmington and was standing conspicuously behind a news media section at the rally, sported a “Mark Robinson for Governor” T-shirt and a baseball cap signed by him. While he continued to support Robinson, he said, Trump’s avoidance of the topic made perfect sense.

“You know, he is playing it safe by just being quiet right now,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.