Rob Schofield, NC Newsline

The right wing just committed a major blunder

Over the last several decades, few initiatives of the American political right have met with greater sustained success than the relentless crusade to capture control of the courts. The U.S. Supreme Court’s reactionary majority is, of course, the ultimate and most visible example of this success, but the ongoing effort to politicize and radicalize the judiciary has borne fruit in many places.

See, for example, the appellate courts in North Carolina where, thanks to the investment of big dollars and a whatever-it-takes-to-win approach to campaigning, Republicans have captured sizable majorities on the state’s Supreme Court (5-2) and Court of Appeals (11-4).

By spending millions of dollars and waging a determined and unabashed culture-war-based ground game that has helped spur conservative voters to action in bottom-of-the-ballot races that once were treated as nonpartisan, the GOP has transformed the state appellate courts through a series of narrow electoral wins into a rubber stamp for its gerrymandered legislative majorities.

And while progressives have tried to push back periodically, they’ve mostly found themselves in a defensive posture and promoting bland messages like “let’s keep the courts fair” or “we need judges who will respect the Constitution” – themes that are true and accurate enough, but that were never capable of firing up the troops.

And then along came Jefferson Griffin.

Six months ago, millions of Democratic- and progressive-leaning North Carolinians had only the vague idea of how the state’s courts were organized – much less the identities of the people who serve on them. Incumbent Democratic Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs was a mostly anonymous jurist – well-known only among the state’s small cadre of civil rights and civil liberties lawyers of which she was once a member.

Today, thanks to Griffin’s ill-conceived and politically disastrous effort to overturn his loss to Riggs in last November’s state Supreme Court election by tossing thousands of ballots, everything has changed.

Conservative pundits and pols may be spinning the brave face notion that Griffin’s failed challenge helped advance the cause of “voter integrity” – that is, identifying categories of voters on whom Republicans can impose new roadblocks to voting – and one suspects that’s something they will pursue.

But by far the biggest and most important impact of Griffin’s failed effort is the transformative boost it’s given to progressives and Democrats in awakening them to the importance of judicial elections.

Indeed, a lot of Republican and conservative operatives are likely wanting to kick themselves right now, or at least, Griffin. Had he quietly conceded last November after a second recount confirmed his defeat, it would have been a disappointment for the right, but hardly a defeat of great consequence.

Republicans would have still maintained their large majority on the high court and most North Carolinians would have quickly forgotten about the contest.

Today, however, after six months of dreadful nationwide publicity for Griffin in which he was rightfully portrayed as a sore loser, along with six months of unprecedented organizing and messaging by dozens of progressive good government advocates and advocacy groups, the visibility of the state courts is dramatically different.

Meanwhile, Justice Riggs has emerged as a minor political rock star.

Thanks to her willingness to abandon the traditional tight-lipped posture of Democratic judicial candidates by stepping out and running a very public campaign to rally public support for her legal argument to count all the votes that were cast, Riggs, in effect, beat the right at its own game.

For the first time in recent memory, a young, progressive Democratic judge presented herself as (and spoke to average people like) a real person with whom they could easily identify – not just a distant and vaguely mysterious figure in judicial robes voicing sober legal platitudes.

It’s no wonder that other Democratic judicial candidates are already lining up to invite her to headline their campaign fundraisers.

And, of course, for Democrats and other progressives looking to alter North Carolina’s political environment by breaking Republicans’ gerrymandered strangleholds on the legislature and U.S. House delegation, all of this news could scarcely have come at a better time.

At the heart of the GOP gerrymandering success is the party’s control of the state Supreme Court. If Democrats are to have any hope of seeing fair redistricting maps return to North Carolina – maps that would reflect a state that, as the Riggs-Griffin election demonstrated in stark terms, is evenly divided between the two major parties – they’ll have to end the current GOP dominance of the high court. And that will necessitate winning elections in 2026, 2028 and 2030, prior to the next scheduled round of redistricting in 2031.

Whether Democrats can capitalize on their recent good fortune in those upcoming elections remains, of course, very much an open question. Notwithstanding the outrage and enthusiasm of recent months, voter memories can be short, and it’s a sure thing that that big GOP dollars and hardball tactics aren’t going anywhere.

For now, though, the chance that Democrats can reverse recent patterns in judicial elections looks much brighter than it did at this time last year. And all those concerned can thank Jefferson Griffin for the sea change.

Conservative website claims to unearth 'despicable' anti-Obama Robinson comments

The Bulwark — a national news and commentary website run by veteran conservative journalists, political strategists and commentators, including William Kristol, founder of the now defunct Weekly Standard — is reporting that it has unearthed more online comments posted by North Carolina Lt. Gov. and Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson in the years prior to his political career.

According to the report by the website’s White House correspondent, Andrew Egger, Robinson posted comments to an online news site in 2009 in which he advocated violence and attacked then-President Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Egger’s report highlights three comments:

“If the cops wanted to shoot an elderly black man they should have shot Al Sharpton,” Robinson commented in April 2009 on a NewsOne article about Sharpton participating in a police-brutality protest. “Closing his mouth would do this Nation good.”

“Obama IS a blackface step-in fectch-it [sic] for liberal white America,” Robinson wrote on the same site the same month.

“It’s Oprah the wicked witch, leading the way to sexing up the children!” he wrote beneath another article a few days later.

The report says that it uncovered the old comments — which it says were posted to the website newsone.com — “through an archive of old comments made on sites built with the content management system WordPress. Plugging Robinson’s personal email address (the same one that multiple outlets have reported on in recent days) into that archive, we were able to find his now-infamous ‘minisoldr’ username and the comments he left.”

In a statement to The Bulwark, Rev. Sharpton said, “This is a long line in despicable, self-hating, antisemitic rhetoric from a man who enjoys the support of Donald Trump and the Republican party. Now, his candidate in that state has suggested cops shoot me instead of some other victim. It’s clear that someone’s life is expendable to them, especially if you disagree on the issues.”

The report comes less than week after CNN reported that Robinson had made a series of cringe-inducing comments on a pornography website under the same online alias during the same general time period.

The tenor and tone of the comments reported by The Bulwark appears to be similar to those of previous controversial public statements Robinson has made — both prior to becoming Lt. Governor and during his term in office.

Robinson has vehemently denied the CNN report and says he has retained legal counsel to aid him in investigating and refuting it. The Bulwark says the Robinson campaign declined to comment when asked about its new discovery.

NC Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Rob Schofield for questions: info@ncnewsline.com. Follow NC Newsline on Facebook and X.

The 16 electoral votes question: Will Mark Robinson’s freefall help scuttle Trump in NC?

Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign to be the next governor of North Carolina appears to be collapsing before our eyes. Last week’s bombshell report from CNN that Robinson had made a series of cringe-inducing comments on a pornography website in the years before he commenced his political career has sent Republican elected officials and candidates scrambling to scrub photographs and favorable mentions of Robinson from their campaign websites and social media accounts.

On Sunday, Robinson’s campaign – which was already trailing Attorney General Josh Stein in the polls before the story broke – announced a mass exodus of staff. By Sunday night, WUNC Radio reported that Robinson was down to having just “three people working on his campaign — two campaign spokesmen and a bodyguard.” On Monday, the Republican Governors Association cut off its financial spigot.

Had last week’s story broken earlier, it’s possible to imagine that GOP leaders would have put on a full-court press in an effort to force Robinson to abandon the race in favor of a substitute nominee. As a relative newcomer to politics, Robinson has few, if any, deep connections or personal ties to state Republican leaders of the kind that might generate feelings of personal loyalty.

But the story blew up just hours before the withdrawal deadline – the day on which the state’s already once-delayed absentee ballots were to be mailed out – and so at this point, Republicans appear to be stuck.

While Robinson has vehemently denied the story, most GOP leaders who’ve found themselves obliged to answer questions about it have settled on a shrugging-their-shoulders approach best exemplified by vice presidential nominee JD Vance during a weekend television interview. “I don’t not believe him, I don’t believe him,” said Vance. “I just think that you have to let these things sometimes play out in the court of public opinion.”

State law says that Robinson can still withdraw, and that the GOP state executive committee could nominate someone else to claim the votes he receives, but Robinson’s name will remain on the ballot – hardly a viable strategy.

And, as a practical matter, Robinson has little incentive to choose such a path. Whether he withdraws now or loses on November 5, the Lt. Governor will soon find himself back in a position in which he’s spent a good deal of his adult life — searching for employment. Why not hang in there and hope for some kind of a miraculous turnaround? Leaving now seems unlikely to produce many lucrative lecture-circuit invitations.

Of course, the bigger and more important and interesting question about Robinson’s political self-immolation is what kind of fallout it will produce for other Republicans candidates who so enthusiastically embraced him.

On Saturday, at a Wilmington rally for former President Donald Trump, Congressman Dan Bishop – a conservative culture warrior running for attorney general who has long embraced Robinson and championed similar or identical positions – seemed to blame the “complicit media” for the mess, saying, “Perhaps they will stop one of us…but they will not stop all of us.”

Meanwhile, Trump, who has repeatedly lavished praise on Robinson and likened him to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (ironically, a figure whom Robinson has long derided) seems to have opted for the “Mark who?” approach. He made no mention of Robinson during the rally – an event to which Robinson was not invited.

And Trump’s silence serves to highlight the potential outcome that has attracted an extra bright measure of the national spotlight in recent days – namely, that Robinson’s fall could help swing North Carolina’s presidential contest, and thereby the national election, to Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Harris-Walz campaign is doing its utmost to make that happen. The Democratic ticket has sought to link the two GOP standard bearers for weeks now, and within hours of the CNN report, it had billboards and an online ad up reminding voters of some of the praise Trump has showered on Robinson.

Whether this strategy will bear fruit is the proverbial $64,000 – or in this case, 16 electoral vote – question.

While it’s more typical that support for a presidential nominee helps those of the same party running for lower offices, the possibility that, in this instance, North Carolinians could see a negative “reverse coattails” scenario play out seems at least plausible.

As John L. Dorman noted in a column addressing the subject in Business Insider, Robinson actually outperformed Trump in 2020 – an election Trump won in North Carolina by only just over 1%.

And as Washinton Post senior political writer Aaron Blake observed, the Robinson connection could cost Trump with the still not insignificant group of non-MAGA Republicans – think Nikki Haley supporters. And if it does help to “tip the state and snatch its 16 electoral votes,” he wrote, “that would severely hamper Trump’s path to victory.”

Two things do seem certain at this point: 1) the presidential race in North Carolina just got that much more hotly contested, and 2) former Fox Sports commentator Jason Whitlock’s prediction that Robinson could be elected president in 2028 has turned out to be a trifle off-base.

Trump makes no mention of Robinson during North Carolina rally

Former President Donald Trump made no mention of North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson during his appearance at a rally in Wilmington on Saturday, but the controversy surrounding CNN’s Thursday bombshell report on Robinson continued to dominate political discussions across the state.

Trump instead used the event to decline an offer to debate Vice President Kamala Harris on CNN on October 23 and to deliver a familiar set of rambling and frequently false and outlandish remarks blasting the Biden-Harris administration and promising an almost instant national transformation if he is elected. He said that if he wins in November, the “borders would be instantly secured,” the “price of household goods will plummet,” energy prices will be cut by half in one year, homeless encampments “will be gone,” and “world peace” would prevail. He falsely stated that every job created in the U.S. in recent years had gone to a migrant worker.

He also repeatedly referred to the Vice President as “Comrade Harris,” and averred that if she wins, “40-50 million illegal aliens” will be in the nation “stealing your money,” while a Harris administration will “confiscate all guns,” seek to pack the Supreme Court with 25 justices, and “kill the American dream forever.”

Robinson, who was not at the Trump event, was scheduled to appear at a meet-and-greet at Fayetteville Motor Speedway at 6 p.m. Saturday, according to a post on the venue’s Facebook page. Trump did highlight the presence of other GOP politicians on Saturday, including Senator Ted Budd and Congressmen Dan Bishop and David Rouzer.

According to the CNN investigation, Robinson referred to himself as a “black NAZI,” a “perv” and said “slavery is not bad” in messages posted on a pornography website more than a decade ago before the start of his political career.

CNN also reported that Robinson, who has repeatedly made statements hostile to transgender people, wrote that he enjoyed watching transgender pornography. He also said that he enjoyed “peeping” on women in public gym showers when he was 14 years old.

On Friday, Politico reported that an email address belonging to Robinson was registered on Ashley Madison, a website designed for married people seeking affairs and that “an adviser to Robinson, granted anonymity to speak freely, confirmed to POLITICO that the email address in question belongs to Robinson.”

As with the CNN story, an official spokesperson for the Robinson campaign denied the report.

It was the second time in four days that Robinson was unmentioned and absent from a major GOP campaign event – he was a no-show at vice presidential nominee JD Vance’s rally in Raleigh on Wednesday.

The scandal surrounding Robinson, who Trump has previously and enthusiastically endorsed and repeatedly and favorably compared to the late Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., served to focus an extra measure of national attention on Saturday’s event.

Though Robinson was already badly trailing his Democratic opponent, state Attorney General Josh Stein, in numerous statewide polls prior to this week’s revelations, the new reports have led some experts to opine that a freefall for his campaign could lead to a “reverse coattails effect” for Trump and help deliver the state and its 16 electoral votes to Harris. Recent polls in the presidential race indicate that Harris and Trump are in a virtual tie in North Carolina and that a shift of even a relatively small segment of voters could prove fatal to the Trump campaign’s hopes in the state.

As Washinton Post senior political writer Aaron Blake explained in a Friday analysis, Robinson’s favorability numbers were “awful” well before this past week and he is easily linked to Trump. Indeed, as NC Newsline reported yesterday, the Harris campaign has already launched a multimedia campaign to do precisely that.

This is from Blake’ analysis:

“What sorts of Trump voters might this turn off? Trump has maintained his political stature over the years despite his own mounds of baggage. But it’s not as if all his supporters are true-believer MAGA types. He also relies on more traditional Republicans who don’t love him but support the team. (Recall that during the GOP primaries, as many as 1 in 5 voters continued voting against him even after Nikki Haley dropped out.)”

According to Blake, Robinson’s continued presence on the scene – he missed the state’s deadline for withdrawing from the race and has vowed to stay in – “could bolster the Harris campaign’s strategy of promising to turn the page on the chaos and extremism of the past nine years”

“It might not be enough to get Democrats over the line in a stubborn state they’ve won just once since 1976 (in 2008), but it surely doesn’t hurt. And if it does help them tip the state and snatch its 16 electoral votes, that would severely hamper Trump’s path to victory.”

Harris nets another high-powered slate of Republican endorsements

If Republican presidential candidates have traditionally been seen as more closely aligned with the U.S. national security establishment — the military, the intelligence community, foreign policy experts — it’s a run that’s come to an abrupt halt in 2024.

This fact was brought home yet again today in an announcement from the Harris-Walz campaign that more than 100 Republican former national security and foreign policy officials who served in senior roles in multiple presidential administrations and in Congress are endorsing Vice President Harris for President.

In their letter of endorsement, the Republican leaders praised Harris as the kind of “principled, serious,” and “steady leader” our country needs, saying, “Vice President Harris has demonstrated a commitment to upholding the ideals that define our nation — freedom, democracy, and rule of law” and that she has “demonstrated that she can engage in orderly national security decision-making, without the constant drama and Cabinet turnover of the Trump Administration.”

Retired Air Force General and former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden is among the former national security officials who endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential candidacy today. (Photo: U.S. Air Force)

In sharp contrast, the letter offered a warning to the American people about former President Donald Trump and the dangers a second Trump administration would bring, and spoke directly to Republicans, saying “Any potential concerns [about supporting the Democratic Party] pale in comparison to Donald Trump’s demonstrated chaotic and unethical behavior and disregard for our Republic’s time-tested principles of constitutional governance.”

The list of individuals signing the letter includes President Reagan and George H.W. Bush’s CIA and FBI Director William Webster, George W. Bush’s Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, and former CIA and NSA director, General Michael Hayden. Former Republican members of Congress with backgrounds in national security and foreign affairs issues on the list include Charles Boustany of Louisiana, Dan Miller of Florida, and Bill Paxon of New York.

Today’s mass endorsement marks just the latest in a fast-growing list of such statements from Republicans and former national security officials. Last week, Reuters reported that a group of 10 former top U.S. military officials had endorsed Harris, while describing Trump as “a danger to our national security and democracy.”

Click here to read today’s letter and the entire list of former GOP officials.

Mark Robinson is in trouble

Even in the current tumultuous political times, Mark Robinson’s rapid rise from an obscure former factory worker with a rather checkered personal past to the highest-ranking Republican in North Carolina state government has been a remarkable one.

Six years ago, Robinson was an unknown citizen with zero experience in public service or politics. Amazingly, however, all that changed overnight — a change so rapid that Robinson himself uses only a single sentence on his gubernatorial campaign website to summarize his entire political career prior to being elected Lt. Governor:

“In 2018 my life changed when I gave a speech to the Greensboro city council that went viral. A year later I launched my campaign for Lieutenant Governor and when I was elected in 2020, became the first black Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina.”

Today, however, as Robinson seeks election to the Governor’s mansion as the GOP nominee in this fall’s election against Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein, there are growing signs that sustained public and media attention on his past, extreme views, and penchant for making outrageous statements, may finally be catching up with him.

Three recent developments stand out:

#1 – This morning, ABC News reported that Robinson failed to file federal income taxes for a period of five straight years. This is from the report:

“…while Robinson has previously talked about his financial issues, bankruptcy records obtained by ABC News paint a more dire and detailed picture of his financial and business history than has previously been disclosed — including new details regarding how the potential future governor had failed to file his federal income taxes for five consecutive years starting in 1998.”

The report goes on to note how the failures, along with Robinson’s three previous bankruptcy declarations and other tax problems, stand in stark contrast to his repeated and fiery statements about the need for North Carolinians to take responsibility for their own actions.

#2 – New polling numbers indicate that Robinson is trailing Stein by a significant margin. This is from this week’s Quinnipiac poll release:

“In the gubernatorial race, Democrat Josh Stein leads Republican Mark Robinson 52 – 44 percent in a head-to-head matchup.

Democrats (96 – 3 percent) and independents (52 – 43 percent) support Stein, while Republicans (87 – 8 percent) support Robinson.

In a four-way race that includes third-party candidates, Stein receives 48 percent support, Robinson receives 41 percent support, Libertarian candidate Mike Ross receives 4 percent support, and Green Party candidate Wayne Turner receives 2 percent support.”

Eight percentage points in a closely divided state that’s leaned Republican in recent years is a surprisingly big number in a statewide race, and it probably relates in part to a third noteworthy development.

#3 – Robinson has failed to win the endorsement of several prominent state Republican leaders. Both of Robinson’s opponents in the GOP gubernatorial primary — veteran state Treasurer Dale Folwell and Charlotte attorney Bill Graham — have declined to endorse him. Folwell has even gone so far as to say that he wouldn’t “waste” his vote on Robinson and to characterize him as “history’s latest example of someone trying to rise to power through hate.” Meanwhile the state’s senior U.S. Senator, Thom Tillis, and former Republican governor, Pat McCrory have also declined to endorse Robinson.

The bottom line: Robinson’s candidacy for governor is far from dead and buried. He has the enthusiastic, if sightly strange, endorsement of Donald Trump (who said that Robinson is “better” than Martin Luther King — this, despite the fact that Robinson has repeatedly denounced King). He also enjoys a great deal of passionate support from many in the state Republican Party’s hardcore Christian conservative base. What’s more, the election is still almost seven months away.

But given the advantages Stein enjoys in experience and, thus far, fundraising, it’s clear that Robinson finds himself at present in some troubled political waters.

Trump and Haley make final in-state pitches for Super Tuesday votes

The yawning gap between the two remaining contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination was on full display Saturday at a pair of pre-Super Tuesday campaign events in North Carolina.

Former President Donald Trump drew more than 5,000 supporters and prominent Republican candidates to the Special Events Center of the Greensboro Coliseum while former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, once Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, drew about 1,500 people at downtown Raleigh’s Union Station. The two speeches, and the size and type of the crowds they drew, provided a stark view of a Republican party fractured but leaning away from Haley’s conservative pragmatism and toward the vitriol and melodrama of the Trump campaign.

Trump paints bleak picture of America, promises to again be its savior

Cool weather and light rain didn’t deter Trump fans in Greensboro, where thousands lined up hours before doors opened or the candidate arrived. Waving large Trump flags and buying Trump merchandise at a makeshift carnival midway, some came from hours and states away to show their devotion.

Fans of former President Donald Trump wave flags hours ahead of his appearance in Greensboro on Saturday. (Photo: Joe Killian)

“I just think he’s got the only solution for all of the crime, the drugs, the violence, the illegal immigrant invasion that our country is in right now,” said Carolyn Sanders, 48, who said she and her husband drove from Wilmington to see the former president. At concession stands in the Coliseum parking lot she bought a Trump shaped squeeze bottle of honey and a sticker of Trump in a crown and cape that declared “I AM A DISCIPLE OF THE GREAT MAGA KING.” Her husband considered a t-shirt featuring an American flag and assault rifle that read, “NOT VACCINATED – FULLY PROTECTED.”

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Saturday’s event, billed as a “get out the vote” effort, drew some of the state’s most prominent GOP candidates — all Trump endorsed — each looking to get their faces and campaign issues into the spotlight ahead of Tuesday’s primary.

Among the GOP elected officials and hopefuls speaking briefly at the event ahead of Trump’s arrival:

U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx
U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop, now running for NC attorney general
N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore, now making a run for the 14th Congressional District seat
Addison McDowell, a registered lobbyist and first-time candidate seeking the 6th Congressional District seat
Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, now running for the GOP nomination for governor

Arriving shortly after 2 p.m., Trump came to the stage to the sounds of the National Anthem as performed by “The J6 Prison Choir” – a group of men imprisoned for various criminal actions during the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump referred to the men as “hostages” wrongfully imprisoned for protesting on his behalf as he attempted to prevent the certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.

The former president heaped praise on the other GOP candidates at the event before launching into his own speech. He reserved his most colorful acclaim for Robinson, calling him “better than Martin Luther King” and “like Martin Luther King on steroids,” joking that Robinson made a strange face when he made the comparison.

In the past, Robinson has dismissed King as both a communist and an “ersatz pastor” and called the American Civil Rights Movement a communist plot to subvert free choice and capitalism.

With the crowd warmed up, Trump launched into a speech that ran more than an hour — with a brief interruption when someone in the audience had an emergency requiring medical attention. The speech, in Trump’s trademark rambling and improvisational style, painted a portrait of an America that has in three years under Biden become an economically devastated, crime-ridden hellscape overrun with murderous “illegal alien animals” and “monsters.” Echoing his first presidential campaign, Trump told the crowd his election — and that of those loyal to his political movement — is the only thing that can prevent further disaster.

“We are a nation whose stock market’s continued success is contingent on MAGA winning the next election,” Trump said. “If they don’t win, you’ll have a situation like 1929. You will have a Great Depression. I believe that with all my heart.”

Trump’s economic pessimism is stark contrast to reality.

Last week, the Nasdaq marked a second straight day of record high closes. The S&P 500 also had a record closing high while the Dow, which hit its own all-time high late last month, closed up 0.2% and has gained 3.5% year-to-date. Last month the U.S. Department of Labor reported the economy added a net 353,000 jobs in January. Unemployment remains at a near a half-century low of 3.7 percent.

Similarly, many of Trump’s claims about his presidential accomplishments in Saturday’s speech don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Fact-checking Trump’s claims

On Saturday, Trump again repeated the lie that his administration created 571 miles of a wall along the border with Mexico. In fact, U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows 458 miles of “border wall system” built during Trump’s one term in office. Most of that, about 373 miles, wasn’t a new border wall but replacement of existing barriers that were considered outdated or in need of repair.

Citing recent anecdotes about violent crime and immigrants, Trump, who claimed to have coined the phrase “migrant crime,” warned of “armies Joe Biden has smuggled across our border” leading to an overwhelming wave of violent crime, particularly in America’s large cities.

Actual data show violent crime down year-over-year in Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York and Los Angeles. In Texas, where Trump painted a nightmare scenario of violent crime abetted by open borders, law enforcement data shows crime is down overall in the cities receiving the most migrants. What’s more, years of data show undocumented immigrants have a lower homicide conviction rate than native born Americans. The rates for legal immigrants are lower still.

In February, Trump pressed Republicans in Congress to reject a bipartisan effort to strengthen border security and provide additional aid to Ukraine. The former president wanted to campaign on the issue and not give Biden a perceived victory.

According to FBI data, violent crime rates have fallen by 4 percent and murder rates by roughly 7 percent since Biden took office in 2020. That’s down from enormous spikes in violent crime that began under Trump, with murder rising by almost 30 percent and assault by more than 10 percent in the last, COVID-19 dominated year of his presidency. Though those rates haven’t yet returned to pre-pandemic levels, the trend over the course of Biden’s time in office has been down.

Haley calls for return to “normal”

Meanwhile, 85 miles east at Raleigh’s Union Station train depot, Trump’s last challenger for the Republican nomination, former South Carolina Governor, and Trump U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, spoke to a polite and enthusiastic audience of perhaps 1,500.

In her half-hour speech, Haley, 52, sounded a call for Republicans to return to their pre-Trump identity as the party of fiscal conservatism and sought to portray herself as the only viable alternative to Trump and President Joe Biden – both of whom she described as incapable and too old for the presidency. At one point, she called for mandatory mental competency tests for all elected officials aged 75 and older (Biden is 81, Trump is 77) and, continuing with a theme that she represents a new generation of leaders, called Congress “the most privileged nursing home in the country.”

Interestingly, while Haley derided both Trump and Biden for their respective performances in office, she reserved her sharpest words for her former boss. She described his criticism of her after the New Hampshire primary as “unhinged,” and decried his embrace of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin – whom she described as a “thug,” a “tyrant” and a “madman” – as a grave threat to the security of the U.S. and its European allies. Similarly, while she blasted Biden and Democrats for leading the nation toward “socialism,” she ascribed equal blame for the nation’s budget shortfalls, massive debt and immigration policy stalemate to Republicans and Democrats.

Hoping to draw a distinction between Trump and President Joe Biden, Haley voiced her support for NATO, Ukraine, and greater security at the southern border.

“This is about preventing war,” Haley said. “They need to have the equipment and ammunition to win so that we don’t have to go to war. This is the part they don’t want you to know. Securing the border is priority number one, period. But if we just helped Ukraine and Israel, that’s only five percent of our defense budget. If we helped Ukraine, Israel and secured the border that’s less than 20% of Biden’s green subsidies. So don’t let them lie to you and say that you have to choose.”

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Haley received her most enthusiastic applause from what was an overwhelmingly white and seeming affluent audience – a group that despite being bereft of any prominent GOP politicians, seemed to balk at times in cheering for her condemnations of Trump and congressional Republicans — when she talked about the trials of COVID and the growing political divisions that have gripped the nation, and spoke wistfully of growing up in the 1970’s. Saying she wanted to make it possible – especially for young people — to experience “normal” again, she recited a host of what would have been standard Republican talking points (like cutting taxes, shrinking government, and reducing illegal immigration) in the era of the Bushes, John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Largely absent from her remarks – save for a fleeting dig at the idea of schoolchildren being free to adopt the pronouns of their choice – were the culture war causes that have mobilized so many on the modern far right. She made no mention of abortion, no mention of in vitro fertilization, no explicit mention of LGBTQ people, and no mention of gun rights. She also made no mention of the global climate crisis or, indeed, environmental issues at all. She did, however, call for slashing federal gasoline and diesel fuel taxes.

Of course, the unspoken elephant in the room for Haley on Saturday was her position in the contest with Trump. While she touted a pair of national polls that she said showed her defeating Biden by a wide margin (and that show Biden and Trump in a virtual dead heat), she offered no plausible explanation of how she plans to overcome Trump’s massive lead in securing the GOP nomination – other than, perhaps, a sudden Trump collapse in the face of multiple criminal and civil trials.

Haley ended her remarks by calling on everyone in the audience to vote for her in the state’s GOP primary and to urge their friends and family members to do likewise. Even if that were to happen, however, her chances of prevailing appear virtually nil. As of Saturday, the latest 538 polling average report shows her trailing Trump in North Carolina by a margin of 67% to 22%.