Mark Robinson’s Dereliction of Duty

Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, has placed military and veterans’ issues at the heart of his political messaging.

“I commit myself every day to stand up for these folks,” Robinson said in a video posted in December 2022. “We said when we were running that we were fighting to make North Carolina the gold standard for veterans’ care. And that’s not just a saying that we take lightly.”

One of Robinson's few statutory roles in his current post as lieutenant governor is to sit on North Carolina’s Military Affairs Commission, a state body that advises on exactly the sorts of veterans’ issues that Robinson talks so much about. And yet records from the MAC show that Robinson has not attended a single meeting of the group in his four years as lieutenant governor.

The MAC doesn’t have a great deal of concrete power. It serves as an advisory group to the legislature and governor on issues related to military bases, the National Guard, the Reserves, and veterans. Robinson’s role on the commission is as a nonvoting member.

[David A. Graham: Mark Robinson is testing the bounds of GOP extremism]

In response to my questions, Robinson’s office played down the commission and argued that Robinson makes a bigger difference by speaking with military and veterans groups around the state. “The Lt. Governor’s seat on the Military Affairs Commission is a non-voting, ex-officio role. So, he found ways to make a substantive impact on Veterans,” a spokesperson for the lieutenant governor told me via email. He cited Robinson’s support for a bill that exempts military pensions from state income tax and said, “The Lt. Governor has also visited numerous military installations and held roundtable discussions with military and veterans’ organizations across the state.” Robinson’s campaign referred questions about the MAC to the office of the lieutenant governor. One of his supporters, Dallas Woodhouse, the former executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, defended him to me by email, writing, “I have no doubt that Mark Robinson would strongly represent veterans and active duty military in North Carolina.”

But Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University, told me that in a job where the main responsibility is to attend meetings, attendance is meaningful. “You show how much you care with time,” he said. “That’s true if you’re a parent, and that’s true if you’re a politician—where you put your time is your priority. And if he’s not putting his time attending these meetings, I think that is a sign that it wasn’t a priority and isn’t a priority.”

Robinson’s attendance for many bodies, including the state board of education, has been infrequent. The MAC meets quarterly, and minutes record Robinson as absent on every occasion since he took office in early 2021. That August, he lamented to an interviewer that Democrats and Republicans couldn’t even work on things where they agree.

“You’re talking about veterans’ issues. We’re not opposed to the things that we need to do for our veterans. We could sit down and work on those things together,” he said. “But as with everything, that issue of politics often drives people apart and causes them not to be able to come to the table.”

The very same day, when the MAC met, including representatives from both parties as well as nonpartisan members, Robinson was not at the table.

“I’m here because our veterans are being pushed aside for illegals,” he said at a church event in May 2023. “I am here because our economy is in shambles. I am here because our nation is literally falling apart, and I need to be standing in the gap to pull her back from the precipice.” Two days later, he skipped another MAC meeting at which a program to encourage hiring veterans, ways to improve mental-health care for service members and veterans, and tax breaks for disabled veterans were all discussed. (Robinson’s predecessor, Republican Dan Forest, attended some though not all of the MAC meetings during his time in office.)

Robinson has gained a great deal of national attention for his many belligerent and offensive views. “Some folks need killing!” he said in a June speech. He has denied the Holocaust, said that the comic-book hero Black Panther was “only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets,” and called Michelle Obama a man. He’s also supported a full ban on abortion, although he’s more recently walked that back in an ad that discusses the abortion his wife once had.

But he also regularly says extremely politically normal things about supporting the military. For example, in his first run for office, in 2020, he said, “We’ve got to honor [veterans], not just with our mouths, not just with handshakes.”

That’s smart politics in a state that bills itself as “the nation’s most military-friendly state.” Home to the U.S. Marine Corps’ Camp Lejeune and the Army’s Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg), North Carolina ranks near the top in number of active-duty service members residing there, and is home to hundreds of thousands of veterans.

“It’s a bedrock part of North Carolina, like Dean Smith, Michael Jordan, and barbecue,” Cooper said. “It is just sort of understood. Every politician—left, right, center—needs to make not just a nod towards being military-friendly but needs to project that in everything that they do.”

Robinson has made those nods, but he hasn’t done much else. Overall, his website is scant on policy specifics, but “Expanding Veterans Care” is one of the few priorities he actually names, saying he would help veterans in retirement and make North Carolina “the gold standard of veterans care.” As lieutenant governor, he has had little power to do these things, though he did oppose a Medicaid expansion, backed by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, that has made thousands of veterans eligible for new benefits.

Military service has long been a source of controversy in American elections, and after a short respite as the Vietnam War generation mostly left the political stage, battles over service are back. Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz has pointed to his years of service in the National Guard as evidence that he will be an advocate for veterans and understands the military. But Republicans have raised questions about possible exaggerations in his past descriptions of his service and rank. Those attacks have been led by Senator J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, who served as a Marine in Iraq. One of Donald Trump’s top campaign aides, Chris LaCivita, helped lead disproven mudslinging against John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign. Democrats have been happy to attack Trump too; at the Democratic National Convention, Maryland Governor Wes Moore joked that he served in Afghanistan because, unlike Trump, he did not have bone spurs.

Trump, though he did not serve, has portrayed himself as a champion for veterans, but people around him have described a series of derogatory comments he’s made about service members. The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported in 2020 that Trump had described soldiers who died as “suckers” and “losers.” The former Trump advisers Mark Milley and John Kelly, both retired generals, have recalled other moments where Trump denigrated veterans, including saying, “No one wants to see that, the wounded.” Earlier this week, Trump’s entourage managed to somehow get into an altercation with staff at Arlington National Cemetery, apparently after the former president tried to use the burial site for a campaign photo op.

[Michael Powell: Why Trump’s Arlington debacle is so serious]

Robinson has not often spoken in detail about his own service in the Army Reserve. In his memoir, he describes the important role that JROTC played for him in high school. “I wanted to be a soldier,” he writes. “People would look at me as I walked in uniform, knowing that I was serving my country. I felt a sense of accomplishment. I felt I was doing something.” Rather than join the regular Army, Robinson decided to join the Reserves after basic training, which he described as providing a way to go to college first. Yet Robinson quickly dropped out of college. “Some have asked why I did not make a career of the Army,” he writes. “What I didn’t like about the Army, or rather what made me unsuited for the Army, was pretty simple. In the Army, I couldn’t do what I wanted to do!”

Discipline and sticking to commitments have evidently remained struggles for Robinson, as his attendance record demonstrates. Four years ago when he ran for lieutenant governor, Robinson warned against hollow promises from candidates.

“Folks, we got to start doing better by our veterans. When I say better, I mean way better,” he said at an event hosted by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity. “This whole time, kicking the can down the road saying, ‘Oh, and you know, we’ll get the veterans next time, in the next election’ … Folks, if it was up to me, these guys would have to go in the room and sit until they got straightened out, wouldn’t be able to come out until they did. It’s way past the time for us to stop paying lip service to people who went off and gave—you know, risked their lives for us.”

He’s now had the chance to sit in that room, but he still hasn’t shown up.