Donald Trump returns Saturday for a campaign rally in North Carolina, where the former president is confronting a mess he played a key role in making in the critical battleground state.

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson has avoided directly weighing in during a gubernatorial campaign event on a CNN report outlining evidence that he made disturbing posts on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago.

The former president did not mention Mr. Robinson, the state’s embattled Republican nominee for governor, whom he once called “Martin Luther King on steroids.”