While campaigning for the Republican US Senate nominee in North Carolina Wednesday, Donald Trump unveiled what he seems to think is a flawless strategy to help out Republicans in the midterm elections: Just lie and lie about crime, link Democrats to sensational murders they had nothing to do with, and rest assured that Republican voters will be too stupid or loyal to care.
Just as he’s done when painting all immigrants as violent criminals, Trump lingered on the gruesome details as he recounted a terrible 2025 murder in Charlotte, hyping up the emotional details because that’s what he grooves on. As media scholar D. Henley observed years ago, “It’s interesting when people die.”
Trump was also happy to explain what he was up to, noting that the infamous Willie Horton attack ad helped defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988, so harping on fear of crime should be a dandy way to get Republicans to the polls, isn’t that brilliant? To hold on to the Senate seat of Thom Tillis, who’s retiring, Trump insisted that North Carolina Republicans must smear the popular Democratic nominee, former Gov. Roy Cooper, with accusations that he let terrible criminals out of prison so they could commit horrible murders.
Which Cooper never did, of course; as Wonkette’s Brooke Binkowski recently explained, the accusations are bullshit. But then, so was Lee Atwater’s racist Willie Horton ad, and look how well that bullshit worked. You don’t really need facts when your lies are sensational enough, because when the target of the lies is explaining the truth, that sounds like they’re making excuses and nitpicking.
THEY’RE BULLSHIT.
Are Amy Acton And Roy Cooper Killing YOUR Sons And Memaws? Well They Are If You’re These GOP Liars!
Sometimes it’s easy to worry that maybe democracy simply can’t work because human brains really are too simple and prone to being fooled. But it’s still a lot better than handing power over to somebody who promises to do our thinking for us.
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In his rally at the airport in Gastonia, near Charlotte, Tump treated the audience to a multimedia barrage, with video clips of assaults, a big mosaic of mug shots (mostly of Black men, obviously), and Trump’s own spin on a lawsuit that led to the early release of some 3,500 prisoners during the COVID pandemic — releases that Cooper opposed at the time, drawing criticism from health advocates and the ACLU, which brought the lawsuit. Trump, of course, pretended that Cooper’s compliance with a court order in that case meant that Cooper must have a soft spot for evil criminals.
Showing the audience the collage of scary Black men’s mugshots, Trump insisted that Cooper had cooperated with “radical activists” to release “some of the worst criminals in the nation into North Carolina.” In reality, Cooper agreed to a settlement deal in the ACLU’s lawsuit after the state Supreme Court ruled against the state, finding that the prison system had violated prisoners’ rights by keeping them locked up and in danger from COVID. Yep, that’s the shady backroom deal Cooper made with those “radical activists” at the ACLU. Or maybe the North Carolina Supreme Court is full of radical activists too.
“He released these people. This is just a small group of them,” the president said, pointing to the mug shots that overwhelmingly featured Black people.
The AP half-heartedly attempted to push back against the demagoguery, noting that “it is unclear under what circumstances the people in the mug shots were released.”
Trump, who like many rightwing liars just loves a good gruesome murder of a white woman by a Black man, spent a good part of the rally lying about the (horrific!) killing of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light rail train in 2025. Zarutska, a refugee from Ukraine, was stabbed from behind by Decarlos Brown Jr., who’s Black, and the case became a rightwing cause celebre because it was caught on video, perfect for endless loops on social media and TV.
State prison officials made clear earlier this year that Brown hadn’t been part of the early-release settlement; instead, he’d finished serving a nearly six-year sentence for a 2014 armed robbery, and was released September 20, 2020, with a year of court supervision. Brown’s release had nothing to do with the settlement; even if he’d been required to serve the remaining year of his sentence in prison, instead of under court supervision, he’d have been out four years before the 2025 murder.
Trump nonetheless lied that Brown had been released at Cooper’s discretion, saying, “The animal who murdered Iryna Zarutska should never have been on your streets after 14 arrests. He should have been locked up for many, many years, but Roy Cooper released him, he said no, let’s release him,” a thing that never happened. Trump also falsely blamed the release on “Democrats’ no cash bail” policies, which North Carolina didn’t have, and which wouldn’t apply to someone being released after doing his time anyway.
Trump also got off on telling the story in salacious detail, saying he just had to watch the video footage “so many times” not because he’s a sicko who likes snuff videos, but because he cares so much about justice, you know.
“When she got on that train, she was petrified to be on that train. She didn't want to be. She went there. She crawled up in the seat. She just wanted to hide.
“She was more scared being on that train in North Carolina than she was being in Ukraine, with all the missiles and bombs.
“But she didn’t know that sitting behind her on the train was a deranged lunatic, a dangerous monster … who set his bloodthirsty eyes on her. You saw the guy? I mean the tape is — That animal stood up, grabbed her around the neck, and slashed a knife right through her neck!”
He really hated that story a lot, you could tell he just hated to dramatically linger on all those details.
Trump also explained that under Cooper, cities in North Carolina had become “blood-soaked killing fields,” and insisted that the entire state would somehow become a “killing field” if Cooper is elected to the US Senate and goes to Washington.
To make the connection to Willie Horton clear, Trump insisted that Brown’s case is the “Same thing as this, same as, exact same thing.” He then explained that his show with the mug shots and the gruesome murder details was necessary to win the Senate race for North Carolina, just like Republicans in 1988 were forced to run the racist Willie Horton ad, which highlighted a blurry photo of Horton looking scary and wild-eyed, exactly the sort of “animal” Trump wants people to think of.
Lee Atwater, the GOP strategist behind the ad, said that by the time the ‘88 campaign ended, he wanted Americans to “think that Willie Horton is Michael Dukakis’ running mate.”
Trump insisted he had similar motives, for the good of the Republican candidate and America. “They put it on, just like we’re putting this on, because we have to make sure that Michael Whatley gets into office.”
Cooper’s campaign was quick to point out — for all the good it might do to refute all the rage-massaging Trump did — that “Independent fact-checkers have called these attacks false,” according to Cooper spokesman Jordan Monaghan. “Michael Whatley is getting desperate and it’s shameful that he’s using heinous crimes to try to deceive North Carolinians.” OK, sure, but if it works to chip away at Cooper’s 15-point polling lead over Whatley (also reflected in recent Republican polling) then surely that’s just fine, whatever your sentimental attachment to old-fashioned things like “facts” and “not lying” may be.
Of course, as the midterm campaign keeps getting uglier, with some Texas Republicans gleefully doubling down on racist stereotypes about Indian-Americans, we may not be done with the feculent ghost of Lee Atwater yet. He infamously explained in a candid interview that most rightwing messaging since the Civil Rights era had to rely on dogwhistles, because polite company required it.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can't say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. […] I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me —because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
There are still weeks to go in the midterm campaign, and we won’t be at all surprised if Trump or some other prominent Republican ditches the Atwater Rule and just says it outright, confident that their supporters will love them for their bravery.
Damn, we’d love to be wrong about that. Even without it, though, Trump seems determined to take his party even deeper into the sewer.
PREVIOUSLY!
Are Amy Acton And Roy Cooper Killing YOUR Sons And Memaws? Well They Are If You’re These GOP Liars!
[AP / WaPo (gift link) / Meaww.com]
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Yep. And this is part of the reason for the season. A lot of horrible people need an excuse—no matter how tiny—to vote for America's Pilonidal Cyst and/or his intellectually bankrupt unreconstructed party. Everything else, "groceries," "inflation," they know this asshole can't do anything good about it. They know the party won't help those things. But the party will help with their true desire...tormenting and disappearing the minorities that they hate.
This is why every single campaign now for the Republicans is vile sadopopulism. It's given them the keys to the kingdom. And as long as they keep doing things like tormenting minorities (trans people for example are easy to demonize since they're so small in number), many Americans are more than happy to give them power to fuck the entire country and loot the remains.
"Trump Very Proud Of His ‘Willie " What there is of it, anyway.