Donald Trump ranted about North Carolina during a rally speech in the battleground state on Wednesday.
The president, 80, took the stage in Gastonia to support Michael Whatley, a former RNC and North Carolina GOP chairman who is running to replace retiring Republican incumbent Thom Tillis. Michigan-born Whatley, 57, is up against former North Carolina governor, attorney general and state representative Roy Cooper.
Trump blamed Cooper, 69, for crime in North Carolina, claiming he was a “murderer protector.” He then labeled the state “one of the worst.”
“Nobody used to think of North Carolina as a dangerous state—criminally dangerous. It was like, North Carolina, it was beautiful. It was apple pie, right?” he said. “And now it’s one of the most violent and one of the worst in the whole nation. And it all started with Cooper. And you have a lousy governor right now, but it started with Cooper.”
Yet FBI data from 2024 show a higher violent crime rate in Alaska, New Mexico, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, California, Nevada, Arizona, Montana, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Michigan, South Carolina, Maryland, and New York.
Trump asserted that Cooper “let out 3,500 murderers and criminals”—a reference to a settlement Cooper approved as governor that stemmed from a lawsuit by civil rights groups over COVID-19 safety in state prisons. Roughly 3,500 inmates were released early as part of the settlement, while the plaintiffs initially sought 18,000. Cooper opposed a larger release of inmates, which may have resulted had the state not settled.
How many of the 3,500 inmates were convicted murderers wasn’t immediately clear. But the topic has been fodder for attack ads; a pro-Whatley Super PAC is currently running a spot that falsely implies that an alleged murderer was one of the inmates freed in the settlement.
When reached for comment by the Daily Beast, a Cooper campaign spokesperson counterattacked by throwing Trump’s claims back at him.
“Independent fact-checkers have called these attacks false – Michael Whatley is getting desperate and it’s shameful that he’s using heinous crimes to try to deceive North Carolinians. While Roy spent his career putting rapists and violent criminals behind bars and signing tough on crime laws as governor, Michael Whatley has continued to knowingly appoint, campaign with and elevate convicted child sex predators who spent time in prison and is celebrating the support of a President who released over 13,000 prisoners during COVID without a court order.”
In 2020, as part of emergency COVID-19 legislation that Trump signed into law, more than 13,000 inmates were released from federal prison and put into home confinement, the Bureau of Prisons said in a 2024 report.
Trump attacked Cooper on crime last week as well. During the GOP convention in Dallas, he falsely accused Cooper of releasing early the alleged killer of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who was stabbed on a Charlotte train last year. Many other Republicans have repeated that line of attack. But the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction disputes their claim. The suspect, DeCarlos Brown Jr., served his sentence and was not released early, a spokesperson told The Charlotte Observer.
On Wednesday, Trump also attempted to criticize Cooper over his response to Hurricane Helene, which struck the state in the fall of 2024, Cooper’s last year as governor.
“I remember Cooper was your governor when you had Helene. They call it the biggest water hurricane—it was all water. And it was brutal. I was here the following day. You remember that? But Cooper did nothing. He did nothing,” he argued, despite Cooper declaring a state of emergency, issuing a slew of executive orders, signing relief package legislation, touring damage sites with Joe Biden, and going to Washington to request federal assistance.
In the immediate aftermath of the storm, Trump—who had praised Cooper’s response to hurricanes in 2018 and 2019—claimed without evidence that Cooper and the federal government were “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.”
Yet Haywood County Commission Chair Keven Ensley, a Republican, praised Cooper’s actions: “Two top politicians that helped us more than anything was Gov. Cooper — he came here several times, spent a lot of time here — and [Sen.] Thom Tillis.”
In response to Trump’s comments Wednesday, a Cooper campaign spokesperson told the Daily Beast that Cooper “led North Carolina through several major catastrophic storms, activating emergency resources, keeping families safe and securing significant state and federal funding for recovery.”
They added: “While DC insider Michael Whatley has failed in his role as federal recovery czar as Western North Carolina has only received about 15% of the critical funding it needs and used his position to line his own pockets at the expense of Helene victims, Roy Cooper will work with leaders in both parties to fast-track federal funding to ensure Western North Carolina gets every federal dollar its owed.”
