In a dark, divisive NC speech, Trump tries to scare people to the polls | Opinion
President Donald Trump visited North Carolina on Wednesday in an effort to rally support for struggling U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley.
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But with an economy that’s middling at best and a deeply unpopular war in Iran, there isn’t a whole lot to get people excited about. So Trump is falling back on his favorite tactic: scaring people to the polls.
In Wednesday’s speech in Gastonia, where Whatley is from, Trump painted an awfully dark picture of North Carolina, calling its cities “blood-soaked killing fields” and its streets “filled with lawlessness, filth and squalor.” He repeatedly invoked the murder last summer of Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train.
“So nobody used to think of North Carolina as a dangerous state, criminally dangerous,” Trump said. “It was like North Carolina, it was beautiful, it was apple pie, right? And now it’s one of the most violent and one of the worst in the whole nation.”
The crowd of supporters who gathered at Gastonia Municipal Airport cheered on every attack on former Gov. Roy Cooper, the Democratic candidate for Senate. But in reality, Trump was fearmongering, plain and simple. It’s quite a peculiar way to describe a state the president claims he loves. Apparently, to Trump, to love something is to degrade it and lie about it repeatedly.
Trump’s description of North Carolina contradicts the claims of his own administration. Ahead of the president’s visit, the White House issued a press release bragging about how, thanks to the president, North Carolina is safe after all. The press release cited improvements in crime statistics, including a drop in robberies, murders and motor vehicle thefts. It even cited decreases in crime in Charlotte and Raleigh, two of the “blood-soaked killing fields” Trump was presumably referring to in his speech. U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche also took the stage Wednesday to tout how North Carolina is the safest it’s been in years.
But to win elections, you have to motivate people to vote, and Trump is attempting to do so by convincing North Carolinians that they’re living in a violent hellscape that only Republicans can save them from. The irony in all of it is that North Carolina is a state that Republicans already largely control.
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“Roy Cooper and his band of communists want to take everything you have and give it to people who would rob your house, invade your border, just shoot you dead,” Trump told the crowd. “They shoot you dead. Then they go to sleep at night, wake up in the morning and not even remember that they killed you. They couldn’t care less. They’re animals. They’re killers.”
Of course, it’s unclear if crime is really the galvanizing issue that Trump and Republicans want it to be, at least with the general public. Crime and public safety don’t seem to be top of mind for voters right now. Polls show that voters are most worried about the economy, namely inflation and the cost of living, and they disapprove of how Trump has handled it.
Trump’s approach has been to dismiss the affordability crisis as “fake,” a “hoax” and a “con job.” On Wednesday, he again claimed that affordability is a word Democrats made up, and was dismissive of ballooning gas prices, calling it “a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done” in Iran. (The average price of regular gasoline was nearly 30 cents more expensive Wednesday in Charlotte than a week earlier.) That flippant attitude does help drive people to the polls, but they’re voting in the other direction.
The problems that North Carolina faces — and that we face as a country — run much deeper than crime, or even affordability. A president who chooses to further divide the country with speeches like this, in which fear and hate are the central themes, is not someone who appears equipped to solve them. If Wednesday’s speech was meant to reassure people of that, it failed on every count.
Deputy Opinion Editor Paige Masten covers politics and the 2026 elections for The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer.
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