President Donald Trump joined Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley in Gastonia Wednesday night to promote Whatley and bash his Democratic opponent, former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper.
Cooper and Whatley — along with Green Party candidate Michael Dublin and Libertarian Shannon Bray — are running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-NC, who isn’t seeking reelection. Political analysts believe the contest could help determine party control of the U.S. Senate for the next two years.
Other WRAL Top Stories
Whatley has put public safety concerns at the forefront of his campaign, arguing that Cooper endangered North Carolinians with his policies and by agreeing to release 3,500 inmates as part of a legal settlement in 2021.
Trump has helped spread Whatley’s message. During the Republican National Committee’s midterm convention in Dallas last week, Trump alleged that Cooper, as a U.S. senator, would “make North Carolina a killing field.” On Wednesday he went further, calling North Carolina cities “blood-soaked killing fields.”
In Gastonia, Trump and Whatley again focused on crime — at times repeating claims that we’ve already fact-checked. Here’s a review.
Trump on Cooper: “When he was governor, he let out 3,500 people, many of them murderers.”
That omits context, including that this release was part of a pandemic-era civil rights lawsuit settlement.
In April 2020, a coalition of civil rights groups sued Cooper’s administration in an attempt to reduce COVID-19 infection risk in state facilities. The ACLU of North Carolina and others said Cooper failed to protect inmates from the virus by refusing to halt jail admissions or release medically vulnerable people and inmates whose sentences were nearly up. The Cooper administration argued in court that it was already sufficiently protecting inmates from the virus.
In June 2020, a North Carolina Superior Court judge ruled the civil rights groups were likely to win the case and ordered the parties reach a solution to keep the state’s 300,000-plus prisoners safe — one that would include inmate reentry programs and new sentencing credit opportunities. Five state prisoners had died from COVID-19 by the time of the ruling. And in December 2020, the judge appointed what’s known as a special master to oversee the negotiations.
On Feb. 25, 2021, the parties agreed to a settlement that allowed for the early release of 3,500 people in state custody — a deal Whatley says while campaigning that he never would’ve signed. Cooper has said, if he hadn’t settled the case, the plaintiffs could’ve pushed for even more prisoners to be released.
Although Trump criticized Cooper for those COVID-era prison releases, Trump let more inmates out of federal prison during the pandemic — approximately 13,000 of them — during his first term as president.
Whatley: “And what do you think happened as soon as those criminals were back on the street? They went right back to their life of crime.”
A May New York Post report that said at least 18 of inmates released early from prison were later charged with killing someone. A WRAL analysis of those accused killers’ court and prison records found that a majority of them either were already out of prison before the settlement was signed — or would've been out of prison anyway when they were accused of killing someone, even if they hadn't been included in the early-release settlement.
Earlier this year, Republicans who control the North Carolina General Assembly announced the creation of a committee tasked with investigating the settlement and its ramifications. The committee has yet to meet or release a report.
Trump: “Cooper let DeCarlos Brown out.”
That’s wrong.
Trump and Whatley both blamed Cooper for the August 2025 death of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian who moved to Charlotte in 2022 after Russia invaded her home country.
The suspect in Zarutska’s case, DeCarlos Brown Jr., appears in the 2021 legal settlement but wasn’t behind bars when the settlement was reached. State officials previously told PolitiFact that Brown wasn’t released because of the settlement and that it had no bearing on whether Brown was free to roam the streets in 2025.
Brown pleaded guilty to robbery with a dangerous weapon in 2014 and was released from prison Sept. 20, 2020 — five months before the Cooper administration agreed to the legal settlement.
Brown qualified to be included on a list of prisoners released early because he had a post-release hearing on Feb. 15, 2021 — 10 days before the agreement was signed. Brown was one of many prisoners whose release came before Feb. 25, 2021, but who qualified to be counted in the settlement, according to a PolitiFact review of settlement documents provided by the state.
Trump said “nobody used to think of North Carolina as a dangerous state, criminally dangerous. It was like North Carolina, it is beautiful. It was apple pie. And now it's one of the most violent and one of the worst in the whole nation.”
That’s misleading. State and federal authorities haven’t released complete data for 2025 crime. Although North Carolina’s 2024 violent crime rates were higher than the national average, they were not among the nation’s worst.
The State Bureau of Investigation reported a rate of 388.4 violent crimes per 100,000 people in 2024 — a 4.3% decrease from the prior year — while federal authorities reported an overall rate of 370.8 violent crimes per 100,000 people across the U.S.
Also that year, North Carolina reported a homicide rate of 7.6 per 100,000 people — a 9.2% drop from the prior year’s rate of 8.4 per 100,000 people — while the homicide rate was 5.1 incidents per 100,000 people across the U.S.
Federal data show 18 other states with higher rates of violent crime, according to analyses by the Council of State Governments and U.S. News & World Report.
Trump blamed North Carolina’s crime rate on Cooper. However, state data shows that violent crime fell during each year of Cooper’s second term as governor and has continued falling under Cooper’s successor, Democratic Gov. Josh Stein.
Trump said “Last year, we achieved the largest drop in violent crime ever recorded, while the murder rate fell to the lowest level in 125 years. That’s 1900.”
This needs context. U.S. crime has hit record lows, but Trump’s claim about the national murder rate goes beyond what the FBI reported.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported a rate of 327.6 violent crimes per 100,000 people in 2025 — a 9.3% decline from the prior year and the largest year-to-year decline since the bureau began estimating crime trends in 1936. The homicide rate was 4.1 per 100,000 people, which the FBI said was tied with 1955 and 1956 as the lowest.
To support Trump’s claim, the White House previously cited a study by the Council on Criminal Justice, an independent criminal justice research group. The group wrote in its 2025 Crime Trends report that the U.S homicide rate that year was on pace to become “the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900, and would mark the largest single-year percentage drop” on record.
However, crime analysts previously told PolitiFact that data collection methods have changed over the years and cautioned against comparing crimes rates 125 years apart.
Whatley on Cooper’s handling of violent protests in 2020: “Did he call in the National Guard to put down those riots? No."
That’s misleading. North Carolina was one of at least 15 states to call out the National Guard due to civil unrest following the death of George Floyd, whose video-taped murder by a Minneapolis police officer sparked protests across the nation. Cooper announced May 31, 2020 that he had authorized 450 National Guard members to be deployed to Charlotte, Raleigh and other North Carolina cities, if needed.
At the time, North Carolina lawmakers criticized Cooper for not utilizing the National Guard sooner — and that’s what Whatley was referencing, a Whatley campaign spokesperson told PolitiFact after his Gastonia speech.
Cooper announced his National Guard decision a day after peaceful protests turned to riots and looting in multiple North Carolina cities. U.S. Rep. Tim Moore, R-NC, who served as the state House Speaker at the time, filmed rioting from his downtown Raleigh apartment the night before Cooper’s announcement and called on Cooper to “immediately send in the National Guard.”
DJ Griffin, the Whatley spokesperson, told PolitiFact: “Rather than stop the rioters that were burning down businesses in Raleigh, Cooper stood by and allowed the violence to occur.”
Whatley: Cooper “vetoed legislation to tell our sheriffs that they have to honor ICE detainers and get violent, criminal, illegal aliens the hell out of North Carolina.”
That’s accurate.
For years, Republican North Carolina legislators sought to require the state’s sheriffs to keep suspects in their custody if requested to do so by federal immigration officials. Many sheriffs complied voluntarily, but some Democratic sheriffs — particularly in the state’s biggest counties — opposed the idea, claiming that immigrants of any legal status were much less likely to report crimes, serve as witnesses, or otherwise help law enforcement if they knew that their local law enforcement worked with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
Cooper vetoed Republican-authored legislation 2019 and 2022 that would have required sheriffs to work with ICE, effectively blocking GOP efforts for years. Cooper called the 2022 bill unconstitutional, adding that it “weakens law enforcement in North Carolina by mandating sheriffs to do the job of federal agents, using local resources that could hurt their ability to protect their counties,” he said in a statement at the time.
In 2024, Cooper vetoed a similar bill but legislators voted to override his veto and enacted the requirement into law. In a statement to PolitiFact, Cooper’s campaign said the former governor “believes our country must have a secure border” and criticized Republicans for not supporting a 2024 Biden-backed immigration bill.
Trump accused Cooper of trying to block disaster relief to Trump supporters after Hurricane Helene: “If they had a Trump sign, which was almost all of them, then they wouldn't touch him. Remember that? That was Cooper.”
Trump previously accused Cooper of blocking aid to victims of Hurricane Helene — a claim we rated Pants on Fire — and we found no evidence to support this claim, either. It’s possible Trump misremembered a scandal involving a Federal Emergency Management Agency employee in a different state.
FEMA in November 2024 fired an employee who had advised their disaster relief team to avoid homes with signs supporting Trump.
The move came after The Daily Wire reported that the employee had given the instructions to workers who were canvassing an area in Florida. A FEMA spokesperson told CNN that the employee had “no authority and was given no direction to tell teams to avoid these homes.”
The fired employee told Fox News that FEMA had similar "avoidance" protocols in North Carolina — but made no mention of Cooper. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said the employee’s actions constituted “a clear violation of FEMA’s core values and principles to help people regardless of their political affiliation.”