Trump refers to Black man from racially offensive 1988 campaign ad while stumping in North Carolina

As President Donald Trump tries to convince voters that Democrats have let crime run amok, he’s digging into the country’s political past to reference one of the most controversial campaign advertisements that relied heavily on racist tropes. Senate candidate Michael Whatley, Trump resurrected a 1988 George H.W. Bush presidential campaign ad featuring Willie Horton, a Black man convicted of rape and assault after his release through a Massachusetts prison furlough program.A grainy black-and-white prison photo of Horton was used in the ad targeting then-Massachusetts Gov.

Michael Dukakis, who was ahead of Bush in the polls. On Wednesday, Trump evoked the Horton ad in an effort to convince voters Democratic former Gov. Roy Cooper, Whatley's opponent in the Senate race, is soft on crime.“Willie Horton was a bad guy, really bad guy,” Trump said, before comparing Dukakis's release of Horton to the pretrial release of a Black man who faces a murder charge for last year's killing of a white Ukrainian refugee in Charlotte, North Carolina.“Same thing as this, same as, same exact thing,” the president told the crowd in Gastonia.It’s the second time Trump has invoked Willie Horton while campaigning for his party.

Last month during a speech in Las Vegas, Trump called the Charlotte killing a “Willie Horton — modern day” tragedy.“After the Willie Horton ad dropped, Bush established a lead in the polls and never looked back,” said Andra Gillespie, political scientist at Emory University outside Atlanta. “They showed the picture, and you ascribed race onto it. It wasn’t sufficiently condemned as racism.”A spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, which organized the Gastonia campaign rally, defended Trump's reference to Horton.“Roy Cooper emptied prisons and released thousands of violent monsters onto North Carolina streets,” RNC National Press Secretary Natalie Baldassarre said in a statement to The Associated Press.

“The results had deadly consequences, and every Democrat who supports abolishing or defunding the police, paroling criminals, and implementing lax bail policies will have to answer for their dangerous records in November.”Trump paints North Carolina as a ‘dangerous state’Wednesday’s rally referenced the Aug. 22, 2025, killing of white 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska …