Post from Truth Social

One of a batch, with the attack left to the video

The written text is the fixed endorsement template, and it went out on 18 September alongside at least five others with identical wording: Moody in Florida, Collins in Georgia, Marshall in Kansas, Rogers in Michigan, Buckhout in NC-1. Each has the same three parts: "[Name] has my Complete and Total Endorsement," the capitalized "HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!", and the signature "President DONALD J. TRUMP." Only the name, the office and the pronoun change. On its own the text is a slot-filled form and tells us little about his state.

The attached video is where the content is. It's a direct-to-camera endorsement in which Trump speaks in the first person ("I'm asking you," "my complete and total endorsement," "I won your state all three times"). That makes its claims his own, unlike a clip where a broadcaster or supporter does the talking. About a third of the clip praises Whatley. The rest attacks Roy Cooper. So the post is mostly a prosecution of the opponent, with the endorsement as its frame.

The candidate's credential goes through Trump's own record

Whatley's qualification comes out as a claim about Trump: "he was the head of your Republican party and I won your state all three times by a lot." Service is folded into the endorser's victories, and the margin is inflated along the way (the 2020 result was about 1.3 points). The loyalty test comes first: "Michael has been with us from the very beginning." What qualifies Whatley is how long he has been loyal and how close he is to Trump's wins, more than anything on policy. That fits a long-standing pattern where endorsement means granting status, and the grant reflects well on the one giving it. The mild grandiosity here is routine. There is no sign of injury or rage. The trigger is campaign maintenance during a heavy endorsement cycle about six weeks before the midterms.

Splitting, and taking Cooper out of "the people"

The two men are drawn as opposites with nothing in between. Whatley is "one of the finest people I know" and "really strong on crime." Cooper is the "weak on crime, former governor, radical liberal Roy Cooper," and then comes the line that pushes him out of the group entirely: "I know the people of North Carolina and Cooper is not one of them." That is splitting plus devaluation. A two-term governor the state elected twice is described as foreign to it. The same polarity shapes the order/chaos framing. Whatley is the restorer ("strong borders, booming economy and the greatest military"), and Cooper is the chaos agent who will "flood your communities with crime." In archetype terms, Trump is the king handing down a blessing, and the disowned trait of rule-breaking is placed on the opponent as the man who "set that savage criminal loose."

A disproven claim, repeated

The central charge is that Cooper "released that guy into our society and he killed that beautiful young woman," meaning the August 2025 killing of Iryna Zarutska on the Charlotte light rail. By the time of this post, PolitiFact, WRAL, The Assembly and FactCheck.org had all reported that Decarlos Brown was in state prison from February 2015 to September 20, 2020. He served his full sentence and was released five months before the February 2021 COVID settlement that Republicans point to. His 2025 pretrial release came from a magistrate, after Cooper left office. The clip repeats the claim anyway, and adds a made-up detail of intent: "He was told not to do it and he did it." That line has no documented basis and turns a false causal chain into a story of defiance. This is distortion, meaning reality reshaped to fit a need. Since the claim has been publicly and repeatedly corrected, sticking to it looks more like strategy than mistake.

The recidivism figures ("murdered 25 people in your state, rape 99 people and committed more than 600 felonies") repeat numbers from Whatley's campaign, where they were rearrests and charges, not convictions. Fact-checkers found that more than half of the murder cases happened after the person's scheduled release date without the settlement, and at least seven people were out before it was signed. In the clip, arrests become crimes committed, and crimes that would have happened anyway become Cooper's fault.

Language that describes the victim's death as spectacle

The dehumanizing words point at the attacker ("deranged monster," "savage criminal," "stone cold killers") and at "people like that." They don't point at a population group. The most striking line is about the victim: "she's dead violently on tape for everybody to watch." It uses the widely shared surveillance footage as proof and pushes the viewer's revulsion onto the opponent. Cooper's name sits next to that image, but the only action asked of anyone is to "knock on doors and volunteer and vote." The rhetoric is fear appeal with guilt by association, not mobilization against a person.

Speech in the clip

Most of the clip reads as a script, but it has his usual extemporaneous run-on sentences, like "He has done such a bad job on murder and all of the other things with his sanctuary cities and everything else that he's always promoting." Loose, piled-up clauses like these show up in his rally speech from 2015 on and don't depart from that baseline. "Done such a bad job on murder" is compressed wording in the same style, not a word substitution. The name spellings "Watley" and "Zorutzka" come from the speech-to-text, not from him.

Authorship

The post went out at 14:26 Eastern on a weekday, in the middle of a run of identical templated endorsements. The text has no errors or drift, and its signature block is the one used in campaign-office batches. Staff almost certainly wrote and posted the text. The video's wording is his in delivery, and its content follows NRSC and Whatley campaign talking points closely.

Sources: PolitiFact, WRAL, The Assembly, FactCheck.org, WRAL crime claims, Breitbart/Whatley figures

Fact Verification

Overall Veracity: 56%