AI Analysis
Machine-generated analysis of the post above on 2026-10-12. Not written by the author of the post.
An endorsement attack on Roy Cooper for Michael Whatley's North Carolina Senate campaign. It recasts Cooper as a worse Dukakis and Cooper's COVID-era prisoner releases as a worse Willie Horton. The exact statistics ("83 murderers, 51 were serving life sentences, and 25 immediately committed murders") look like campaign material, but they do not match even the Whatley side's own published figures. The post appears to have merged separate numbers into one causal chain. The releases came from a 2021 court settlement Cooper had resisted, not from his own choice to protect inmates from COVID. The Horton passage is wrong in its central detail. Horton did not "rape and kill three women." On furlough he raped one woman and assaulted her fiancé. His 1974 murder victim was a teenage boy. The rest of the 1988 history is accurate, so the error lands on the most emotional detail. That fits either deliberate embellishment or confabulation, and a single instance cannot separate the two. The post also omits that Trump's own Bureau of Prisons moved thousands of inmates to home confinement in 2020 for the same COVID reason, which is consistent with projecting his own record onto the opponent. Timing (8:13 a.m. Eastern), idiom ("believe it or not," "never been... and there never will be!") and the signature sign-off point to Trump, likely working from staff talking points. The only call to action is a vote.
- 8:13 a.m. Eastern posting time, inside his habitual early-morning window
- Signature idioms: 'believe it or not', 'There has never been... and there never will be!'
- Erratic capitalization of 'Crime', 'Senator', 'Governor'
- All-caps endorsement line and 'President DONALD J. TRUMP' sign-off typical of his 2025-26 endorsement posts
- Embellished Willie Horton detail ('three women') unlikely from a staffer working off a fact sheet
Strongest facet: low agreeableness (antagonism toward named opponent)
Primary drive: power
Trigger: Maintenance (North Carolina Senate race three weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms)
The releases came from a 2021 settlement of an NAACP/ACLU lawsuit over prison COVID conditions, which moved about 3,500 inmates to early release or extended limits of confinement. The Whatley campaign's own figure is that 25 of more than 4,200 people released under Cooper later committed murder. The Senate Leadership Fund ad says 18 of 3,500 were murderers. No published source gives 83 murderers or 51 lifers, or links the 25 murders to them. 'Immediately' is unsupported, and FactCheck.org found that a pro-Whatley ad tied Cooper to a killing whose suspect had been released in South Carolina.
COVID conditions in prisons were the basis for the releases. But the releases came from a court settlement of a lawsuit Cooper's administration had fought, and FactCheck.org notes he resisted calls to release prisoners.
Dukakis led George H. W. Bush by double digits in summer 1988 and lost. The Horton furlough attack was a major part of the Bush campaign's case, but historians credit several factors. Horton was furloughed in 1986 under a Massachusetts program that predated Dukakis, and Dukakis did not release him personally.
Horton failed to return from a 1986 weekend furlough. In 1987 in Maryland he raped a woman and assaulted her fiancé. He killed no one after release. His original 1974 murder victim was Joseph Fournier, a 17-year-old male gas station attendant.
The claim has two parts. The second half ("there never will be") is a prediction and can't be checked. The first half is a superlative opinion, but its factual core, that no governor has had a worse crime record than Roy Cooper, can be tested. It fails on every measure I could find.
State crime rates. SBI data puts North Carolina's violent crime rate during Cooper's tenure (2017 to January 2025) at roughly 384 to 446 per 100,000. It was 383.7 in 2017, peaked at 446.1 in 2020 and was 388.4 in 2024. A UNC School of Government analysis notes that the 2020 peak was 'much lower than the 40-year high' of nearly 700 per 100,000 in 1992, under Gov. Jim Martin. On violent crime, then, Cooper's record was well short of the worst even among North Carolina's own governors. The 2020 rise also tracked a national trend: murders rose about 30% nationwide that year, the largest one-year jump on FBI record, while Trump was president. PolitiFact and WRAL report that state data shows violent crime fell in each year of Cooper's second term, including a 4.3% drop in the violent crime rate and a 9.2% drop in the homicide rate in 2024.
Comparison with other states. PolitiFact and WRAL rated Trump's companion claim that North Carolina is 'one of the most violent' states as misleading. North Carolina's 2024 violent crime rate (388.4) was somewhat above the national rate (370.8), but 18 states had higher rates. One fair point for critics: the state's 2024 homicide rate (7.6 per 100,000) was well above the national 5.1.
Release and clemency records. Other governors have released far more serious offenders, or done so with more direct consequences:
- George Ryan (Illinois, 2003) commuted 167 death sentences, about ten times Cooper's 15 commutations of December 2024.
- Mike Huckabee (Arkansas) granted 1,033 clemencies, including a commutation for Maurice Clemmons, who later killed four Lakewood, Washington police officers. That case was widely compared to Willie Horton.
- Haley Barbour (Mississippi, 2012) pardoned or released about 200 people, including at least 14 convicted murderers.
- Matt Bevin (Kentucky, 2019) issued over 400 pardons, including a convicted killer whose family had raised money for him and a man convicted of raping a 9-year-old.
- Michael Dukakis, the post's own comparison, oversaw the furlough under which Horton committed a rape and assault.
Cooper's roughly 3,500 early releases came from a 2021 court settlement of a COVID-era civil rights lawsuit, which he had at first resisted. Over the same period, Trump's own Bureau of Prisons moved about 13,000 federal inmates out early. Fact-checkers (PolitiFact/WRAL, FactCheck.org, WITN) found that the most prominent killings tied to Cooper were wrongly attributed to him. DeCarlos Brown was released in September 2020, before the settlement, and the Senate Leadership Fund ad's suspect was released from a South Carolina prison. A May 2026 New York Post count found at least 18 settlement releasees later charged with killings, but WRAL found most were already out, or would have been released anyway by the time of the crimes.
What critics can fairly cite. Cooper agreed to the settlement, vetoed ICE-detainer bills three times (accurate per PolitiFact), commuted 15 death sentences on his last day in office, and governed during the 2020 crime peak. These are legitimate grounds for criticism. None of them makes his record the worst of any governor ever, by crime rates or by the scale and consequences of releases.
I rated it mostly false rather than false because 'bad record on crime' has no fixed metric and the prediction can't be graded. Every measurable comparison still contradicts the claim.
No contradictions with other posts detected yet.
Trump spent the day gearing up for an evening rally in Youngstown, Ohio, and most of what he posted was in other people's words. More than half the day's posts came in one early-morning burst of fan videos, praise screenshots and rally clips. He passed along two clips without comment that cast Musli...
A Willie Horton ad, with the Horton facts made up
The post is a campaign attack built on one analogy. It sets Roy Cooper, the Democratic Senate nominee in North Carolina, beside Michael Dukakis in 1988, and says the comparison favors Dukakis: "What Former Governor Roy Cooper did is, believe it or not, far more consequential." It ends with an all-caps endorsement of Michael Whatley. The structure is a stock opposition-research sequence: precise figures, an emotional historical precedent, a superlative verdict, then the call to vote.
The numbers and the precedent
The opening figures ("83 murderers, 51 were serving life sentences, and 25 immediately committed murders") are exact in a way Trump's own speech rarely is. They read like a campaign briefing sheet. They also do not match what the Whatley side has actually put out. The Whatley campaign's figure is that Cooper released "more than 4,200 criminals," 25 of whom later committed murder. The Senate Leadership Fund ad says 18 of 3,500 were murderers. The post appears to have combined these into one chain in which the 25 murders come from the 83 murderers and happen "immediately." No published source supports that chain. The releases themselves came from a 2021 court settlement of an NAACP/ACLU lawsuit over prison COVID conditions, a suit Cooper had resisted. That makes "He didn't want them to catch COVID" a partial truth with the agency moved onto him.
The Willie Horton passage is the most diagnostic error in the post. Trump writes that Horton "went on to immediately rape and kill three women." Horton's 1974 murder victim was a 17-year-old male gas-station attendant. On his 1987 furlough escape he raped a woman and assaulted her fiancé in Maryland. He killed no one on furlough, and there were no three women. The 1988 history is otherwise correct (the year, Dukakis's summer lead, the furlough attack line), so the fabrication sits in the detail that carries the emotion. Two readings fit. One is embellishment for effect, which matches his long habit of inflating crime anecdotes. The other is confabulation: a hazy memory of a "terrible crime" filled in with a vivid, plausible-sounding number. The text cannot settle which. One instance of a distorted 38-year-old fact is weak cognitive evidence, but it belongs in the longitudinal record with other historical-detail errors.
Who wrote it
12:13 UTC is 8:13 a.m. Eastern. That holds whether he was at the White House or Mar-a-Lago, and nothing in the event record puts him elsewhere. Early morning is inside his own posting window. The voice markers are his: "believe it or not," the double absolute "There has never been a Governor with such a bad record on Crime, and there never will be!", the random capitals on "Crime" and "Senator," the all-caps vote line, and the "President DONALD J. TRUMP" sign-off he has used on endorsement posts throughout 2025–26. The exact statistics point to staff input. The likeliest picture is a Trump-dictated or Trump-edited post working from campaign talking points. His own contribution shows most clearly in the Horton embellishment, which no staffer working from a fact sheet would write.
Splitting, and the parallel left out
The psychological content is narrow. The self barely appears. The post is about Cooper, and Trump's role is the kingmaker handing out a verdict. The main defense is splitting: Cooper is the worst governor in history ("never been... never will be"), and Whatley is simply the answer. Distortion runs through the facts, from a court settlement turned into a personal choice to a rape-assault turned into three murders.
The post leaves out a parallel. In 2020, under Trump's own Justice Department, the Bureau of Prisons used CARES Act authority to move several thousand federal inmates to home confinement for the same COVID reason. Trump has also used clemency widely, including for January 6 defendants convicted of assaulting police. Attacking an opponent for releasing prisoners over COVID, while dropping his own administration's matching policy, fits projection at the level of the disowned record, the Jungian shadow placed on the opponent. The text never mentions either record, so this reading is medium-confidence and rests on what the post omits.
There is no sign of narcissistic injury. The trigger is the midterm calendar three weeks out and a competitive Senate race, which makes this routine campaign maintenance, not a reaction to a slight. The hostility is instrumental and aimed at voters' fear of crime. It is not rage.
Rhetoric and risk
The techniques are fear appeal, false precision, historical analogy used as an a fortiori argument ("far more consequential" than the case that sank a presidential nominee), superlative condemnation, and a direct electoral call to action. Invoking Horton imports the most famous crime-fear ad in modern American politics, along with its well-documented racial coding. The post makes no racial reference itself, and Cooper is white, so the borrowing is of the ad's form, not its racial content. Cooper is named and the grievance is sharp, but the only action asked for is a vote. There is no dehumanizing language, no eliminationist verb, and no call to confront anyone. That is what keeps this ordinary, if heavily distorted, campaign speech.
Fact Verification
| Claim | Verdict | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| "Roy Cooper let out 83 murderers, 51 serving life sentences, and 25 immediately committed murders after release" | Mostly False | The releases came from a 2021 settlement of an NAACP/ACLU lawsuit over prison COVID conditions, which moved about 3,500 inmates to early release or extended limits of confinement. The Whatley campaign's own figure is that 25 of more than 4,200 people released under Cooper later committed murder. The Senate Leadership Fund ad says 18 of 3,500 were murderers. No published source gives 83 murderers or 51 lifers, or links the 25 murders to them. 'Immediately' is unsupported, and FactCheck.org found that a pro-Whatley ad tied Cooper to a killing whose suspect had been released in South Carolina. |
| "They were released by him because he didn't want them to catch COVID while in prison" | Half True | COVID conditions in prisons were the basis for the releases. But the releases came from a court settlement of a lawsuit Cooper's administration had fought, and FactCheck.org notes he resisted calls to release prisoners. |
| "Michael Dukakis lost his lead in the 1988 race because he released Willie Horton" | Half True | Dukakis led George H. W. Bush by double digits in summer 1988 and lost. The Horton furlough attack was a major part of the Bush campaign's case, but historians credit several factors. Horton was furloughed in 1986 under a Massachusetts program that predated Dukakis, and Dukakis did not release him personally. |
| "Willie Horton went on to immediately rape and kill three women" | False | Horton failed to return from a 1986 weekend furlough. In 1987 in Maryland he raped a woman and assaulted her fiancé. He killed no one after release. His original 1974 murder victim was Joseph Fournier, a 17-year-old male gas station attendant. |
| "There has never been a Governor with such a bad record on Crime, and there never will be" | Mostly False | The claim has two parts. The second half ("there never will be") is a prediction and can't be checked. The first half is a superlative opinion, but its factual core, that no governor has had a worse crime record than Roy Cooper, can be tested. It fails on every measure I could find. |
State crime rates. SBI data puts North Carolina's violent crime rate during Cooper's tenure (2017 to January 2025) at roughly 384 to 446 per 100,000. It was 383.7 in 2017, peaked at 446.1 in 2020 and was 388.4 in 2024. A UNC School of Government analysis notes that the 2020 peak was 'much lower than the 40-year high' of nearly 700 per 100,000 in 1992, under Gov. Jim Martin. On violent crime, then, Cooper's record was well short of the worst even among North Carolina's own governors. The 2020 rise also tracked a national trend: murders rose about 30% nationwide that year, the largest one-year jump on FBI record, while Trump was president. PolitiFact and WRAL report that state data shows violent crime fell in each year of Cooper's second term, including a 4.3% drop in the violent crime rate and a 9.2% drop in the homicide rate in 2024.
Comparison with other states. PolitiFact and WRAL rated Trump's companion claim that North Carolina is 'one of the most violent' states as misleading. North Carolina's 2024 violent crime rate (388.4) was somewhat above the national rate (370.8), but 18 states had higher rates. One fair point for critics: the state's 2024 homicide rate (7.6 per 100,000) was well above the national 5.1.
Release and clemency records. Other governors have released far more serious offenders, or done so with more direct consequences:
- George Ryan (Illinois, 2003) commuted 167 death sentences, about ten times Cooper's 15 commutations of December 2024.
- Mike Huckabee (Arkansas) granted 1,033 clemencies, including a commutation for Maurice Clemmons, who later killed four Lakewood, Washington police officers. That case was widely compared to Willie Horton.
- Haley Barbour (Mississippi, 2012) pardoned or released about 200 people, including at least 14 convicted murderers.
- Matt Bevin (Kentucky, 2019) issued over 400 pardons, including a convicted killer whose family had raised money for him and a man convicted of raping a 9-year-old.
- Michael Dukakis, the post's own comparison, oversaw the furlough under which Horton committed a rape and assault.
Cooper's roughly 3,500 early releases came from a 2021 court settlement of a COVID-era civil rights lawsuit, which he had at first resisted. Over the same period, Trump's own Bureau of Prisons moved about 13,000 federal inmates out early. Fact-checkers (PolitiFact/WRAL, FactCheck.org, WITN) found that the most prominent killings tied to Cooper were wrongly attributed to him. DeCarlos Brown was released in September 2020, before the settlement, and the Senate Leadership Fund ad's suspect was released from a South Carolina prison. A May 2026 New York Post count found at least 18 settlement releasees later charged with killings, but WRAL found most were already out, or would have been released anyway by the time of the crimes.
What critics can fairly cite. Cooper agreed to the settlement, vetoed ICE-detainer bills three times (accurate per PolitiFact), commuted 15 death sentences on his last day in office, and governed during the 2020 crime peak. These are legitimate grounds for criticism. None of them makes his record the worst of any governor ever, by crime rates or by the scale and consequences of releases.
I rated it mostly false rather than false because 'bad record on crime' has no fixed metric and the prediction can't be graded. Every measurable comparison still contradicts the claim. |
Overall Veracity: 28%
Post from Truth Social
Former Governor Roy Cooper, of North Carolina, let out 83 murderers, 51 were serving life sentences, and 25 immediately committed murders after being let out of penitentiaries across the State. They were released by him because he didn’t want them to catch COVID while in prison. There has never been a Governor with such a bad record on Crime, and there never will be! Governor Michael Dukakis lost his insurmountable lead in the 1988 Presidential Race because he released Willie Horton, who went on to immediately rape and kill three women. What Former Governor Roy Cooper did is, believe it or not, far more consequential. VOTE FOR MICHAEL WHATLEY TO BE THE NEXT U.S. SENATOR FROM THE GREAT STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA! President DONALD J. TRUMP