Post from Truth Social

A debunked charge, repeated against a Senate candidate two weeks before the vote

The post is three sentences and a sign-off, with an attached image (most likely a mugshot or ad graphic; it wasn't examined). It aims at Roy Cooper, the former North Carolina governor now running for the U.S. Senate against Trump-backed Michael Whatley, with the November 3 midterm about two weeks away. The timestamp converts to about 8:19 PM Eastern on Saturday, October 18. Trump's location that evening isn't in the provided events. The earlier posts that day dealt with a golf course on the National Mall and a defensive explanation of why he would not sign a Russia sanctions document. So this is a turn to campaign offense after a day spent partly justifying a decision.

What the claims rest on

The first sentence, "Governor Roy Cooper released this man, who then killed beautiful Iryna Zarutska," repeats a charge that had been publicly corrected for months before this post. North Carolina's Department of Adult Correction says Decarlos Brown Jr. was not released early. He served past his minimum release date on a 2015 armed-robbery sentence. His name does appear on a list attached to the 2021 prison-conditions settlement, but he was already out of prison when that settlement was reached. PolitiFact checked this exact line of attack by Trump and Whatley in September 2026. The repetition is the behaviorally informative part. The claim survives correction because it serves a campaign purpose, which places it closer to strategic distortion than to confabulation.

The second sentence, "He then released 83 other murderers, so they wouldn't catch COVID while in jail, who went on to kill 25 people!", is shaped like a precise statistic: two specific counts, a stated motive, and an exclamation. It runs a causal chain (Cooper's decision, the release, later killings) that WRAL's analysis of the same list undercut. Most of the accused killers on the list were either already out before the settlement or would have been out anyway by the time of the alleged killings. The specific 83 and 25 figures could not be located in the fact-check coverage. The phrase "so they wouldn't catch COVID" turns a medical-risk rationale (older and long-sentence prisoners were included because of pandemic vulnerability) into something that sounds like solicitude for murderers.

Mechanism: splitting and distortion in service of attribution

The structure assigns one cause to two separate outcomes. A man who completed his sentence becomes "this man" whom Cooper "released." The settlement list becomes "83 other murderers." Responsibility for deaths moves from the people who did the killing to a political opponent. This is a splitting move: Cooper is cast entirely as an agent of death ("released... who then killed... who went on to kill"), and the victim is idealized by the recurring epithet "beautiful." "Beautiful Iryna Zarutska" has become a fixed formula in Trump's references to the case. Repeated across posts, it works less as description than as an emotional tag that reactivates the original outrage. The adjective calls up the security-camera footage of her killing, which circulated widely in 2025.

There is no visible narcissistic trigger. The post doesn't respond to criticism of Trump and doesn't mention him, apart from the signature. The self appears only in "President DONALD J. TRUMP," with the name in capitals as an authority stamp rather than a first-person voice. Read alone, this is campaign maintenance and preemptive attack. The grandiose register of his self-referential posts is absent. What is present is the recurring schema of the world as a place where opponents loose killers on the innocent, and he as the one who names them.

Rhetoric and the edge of danger

The devices are guilt by association, false cause (post hoc), appeal to fear, and numerical precision used for credibility ("83," "25"). Nothing dehumanizes Cooper or Brown in the language itself. The danger reading rests on what the post combines: a named individual opponent, deaths attributed to him personally, and a case whose racial dimensions (a Black assailant, a white Ukrainian refugee) drove national mobilization in 2025. There's no call to action, which keeps it short of a stochastic pattern. But "Cooper released... who then killed" puts a candidate's name next to a murder that many readers have seen on video.

Who wrote it

Authorship evidence points both ways. On the side of Trump himself: the recurring "beautiful" epithet, the exclamation, the dangling relative clause ("83 other murderers, so they wouldn't catch COVID while in jail, who went on to kill"), and an ambiguous "He" that grammatically could refer back to the killer before the reader settles on Cooper. That kind of syntax is consistent with his long-documented composing style. The capitalized sign-off appears on posts he appears to write himself. On the side of staff or campaign material: the specific counts and the alignment with existing NRSC/Whatley talking points suggest supplied content. The likeliest reading is campaign material that Trump voiced or lightly reworked himself.

Cognitive markers

The syntactic slippage is mild and matches his baseline. His speech since the 1980s has relied on loosely attached clauses, and here the meaning stays recoverable. No word-finding errors, name confusion or temporal confusion appear. The false claims trace back to a documented partisan source, not a memory gap.

Fact Verification

What holds up:

• The releases came from a February 25, 2021 settlement of an NAACP/ACLU lawsuit over COVID-19 conditions in state prisons. The state agreed to the early release of about 3,500 people. Pandemic risk was the reason for the case, so "so they wouldn't catch COVID" loosely fits. The wording leaves out that the deal was court-pressured: a judge had issued a preliminary injunction. FactCheck.org and the Washington Times note that Cooper resisted early calls to release prisoners, and plaintiffs had sought up to 18,000 releases.
• People convicted of murder were on the list. Reporter Andrew Dunn, cited by the Free Beacon, counted 51 people serving life sentences for first-degree murder, second-degree murder or first-degree rape. That matches Trump's 51, but it includes rape convicts. The CooperReleasedHim.com database, built by right-leaning journalist Stephen Horn, counts 70 people convicted of murder among the 4,234 names (North State Journal, May 6, 2026).

What doesn't hold up:

• The 83. The highest count of convicted murderers found anywhere is 70, from a partisan database whose own page calls its offense labels "best guesses." No source gives 83.
• "Released" overstates what the list shows. The Assembly found that 1,535 names (34%) were post-release supervision cases already out of prison, counted toward the 3,500 retroactively. Decarlos Brown Jr. is one example. More than 90% of those released early would have been out by the end of 2021 anyway. State officials told the Charlotte Observer and FactCheck.org that the 51 lifers were already parole-eligible and the settlement didn't make them eligible.
• The 25. Every documented count is lower and measures something different:
• The New York Post (May 7, 2026) found 18 people from the entire list later charged with murder, not 18 convicted murderers.
• The Whatley campaign says 19 deaths.
• The Center Square reported 24 charged with homicide-related offenses across the 4,200-plus list.
• Horn said 14 had been convicted of murder since release.
• Among the 70 convicted murderers in Horn's database, only nine reoffended at all, counting any new crime or violation.

None of these supports "83 murderers who went on to kill 25."

• The causal link. The Assembly found at least seven of the Post's 18 were already out before the settlement was signed. Only one, Calvin Locklear, appears to have killed someone during the window he would otherwise have been in prison. WRAL's review of the accused killers' court and prison records, cited by PolitiFact on September 17, 2026, found most were already out or would have been out anyway when the killings happened.

A pandemic settlement that put some convicted murderers on the list, with some list members later charged in killings, is real. The specific 83 and 25, and the claim that this group of murderers killed 25 people because Cooper freed them, are unsupported and contradicted by the available records. |

Overall Veracity: 10%