Donald Trump Invoked The Racially Charged 1988 Willie Horton Campaign Ad While Attacking Democrats On Crime During A North Carolina Senate Campaign Rally
President Donald Trump reached back nearly four decades into American political history this week, invoking Willie Horton and one of the most controversial campaign advertisements of the 1988 presidential race while campaigning for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley in North Carolina.
Speaking Wednesday in Gastonia, Trump used Horton’s case to argue that Democrats have failed to adequately address violent crime, drawing a comparison between the 1988 controversy and the 2025 killing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte.
“Willie Horton was a bad guy, really bad guy,” Trump told the crowd before comparing Horton’s case to that of Decarlos Brown Jr., a Black man charged with murdering Zarutska aboard a Charlotte commuter train.
Trump sought to connect Brown’s release before the killing to Democratic former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, who is running against Whatley for U.S. Senate. But Cooper was no longer governor when Brown was granted pretrial release on a misdemeanor charge, according to court records cited by The Associated Press.
State corrections officials have also said Brown was not released early from prison or through the COVID-era prisoner settlement Trump referenced.
Willie Horton Reference Revives A Notorious Campaign Strategy
The Horton case became a major issue during the 1988 presidential campaign between Republican George H.W. Bush and Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.
Horton, who is Black, was serving a life sentence when he received a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison program. He failed to return and later committed robbery, rape and assault.
A political action committee supporting Bush aired an advertisement featuring Horton’s grainy mug shot while attacking Dukakis over the furlough program. Although the ad was not produced by Bush’s official campaign, the campaign separately emphasized Horton and Dukakis’ record on crime.
The advertisement became one of the best-known examples of racial imagery in modern political campaigning. Scholars and critics have argued that its presentation of Horton, particularly the use of his mug shot alongside images of the two white presidential candidates, played on fears connecting Black men with violent crime. The Bush campaign denied accusations at the time that its crime messaging was racist.
