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 cite one of the most controversial campaign advertisements that relied heavily on racist tropes.
During a campaign stop Wednesday in Gastonia, North Carolina, to stump for Republican U.S. 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 ****** ault 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.
But Cooper was not the governor when the man was released or when he was later charged with killing the refugee.

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