Trump's September 16, 2026 rally in Gastonia was billed “Make America Safe Again,” and his description of the state he was standing in contradicted his own administration's account of it, delivered the same day from the same stage.
“For years, pro-crime politicians like Roy Cooper have tried to bully you into silence while they turned your cities into blood-soaked killing fields,” Trump said. He added that North Carolina used to be “apple pie, right? Now, it's one of the most violent, one of the worst in the whole nation,” and said Cooper had “filled your streets with lawlessness, filth, and squalor.”
He put the choice to voters this way: “You can either vote for Roy Cooper to set loose criminals who rape and murder your children and your population, or you can vote for Michael Whatley to protect and defend your children and your population.” Of Cooper and Democrats he said they “want to take everything you have and give it to people who would rob your house, invade your border, just shoot you dead.”
Hours earlier the White House had issued a release titled around Trump's record in the state, saying “The Trump Administration is restoring law and order, and the numbers prove it.” Minutes before Trump spoke, Attorney General Todd Blanche told the same crowd: “North Carolina is ground zero for exactly what is working. Communities are safer, families are stronger.” Blanche said that “In the great state of North Carolina, violent crime fell nearly 11%.”
The independent data agrees with Blanche, not with Trump. Rankings differ by year and dataset, but the direction does not. AP reported that 2024 FBI crime data put North Carolina 19th of 50 states for violent crime. PolitiFact found 18 other states with higher violent-crime rates and that violent crime fell in every year of Cooper's second term and has kept falling under Gov. Josh Stein. Spectrum News put the state 21st on the latest FBI estimates. The Charlotte Observer reported violent crime down 5.8 percent in the first half of 2026, with U.S. News ranking the state 31st of 50.
Stein's response: “Statistically, he's just flat out wrong. There are 20 states that have more violent crime than we do. But that's not the point. We want to make sure that people are safe and feel safe in this community.” He called the rally rhetoric “just political nonsense.”
PolitiFact also found the specific claim tying Cooper to DeCarlos Brown's release to be false, and noted that Trump released roughly 13,000 inmates from federal prison during the pandemic in his first term.
NBC News reported that Blanche's appearance was itself a departure: “It's a break from tradition for the attorney general to appear at partisan political rallies, but Trump has eroded some of the post-Watergate norms that sought to insulate the nation's top law enforcement officer from politics.”