At his September 16, 2026 rally in Gastonia, North Carolina, Trump reached back to the 1988 Willie Horton advertisement, the benchmark example of racialized crime messaging in American politics, and said out loud that he was using it as a model.
“Willie Horton was a bad guy, really bad guy,” Trump said. “Same thing as this. Same as this. Same exact thing.” He said Michael Dukakis “lost the election the last time because of that one advertisement,” and then, per WRAL: “They put it on, just like I'm putting this on, because we have to make sure that Michael Whatley gets into office.”
The Associated Press, which reported the remarks in its own voice as Trump digging into “one of the most controversial campaign advertisements that relied heavily on racist tropes,” wrote that he was comparing the Horton case to the pretrial release of a Black man charged with murdering a white Ukrainian refugee in Charlotte. The 1988 ad, run against Dukakis, used a prison photo of Horton, a Black man convicted of rape and assault after being released through a Massachusetts furlough program.
While Trump spoke, a large screen at the rally displayed a mosaic of mug shots. “He released these people. This is just a small group of them,” he said, pointing at the screen. AP reported that the mug shots “overwhelmingly featured Black people.” NBC News independently confirmed the screen of mug shots of unnamed suspects without characterizing who appeared in them.
The premise was wrong. AP reported that state corrections officials say DeCarlos Brown Jr. was not released early and not released under the COVID-era settlement Trump referenced; at the time of the attack he was on pretrial release over a misdemeanor, ordered by a magistrate after Roy Cooper had left the governor's office. Court records show Brown had 14 prior cases in Mecklenburg County and a schizophrenia diagnosis.
Republican National Committee press secretary Natalie Baldassarre defended the attack to AP: “Roy Cooper emptied prisons and released thousands of violent monsters onto North Carolina streets.” Nobody in the party disputed the Horton comparison.
Emory political scientist Andra Gillespie told AP that after the 1988 ad, “Bush established a lead in the polls and never looked back,” and that “They showed the picture, and you ascribed race onto it. It wasn't sufficiently condemned as racism.” University of Louisville professor emeritus Dewey Clayton said, “It was very effective,” and, “In 2026, talking about ads going back in the 1980s? I'm sure he had consultants that were basically saying this is tried and true.”
AP reported this was the second time Trump had invoked Horton on the trail, after calling the Charlotte killing a “Willie Horton, modern day” tragedy in Las Vegas the previous month. That detail appears in AP's account alone.