President Donald Trump painted a terrifying picture during his rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night. Standing on stage at Gastonia Municipal Airport, Trump offered a dramatic retelling of a brutal murder that took place in the state last August. Iryna Zarutska’s death made headlines around the country, but the killing that Trump weaved into the Republican Party’s midterm pitch has also emerged as a persistent fixation and rallying cry for racist extremists on the far right.
As he told Zarutska’s story, Trump spared no gory or dramatic details.
“A beautiful, beautiful, beautiful 23-year-old woman — a young, beautiful girl named Iryna Zarutska was riding home on a train in Charlotte after fleeing war torn Ukraine,” Trump said, adding, “She was petrified of Ukraine. But you know what? When she got on that train — I watched that so many times — when she got on that train, she was petrified to be on that train.”
Surveillance footage on board that train captured the moment Zarutska was stabbed to death by another passenger who stood behind her.
“She didn’t know that, sitting behind her on the train, was a deranged lunatic, a dangerous monster with 14 prior arrests for violent crimes who set his bloodthirsty eyes on her right from the beginning,” Trump said.
The video, the unprovoked nature of the crime, and the fact that Zarutska was a refugee all fueled the attention that swirled around the murder. But, in the months prior to Trump’s rally speech, white nationalists were drawn to the case for a different reason: Zarutska’s killer was a Black man. That fact led groups like far right “active clubs” and the most militant, extremist factions of the Proud Boys to fixate on the story. These racist activists attempted to cast the case as evidence that white people are facing dire threats from crimes committed by people of color.
Patriot Front, the white nationalist group infamous for staging masked demonstrations in cities across the country, even took the issue offline by marching in Charlotte, putting up a mural of Zarutska in Florida, and staging protests at a similar display in Providence.
A September 2025 broadcast of “Red Ice TV,” a prominent white supremacist online show co-hosted by Lana Lokteff, was emblematic of the white supremacist movement’s perspective on the Zarutska case.
“Iryna fled the Ukraine to have a safer life in America. Well, there is no such thing as safe for white girls in diverse America. She didn’t die at the hands of Russians or Nazis. She died by the hand of a rando Black man stabbing her in the neck,” Lokteff said.
Lokteff also falsely claimed Zarutska was “the only visible white person on the train and no one helped her” or “stopped the killer.” In reality, the footage showed other white passengers. While no one intervened in the immediate moments Zarutska was stabbed, passengers of multiple races came to her aid in the immediate aftermath. The man who was apparently filmed killing Zarutska, Decarlos Brown Jr., was arrested by police after the train pulled into a station. Brown faced federal and state charges before being ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial. The legal proceedings are still ongoing.
On Red Ice, Lokteff’s false version of events was tied into a larger narrative that has long been popular among racist extremists: that the white race is facing a deadly threat from diversity. This idea, which is fueled by a context-free focus on crimes committed by people of color, is one of the core concepts of the so-called “red pill” awakening during the rise of the alt right that coincided with Trump’s ascent to the White House. On her broadcast, Lokteff explicitly used her framing of the case to encourage listeners to be “racist.”
“Let that sink in white folks, this is the reality for whites in diverse America: Iryna died, not from a Slavic War, but in the war against whites,” Lokteff went on. “Had someone told her the truth, had she been racist, she would be alive today.”
Trump’s North Carolina speech was not the first time he has homed in on Zarutska’s death. He invited Zarutska’s mother to attend his annual State of the Union address in February. During that speech, Trump referred to Brown as “a deranged monster who had been arrested over a dozen times and was released through no cash bail.” On Wednesday, a page dedicated to Zarutska was published on the White House website featuring a video of those remarks.
In his references to the case, Trump has not invoked race, instead tying it to his efforts to paint Democrats and their criminal justice reform efforts as soft on crime. That push has included various inaccurate claims — including about Zarutska’s killer. Trump’s prior suggestion that Brown was released on “cashless bail” was fact checked by a North Carolina NBC affiliate that noted the state has a “money bail system.” At the time of the killing, Brown was reportedly released on a written promise to appear in court after being arrested for making multiple 911 calls. He was required to pay bail for earlier arrests.
During his speech on Wednesday night, Trump was campaigning for erstwhile Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley, who is running for U.S. Senate against Democratic former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper. In his remarks, Trump described the state’s cities as “blood-soaked killing fields” while falsely claiming North Carolina has some of the highest crime rates in the country. He laid blame for this situation and the Zarutska case on Cooper’s tenure in the governor’s mansion. Trump partly based this on the fact that thousands of prison inmates were given an early release due to the COVID-19 pandemic during Cooper’s tenure. Republicans have consistently launched that attack despite the fact Cooper actually opposed those early exits.
“Right here in Charlotte, you’ve seen the deadly consequences of weak, cowardly sellouts to the radical left like Cooper,” Trump said immediately before bringing up the Zarutska case. “He’s radical left. You know, he tries to pretend he’s a moderate. He’s not. He’s a radical left, weak person.”
Trump’s focus on the killing was yet another example of his administration participating in a feedback loop with white nationalists. Obscure symbolism and false narratives that first emerged on the furthest edges of the right have been staples of his campaigning and second term. Trump’s animalistic depiction of Zarutska’s killer was evocative of the infamous Willie Horton incident from the 1988 U.S. presidential election where future President George H.W. Bush took control of the race by launching a television advertisement that targeted his rival, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, for having released a man who subsequently committed a vicious kidnapping and rape. The highlighting of an individual Black criminal was widely characterized as a racist dog whistle. In a 2018 article, New York Times correspondent Peter Baker called the “Willie Horton” strategy “among the most controversial chapters in modern politics.”
Despite all of that, on stage in North Carolina, Trump was abundantly clear that his invocation of Zarutska was an effort to use “Willie Horton” politics against Cooper.
“Years ago in Massachusetts, there was a governor named Dukakis — Michael Dukakis, you remember — who had a very substantial lead for president. He was going to win easily, but he allowed a man named Willie Horton out of jail. Willie Horton was a bad guy, really bad guy, same thing as this … same exact thing,” Trump said, adding, “Overnight, Dukakis took a rousing lead of 15 points and lost the election in a landslide because of that one advertisement. They put it on just like we’re putting this on because we have to make sure that Michael Whatley gets in.”
“But you know what? When she got on that train — I watched that so many times …”
Sounds like he is into violence porn.
I just wonder if he watched the murder of George Floyd many times.
She was killed by a mentally ill person who happened to be black. The event is relished by a mentally ill person who happens to be President.
That’s all that he has? SAD!
There are terrible, unspeakable things happening to people every single day. Many of them victims of this administration.
You would think that they would be all obsessed with the race of Charlie Kirk’s killer.
Wrong skin color, I guess
KKKristofascists don’t view the world through a lens of civilizational destruction via murdering the womenfolk only when they’re the ones doing the murdering. Just like they view bombing a school full of little girls as a message to Iran that they will murder Iran’s ability to reproduce in order to end Iran’s civilization, they internalize the random murder of one single white woman in America as a similar civilizational threat.
He may have, but for the wrong reason.