Trump flies in to save Whatley, tells the crowd Roy Cooper is ‘going to become your senator’

Donald Trump flew to North Carolina to rescue Michael Whatley. Thirty-two minutes in, he called the race for the other guy.

He was deep in his usual riff about Roy Cooper’s 2021 prison settlement, the one he calls “far worse than Willie Horton,” when he landed the line: “he released them into our society and he’s going to become your Senator and it’s crazy.” He meant it as a warning. It came out as a forecast.

The forecasters agree with him. The latest ECU poll has Cooper up 50 to 43. National Republican groups have pulled their money, and NBC rates the race Likely Democrat. Trump said earlier that night, “I hope it works out.” Not a closing argument. A prayer.

The claim around the slip isn’t much better. The 3,500 early releases came from a COVID-era civil rights settlement. Fact-checkers found that at least 18 of those released were later charged with killings, not his “25,” and that most of them were already out or would have been anyway. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, Trump’s own first-term government let roughly 13,000 federal inmates out. By our math, that’s almost four Coopers.