Less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump visited North Carolina to denounce the state as “one of the worst in the whole nation” during a political rally, Gov. Josh Stein pushed back.
“We’re in the political silly season, and so people say silly stuff,” Stein told reporters Thursday, outside a labor organizer convention in Cary where he was the keynote speaker.
Trump spent nearly an hour on stage in Gastonia on Wednesday, mostly focused on attacking the track records of Stein and his predecessor, former Gov. Roy Cooper. Trump is a Republican; Stein and Cooper are Democrats. And Cooper is running for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat against Trump’s endorsed candidate, Republican Michael Whatley.
“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 told his North Carolina supporters Wednesday.
Cooper’s campaign says that’s false; so did Stein who told reporters Thursday that North Carolina is right around the national average when it comes to crime.
“Statistically, he’s just flat out wrong,” Stein said. “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. And we’ve been working hard, on a bipartisan basis, with the legislature to address these issues.”
And despite Trump’s claims of growing violence and danger, violent crime has been on the decline for years — nationwide and in North Carolina specifically.
Public safety data reported by local law enforcement agencies shows crime fell every year of Cooper’s final four-year term as governor and has continued falling under Stein. And Trump’s own attorney general and former personal attorney, Todd Blanche, made that exact point in a speech in Gastonia as he was introducing Trump at his rally.
“North Carolina is ground zero for exactly what is working,” Blanche said of crime-fighting efforts. “Communities are safer, families are stronger. … In the great state of North Carolina, violent crime fell nearly 11%. Robbery, sexual assault, aggravated assault, all went down. Illegal gun possession, that were used just two years ago in violent crime, declined. Car thefts are way down.”
Trump went a different direction, instead telling the crowd that Cooper “filled your streets with lawlessness, filth, and squalor.”
PolitiFact looked into a number of Trump’s claims after Wednesday’s speech focused on crime and immigration.
In his speech to the AFL-CIO on Thursday, Stein also highlighted North Carolina’s fast-growing population and in-demand status among people from other states choosing to move here. “So many people are moving here,” Stein said. “More people are moving to North Carolina than to any other state in the country from other states.”
Cooper’s campaign on Wednesday encouraged voters to weigh his record, as governor and attorney general, with Trump’s claims: “Roy spent his career putting rapists and violent criminals behind bars and signing tough on crime laws as governor,” Cooper’s campaign said Wednesday.
Stein added Thursday that while he has been trying to work with Republicans in the state legislature to tackle crime, drugs and similar issues, Trump hurts those efforts when he makes claims like those he made Wednesday, on stage with numerous Republican state lawmakers.
“His coming down here and putting out this rhetoric, and the Whatley campaign putting lies on TV, it doesn’t help advance the debate,” Stein said. “It’s just political nonsense.”
Whatley disagrees. In a speech before Trump took the stage Wednesday, he referenced the legal settlement Cooper’s administration signed during the Covid-19 pandemic that allowed early release for several thousand prisoners.
“He created a revolving door that put criminals back on the streets again and again,” Whatley said.