After a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee was fatally stabbed by a man in the southern US state of North Carolina, US President Donald Trump has tried to use that example to justify his sending the National Guard to combat crime in northern US states and other Democratic strongholds.
AFP reported that Iryna Zarutska was sitting quietly on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina on August 22 when she was attacked with no warning by a man sitting behind her, security video shows. Her murder made little national news last month but it recently surged into the spotlight after Republican lawmakers and far-right influencers promoted the graphic CCTV video last weekend.
The suspect has been identified as Decarlos Brown, a 34-year-old African-American, charged with first degree murder. He was said to have multiple prior convictions and spent eight years in prison for armed robbery. Early reports said he suffered from mental illness.
Trump is seen as leveraging the video to gain political traction on his moves to send US soldiers to Democratic-led cities such as Chicago, Washington, D.C, and Baltimore to combat what the Republican president has framed as out-of-control crime in those areas. He lost the 2024 elections in those districts in respective landslides. He has also targeted far-left-leaning states such as California and Massachusetts.
The three American cities with the most violent crime per capital are New Orleans (Louisiana), Memphis (Tennessee), and St. Louis (Missouri). Those three states are deeply conservative, have not voted for a Democrat in a quarter of a century, and indeed Louisiana is the home state of Trump’s trusted vote-getter in US Congress, House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Trump has never mentioned sending National Guard troops to those criminal hotbeds.
Rounding out the top-four most violent cities list is Birmingham, Alabama, which is about as red a state as they come.
Instead, he has focused on places like Chicago, where the governor is potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate JB Pritzker. Trump said Chicago will soon learn “Why we call it the Department of War” referring to his proposal for a name change from the Department of Defense.
Because of the naked nature of Trump’s political targeting for federal troops, his opponents have added it to the list of his other authoritarian-leaning policies, from silencing the free press through lawsuits and the removal from the White House press room of journalists who are not loyal to him, to his hand-picked Supreme Court majority granting him immunity from crimes that he commits in the discharge of his duties as president, and so on.
“They’re evil people,” Trump said Monday of those critics.
On social media, he described the attacker as a “career criminal” with 14 prior arrests and wrote that Zarutska’s “blood is on the hands of the Democrats who refuse to put bad people in jail.”
“North Carolina and every State needs LAW AND ORDER,” Trump said, “and only Republicans will deliver it!”
Trump advisor Stephen Miller accused Democrats of backing “the monstrous and the depraved.”
North Carolina has been seen as a swing state in recent elections, with a slim three-percent edge for Trump in 2024. The president has not mentioned sending federal troops there.
North Carolina ranks 19th in a list of the nation’s most violent states per capita. Zarutska and her relatives emigrated there from Ukraine in 2022, months after the full-scale Russian invasion of their homeland began.