Trump seizes on Ukrainian refugee’s brutal murder to justify campaign against Democratic cities

It was a day packed with weighty issues, including Israel’s attack on Qatar, the spectacular downward revision of employment data, and the publication of Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book with the sketch of a naked woman attributed to Donald Trump. Nevertheless, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt chose to open the Tuesday news conference with the brutal murder of a Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, who was stabbed to death without any apparent motive on a commuter train in Charlotte (North Carolina) by DeCarlos Brown Jr., a 35-year-old African-American with a history of mental illness and a lengthy record of previous arrests for crimes such as felony larceny, and robbery with a dangerous weapon.

It happened last month, but it became national news and sufficient reason for a new ideological war between the right and left in the United States when the horrific video of the attack emerged this past Friday. In it, Zarutska, 23, is seen entering the train car dressed in the uniform of the pizzeria where she worked; she sits down and, in a familiar gesture, becomes absorbed in her cell phone. Suddenly, the man sitting behind her stands up and stabs her three times. She looks at him in terror before collapsing on the spot as he calmly walks away down the train car. In the footage released by the media, the image freezes just before the first blow.

On Tuesday, Brown was charged with a federal crime — causing death on a mass transportation system — originally meant for terrorist attacks on public transit. This means he faces the death penalty.

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The attack on a commuter train in Charlotte (NC).

While Leavitt reviewed the attacker’s record, which includes five years in prison, and blamed the Democratic Party for the death due to their lax handling of crime in the cities they govern, the White House released a message from Trump on Tuesday from the Oval Office.

“A beautiful young girl that never had problems in life — with a magnificent future in this country. And now she’s dead. She was slaughtered by a deranged monster who was roaming free after 14 prior arrests,“ Trump says in the video, which lasts just over two minutes. He went on to say that repeat offenders continue to ”wreak havoc and death across our country" and that America must respond with force and decisiveness. “We have to be vicious, just like they are. It’s the only thing they understand.”

The president then added that “24 of the top 25 most dangerous cities in America are run by Democrat mayors” and drew the connection between Zarutska’s brutal murder, his own decision to intervene, against the advice of local authorities, in places like Los Angeles, where he sent some 5,000 troops to quell protests against immigration raids in June, or in Washington D.C., where the National Guard has been deployed for a month, and his plans to send troops to Chicago and Boston, two places where mass raids began on Monday. Everything suggests that these may be just the first cities on the list.

“The District of Columbia, the capital of America, was a bloodthirsty, horrible, dangerous place — one of the worst — and now it’s a crime-free city, and we’re going to keep it that way,” Trump said in the Oval Office recording, before asserting, in a threatening tone, that other mayors “need help” and would be better off asking for it.

Blood on their hands

Trump had already addressed in a social media post the young woman’s tragic death in Charlotte, a city that has seen a 25% drop in violent crime in one year. “The blood of this innocent woman can literally be seen dripping from the killer’s knife, and now her blood is on the hands of the Democrats who refuse to put bad people in jail,” he posted. In her press appearance, Leavitt also took the opportunity to say that the judge who released Debrown is a donor to Kamala Harris.

Like almost everything else in the United St, a horrific murder with no apparent motive has become an ideal argument for political bickering. It has also taken a racial turn, amid a wave of criticism of the so-called legacy media, which prominent figures in the MAGA movement have accused of not covering the murder with the same degree of interest as if the victim had been Black and the killer white. There have also been parallels between Zarutska and George Floyd, the African-American killed by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, whose death sparked a wave of protests across the country.

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has shown particular interest in the issue on his social network, X, where he has aired other cases of Black repeat offenders and white victims and has disseminated statistics of dubious origin.

For the conservative network Fox News, the murder has also served to fill hours of television time, giving it something else to talk about instead of the scandal surrounding the publication of millionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book, which includes a lewd drawing attributed to Trump, who maintains it is fake. And, in further proof that the two Americas are increasingly sharing less of what was once considered reality, this latter issue dominated television programming on the other side of the political mirror, from CNN to MSNBC.

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