Trump Invokes Willie Horton To Explain Why It ‘Would Have Been Okay’ For Prisoners To Die During Covid

President Donald Trump invoked the politically notorious case of Willie Horton as he explained why it “would have been okay” to let convicts die in prison from Covid.

Trump reminisced at his Kentucky rally Saturday about Horton, a Black American convicted for kidnapping and rape in 1986 while out on a furlough allowed by then-Gov. Mike Dukakis (R-MA).

When Dukakis ran for president in 1988, the George H. W. Bush campaign leveraged the Horton story, incessantly repeating it on the campaign trail to play into Americans’ racism and fear.

The Willie Horton story — and its role in that campaign — have haunted American politics ever since.

“You remember the late Willie Horton. Gov. Dukakis running for president, he had a 15-point lead. He allowed a man named Willie Horton out of prison during the race. And Willie Horton went on to kill three women, rape and kill three women in very rapid succession,” Trump erroneously claimed.

Horton was in prison for the 1974 murder of a 15-year-old boy during a robbery. While serving a life sentence, Horton escaped from a weekend furlough program in 1986, then raped a woman and stabbed her fiancé.

“And [Dukakis] had a lead of 15 that turned into a minus 10 within about two days, and he was out of the race. And he lost the race terribly. He lost it badly,” Trump said.

And then I see [former North Carolina Gov. Roy] Cooper (D). And so here’s the story. He let out — right? — 88 murderers! You know why he let him out? It was Covid and he didn’t want them to catch Covid. And many of them were on death, essentially death row.

“But they were on very extreme lockup. They were murderers. So, he let out 88 murderers because he didn’t want them to be subject to Covid. And by the way, these guys weren’t going to be hurt. They they were strong. They were not going to be hurt. They were not 84-years-old and seriously obese, like some of my friends that kicked the bucket.”

“These guys were not going to die. And if they did, I guess that would have been okay,” Trump said to laughter from the rally crowd.

Trump continued:

They were murderers! Eighty-eight, is that right, ladies? Eighty-eight — okay, so, Gov. Cooper — this is worse than Willie Horton and Dukakis. So, Gov. Cooper released the 88 people — released them because he didn’t want them to catch Covid! And they’re murderers. They murdered  — of the 88, 25 of them murdered someone almost immediately. And people don’t want to tell the story. They don’t want to tell the story. The fake news doesn’t want to tell the story. That’s much worse than Willie Horton. Eighty-eight people came out, 25, and that was as of a month or two ago. I’m sure there’s a couple of other murders that they did.

Cooper was sued by civil rights groups who argued conditions inside state prisons during the 2020 Covid pandemic violated prisoners’ constitutional rights. The state negotiated a settlement requiring early release for 3,500 prisoners within six months.

Of those 3,500 early releases, 18 were subsequently charged with murder.

Watch the clip above via Fox News.

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