The killing of a Ukrainian refugee in North Carolina has exposed a fault line between President Trump and his MAGA base seeking justice and the state’s outgoing Republican senator.
U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) is appealing to Trump not to pursue a federal takeover of Charlotte after a national outcry over the killing of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a late-night train. A mentally ill man with a long history of convictions and arrests has been charged with her homicide.
The deadly assault fits a pattern of urban violence that the Trump administration has cited in assuming control of Washington, D.C., for 30 days, sending in the National Guard, FBI agents, and other federal authorities to restore law and order on streets that Trump deemed lawless. Tillis was apparently fearful that Trump would begin to call for federal intervention in North Carolina.
Tillis told Fox News that there were “a lot of cities that we should be going to before Charlotte.”
“And I, for one, don’t think that we should be the nation’s police force, because, you know what happens? We’re going to mask the failure of Democrat leaders that are making their cities less safe,” Tillis said. “But we also have to be realistic and see that there are some cities and red states that are also in the top 20 list.”
“All I’m saying is we’ve got an issue, and I’m down there working before it became a national thing, work that we need to do down there to fix basically the free ride of the subway there,” he continued. “But it doesn’t rise to a level of national intervention. I think that’d be an overreach that I’m against, generally.”
