President Donald Trump didn’t mince words after the horrifying on-train murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte. In a post on X, he said Democrats “have blood on their hands” for the policies that let a repeat violent offender roam free. He singled out North Carolina’s Democratic machine—blasting former Governor Roy Cooper and the state’s “reimagined” justice agenda—for creating a system where a career criminal could be cycled back onto public transit instead of into a cell.

Zarutska’s killing wasn’t some complex mystery. It was a failure with a paper trail. The suspect, a 34-year-old with a long felony record, had racked up arrests for years. Yet earlier this year, a Democrat judge turned him loose with no cash bail, a “promise to appear,” and the same revolving door that’s become standard in blue jurisdictions. Weeks later, a young woman who fled a war zone stepped onto a Charlotte train after work—and never made it home.

Trump’s message was blunt: lock up the predators. He called the attacker a “career criminal” who should have been behind bars long before that August night. He also pressed North Carolinians to send Michael Whatley to the U.S. Senate—an unmistakable signal that public safety will define 2026. Voters don’t need another panel discussion. They need consequences for violent offenders, real bail, real prosecution, and real time.

The White House followed Trump’s post with chapter and verse on how North Carolina’s leaders paved the road to this tragedy. In 2020, Roy Cooper launched a “Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice,” co-chaired by then–Attorney General Josh Stein (now governor). The task force’s playbook—“diversion,” “alternatives to arrest,” “de-emphasizing” felonies, and eliminating cash bail across wide categories—was sold as compassion. In practice, it became a get-out-of-jail-cheap card for exactly the kind of chronic offender who terrorizes buses, trains, and neighborhoods. Mecklenburg County piled on with equity consultants and grants to shrink jail populations, while prosecutors and judges dutifully kept the turnstile spinning.

We’ve seen this movie in every Democrat stronghold that adopted the same ideology. The rhetoric is always the same—“restorative justice,” “reimagining public safety,” “equity.” The results are always the same—more victims, more fear, and more candles at more vigils. It’s not complicated: when the system refuses to incapacitate the small cohort committing most violent crime, that cohort keeps hunting. Soft-on-crime policies don’t free communities. They free predators.

Trump’s broader agenda has been equally direct. He federalized the mess in Washington, D.C., backed the Guard in Los Angeles when local officials lost control, and is preparing a hard turn in Chicago. The point is simple: the first duty of government is order. If city hall or a state capitol won’t deliver it, the federal government can and will. That posture drives the press mad, but it’s a political sledgehammer because normal people—parents, commuters, shopkeepers—want their streets back.

Zarutska’s story hits even harder because she came here seeking safety. She left a battlefield and was cut down on a taxpayer-funded train in an American city that chose ideology over handcuffs. That is a scandal. And it’s a choice—made in hearing rooms, courtrooms, and governor’s mansions—by people who should be held to account.

Democrats can fume about tone all they want. Voters are counting bodies. If North Carolina wants to stop the carnage, it must abandon the failed experiment that protected criminals at the expense of everyone else. Real justice is not a hashtag. It’s a jail cell for the violent, a prosecutor who means business, a judge who won’t play roulette with public safety, and leaders who stand with victims before they become names on a memorial.

One election won’t bring Zarutska back. But it can slam the revolving door and send a message from Raleigh to every courthouse in the state: never again.