Trump’s Uses Central Park Five Playbook To Exploit Ukrainian Refugee’s Death

Ukrainians are “white”—until they aren’t

I’ve been thinking a lot about the way Donald Trump talks about the murder of Iryna Zarutska, the Ukrainian refugee who was killed in North Carolina last year.

His recent mentioning of her name during the State of the Union and his use of her mother, Anna, has especially been at the top of my mind. More specifically, I keep going back to the case of the Central Park Five and how their wrongful convictions connected to Trump’s use of Iryna’s murder. Five teenage boys—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise—were falsely accused of brutally assaulting a white woman jogging in Central Park, in 1989.

The media coverage was relentless and racial undertones were obvious to anyone paying attention. And Donald Trump jumped right into the middle of it.

He bought full-page ads in New York newspapers calling for the boys to be put to death. I think about that moment a lot now, because when I look back at those ads, what stands out to me is how clearly Trump understood the racial mythology he was tapping into. American history is full of stories about Black men being accused of harming white women. Those accusations have triggered lynch mobs, riots and generations of racial fear built on the stereotype that Black men are predators.

Trump didn’t invent that mythology. But he knew exactly how to use it—even with Iryna’s killing.

Years later, the five boys were exonerated. Another man confessed to the crime. The city of New York eventually paid the men $41 million in restitution for what had been done to them. But even after all that, Trump still insisted they were guilty. During his 2024 presidential campaign, he repeated the claim again. The now grown men, one of whom is a city councilman, have sued him for defamation.

Trump knows they were exonerated, but he doesn’t care.

The point is that his politics continue to exploit a familiar image: the dangerous Black man threatening a white woman. It’s one of the oldest racial myths in American political life, and Trump continues to use it because he knows it still resonates with a lot of racist white people who support him.

(Mind you, Trump has been accused of sexual assault by dozens of women, caught on camera making sexist remarks and was recently found civilly liable of sexual assault in New York)

That’s why, when I watched him talk about Iryna Zarutska during the State of the Union a few weeks ago, I immediately thought about the Central Park Five. Trump referred to the man who killed her as coming to America through “open borders,” even though he was born and raised in the United States.

He described Iryna as a “beautiful young woman” who had fled a terrible war, even though he does nothing to end it.

I spend most of my time reporting from Ukraine, so I know Trump doesn’t give a shit about Ukraine or helping Ukrainians defend themselves from Russia’s invasion—which is why Iryna fled and ended up in Charlotte in the first place. He has halted military assistance to Kyiv, levies no real sanctions against Moscow and continues to pressure Ukraine to accept territorial concessions that would effectively keep its sovereign land under Russian colonial rule.

At the same time, Ukrainians who fled the war and came to the United States are living with growing uncertainty about their own status. Many of them arrived under Uniting for Ukraine, a humanitarian parole program created in 2022 that allows Ukrainians to live and work legally in the United States for up to two years. Others have Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which protects them from deportation because of the war.

These programs were designed to give Ukrainians safety while their country fights for survival, but face uncertainty; some have left the U.S. for other countries as a result. My Ukrainian friends who are in the U.S. under those programs worry that those protections could disappear, especially as ICE targets and arrests them as they do Black and brown people.

So when I watched Iryna’s mother stand up during the State of the Union while the room applauded, I found myself wondering how secure her own future is in the U.S. How long before she outlives her usefulness to the political story that elevated her tragedy? You’d think he’d at least use that primetime moment to secure United for Ukraine and extend TPS for Ukrainians indefinitely, but he didn’t.

Trump’s words and the applause that followed weren’t about Iryna at all.

Her death has become political theater. Iryna’s story became another chapter in the same racial narrative Trump has been using for decades. And once I started looking at it that way, I noticed something else. The same week Iryna Zarutska was killed in Charlotte, a white man in Tulsa, Oklahoma stabbed a white woman in the throat on a city bus and almost killed her. Trump didn’t mention that case. Neither did the MAGA ecosystem that spends so much time warning that white women are under attack.

Some people might say the story didn’t gain national attention because the woman survived, but that’s not the point. A white woman was attacked. If MAGA truly believed white women were under siege, that story should have mattered. But the man who stabbed her was white. And in Trump’s racial narrative, that makes the story politically useless.

It cannot reinforce the myth that danger always has a darker face.

The same pattern emerged again in another case that barely registered in the national conversation. Another Ukrainian refugee, Kateryna Tovmash, was murdered in North Carolina on Valentine’s Day along with her partner. Authorities say the man accused of killing them—Caleb Barnes—drove seven hours from Ohio to commit the murders.

Trump and the MAGA movement said nothing about Kateryna.

We know why. The alleged killer was a white man named Caleb.

His mugshot does not evoke the racial fears that American politics has relied on for centuries. We know the person who killed Iryna did it becasue it was captured on camera. What is significant is when similar crimes are committed by whittle men and the silence from MAGA that follows. This is why I keep coming back to the Central Park Five. That case shows the formula Trump has been using for most of his public life: a nonwhite face cast as the criminal and a white-looking face cast as the victim. As was the case with the five boys, it doesn’t matter that they didn’t commit the act. It matters that their Black faces, by default, presume they did.

When the perpetrator is Black (or alleged to be), the crime becomes a national spectacle.

When the perpetrator is white, the story fades away.

And when the victim is someone like Iryna Zarutska—a refugee whose story can be molded into a racial parable—her humanity becomes secondary to the political symbolism attached to her death. Reporting on Ukraine has made me think a lot about propaganda and the stories powerful people tell to justify their actions.

Ukrainians know this better than most people.

For years, Russian propaganda has insisted that Ukrainians are not a real nation—that their culture, language and history are somehow artificial. That kind of rhetoric strips people of their humanity. It makes their suffering easier to dismiss. Putin doesn’t talk about Ukrainians as people. He discusses Ukraine as not a real country, a land mass that belongs to Russia or a fake state controlled by western powers to threaten Russian national security. It’s all bullshit and lies, but this is a very effective narrative he has used to justify attacking and colonizing Ukraine over the past 12-plus years.

Ukrainians are stereotyped to the point where he lies to justify killing them. Trump uses racist stereotypes similarly to justify unconstitutional targeting of people of color by ICE and rhetoric to dehumanize Black men as predators of white women.

Russian Supremacy and White Supremacy are pretty similar, when you think about it.

Iryna’s death doesn’t matter Trump as much as the racial symbolism that can be extracted from it—same as the woman who was assaulted in Central Park in 1989. I look at what happened to those five boys in 1989, and observe the way Trump and MAGA talk about Iryna Zarutska, and I come to a simple conclusion.

In Trump’s politics, tragedy is never just tragedy. It’s a racial script.

Someone always has to play the Black villain. And that requires a white victim. But what Iryna’s killing tells us is that her murder only qualifies her as a white woman worth mentioning in MAGA’s ecosystem if the perpetrator is Black.

Kateryna, the Ukrainian killed on Valentine’s Day, was not a “white woman” worth mentioning because her perpetrator was a white man.

Just as in Putin’s Russia, Ukrainians are also invisible in Trump’s America