What exactly did Donald Trump's 1989 New York Times ad say about the Central Park case?
Executive summary
Donald J. Trump purchased full‑page newspaper advertisements on May 1, 1989, that demanded the return of capital punishment in New York and framed the city as being terrorized by violent criminals; the ads were published in multiple New York papers including The New York Times, The Daily News, The New York Post and Newsday [1]. The copy dramatized public fear, praised police, urged an end to “pandering to the criminal population,” and explicitly called to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY,” while coverage and later retrospectives tie the ads directly to the Central Park jogger case though reporting varies on whether the ad named the five teenagers or explicitly demanded their execution [1] [2] [3].
1. The headline demand — “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY”
The most salient and repeatedly quoted element of the ad was an all‑caps exhortation to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY,” a line that many newsrooms and later commentators emphasize as the ad’s central demand and the passage most directly tied to calls for executing those responsible for the Central Park attack [1] [4] [5]. Multiple contemporary and retrospective sources characterize the purchase as a direct call to reinstate capital punishment in response to the April 1989 assault on the Central Park jogger [2] [6].
2. The body copy — fear, policing and “pandering to the criminal population”
The ad’s body invoked vivid civic anxiety — families giving up walks, parks and stoops “as hostages” to roving criminals — and contrasted that fear with nostalgia for a time when “New York’s finest” provided public safety, arguing the city must “cease our continuous pandering to the criminal population” and “give New York back to the citizens” [1]. Those specific lines appear in the Roll Call transcript of the ad and were widely reproduced in archival reprints of the full‑page text [1].
3. Did the ad name the Central Park Five or call for their execution?
Contemporary reporting and later summaries consistently link Trump’s ad to the Central Park case, and many sources phrase it as calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty “so that the Central Park Five could be executed” or “calling for the execution of five young Black and Latino boys,” reflecting how the ad was received at the time [2] [5] [6]. Other accounts note Trump referenced the attack and placed the ads “calling to reinstate the death penalty,” but say the ad’s text did not explicitly spell out the individual names or a specific execution order — an ambiguity flagged by some retrospectives that note Trump referenced the case but may not have used explicit execution language directed by name at the five teens [3] [7].
4. Scale, placement and immediate aftermath
Trump spent what reporting has estimated (commonly cited as about $85,000) to run full‑page ads across several major New York papers, a placement that amplified the message’s reach and helped cement its association with Trump’s law‑and‑order posture during the city’s high‑crime era [7] [3] [1]. The ad became a touchstone in later debates about race, media, and criminal justice in New York; the five teenagers were convicted in 1990, had their convictions vacated in 2002 after another man confessed and DNA evidence exonerated them, and later settled with the city [7] [8].
5. Why the exact wording still matters today
The wording of the ad — its headline demand for capital punishment plus charged language about criminals and police — is central to contemporary disputes over whether Trump defamed the exonerated men and to arguments about how media amplification shaped public opinion; that debate appears in lawsuits and coverage that alternately emphasize the ad’s explicit death‑penalty demand and the question of whether it directly ordered the five’s execution [8] [5] [4]. Reporting shows the ad plainly advocated reinstating the death penalty and tied that demand to the atmosphere created by the Central Park attack, while sources diverge on whether the ad’s phrasing literally named the five defendants or ordered their execution, an ambiguity that has fueled competing narratives ever since [1] [3].