Absurdity can be a lethal weapon. When Donald Trump made a risible claim about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio at last week’s ABC News presidential debate, it felt like the ludicrous low point of a generally dire performance. “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” he said. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
The Republican nominee’s lie was quickly corrected by David Muir, one of ABC’s moderators. The digital response was instant: an online profusion of jokes, memes, dances and satirical songs, some of them brilliant. And rightly so. Lampooning those who hold or seek power is essential in a free society.
But it struck me as intriguing, and alarming, that Trump’s campaign did not see his preposterous claim as a gaffe, an embarrassing outburst by a candidate who had, at times, seemed out of control in his exchanges with Kamala Harris. Far from it: his strategists filled official social media feeds with AI-generated images of Trump protecting cats, dogs and the occasional duck.
On Friday, he posted a picture on Instagram of a ginger tabby holding a sign in its paws: “KAMALA HATES ME”. The Arizona Republican Party put up billboards urging voters to “Eat less kittens”. On Saturday, Tucker Carlson said: “If PETA [the animal welfare campaign] doesn’t endorse Trump after this, they are completely fraudulent.”
Why are the forces of MAGA doubling down on a fictitious claim that, you might think, only reminds the voters of their candidate’s disastrous debate? Lift the lid of farce – and behold a very deep well of poison.
For a start, Trump’s lie has already had real-life consequences in Springfield, where city, county and school buildings were closed on Thursday because of a bomb threat; two hospitals were forced into lockdown on Saturday; and Haitian citizens are living in fear as their windows are broken, their cars are vandalised, and acid is thrown on their property. Suddenly, the city is the frontline in America’s culture wars.
It is important to grasp, too, that this storm has been brewing for more than two months. On July 9, six days before his selection as Trump’s running mate was announced, JD Vance claimed at a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee that the influx of 15,000 Haitian migrants to Springfield in recent years had caused a housing crisis.
“In my conversations with folks in Springfield, it’s not just housing,” the Ohio senator said. “There are a whole host of ways in which this immigration problem, I think, is having very real human consequences.”
At a National Conservatism conference the next day, he continued his attack on the Haitian community. “Look, the thing on immigration that no one can avoid is that it has made our societies poor, less safe, less prosperous, and less advanced,” Vance said. He road-tested his now-familiar claim that America is not an “idea” but a “nation”: code for white and Christian, rather than multicultural.
What Vance has not mentioned is that the vast majority of Haitians in Springfield are there legally under the Temporary Protected Status programme; they have been encouraged to settle in the city by its authorities and employers, keen to fill jobs at an Amazon warehouse and metal works plant; and that the pressure to which housing and public services have been subjected has been offset by the property, sales and income taxes the new arrivals pay.
But why let the facts stand in the way of a xenophobic campaign? During August, neo-Nazi gangs such as Blood Tribe and Patriot Group stepped up their activities in Springfield.
At one demonstration, as white supremacists waved swastika flags and yelled racists slogans, Drake Berentz, a leading member of Blood Tribe, declared that the city had been taken over by “degenerate Third Worlders”, claimed that Jews were behind the migrant influx (the so-called “Great Replacement Theory”), and insisted that “no longer do you have to suffer the abuse of subhumans”.
On August 27, Berentz turned up at a meeting of the city council, but was removed for using threatening language. At the same gathering, Anthony Harris, a local Black resident apparently running to be mayor of Clark County, made the claim that Haitian migrants were stealing animals. “They’re in the park, grabbing up ducks, by their necks, and cutting their heads off and walking off with them, and eating them,” he said.
This assertion quickly merged in the digital hivemind with other allegations and gossip. On August 16, a visibly disturbed woman, Allexis Telia Ferrell, was arrested for allegedly killing and eating a cat: she is not Haitian and the incident took place in Canton, 170 miles from Springfield.
A photo of a man holding a dead goose went viral online: again, the picture was not taken in Springfield but in Columbus, Ohio. Meanwhile, Erika Lee, a resident of the troubled city, posted on Facebook that a neighbour had seen her daughter’s boyfriend’s cat hanging from a tree in a Haitian’s yard.
“I’ve been told they are doing this to dogs, they have been doing it at Snyder Park with the ducks and geese,” Lee wrote. The neighbour in question has since explained that Lee’s story was wrong.
How did such nonsense end up being repeated in a presidential debate watched by 67 million Americans? In his book, On Rumours, Cass Sunstein argues that fabricated stories proliferate because of “social cascades” (the groups upon which we depend for our information) and polarisation. “When like-minded people get together,” he writes, “they often end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk to one another.”
Revulsion is also a powerful engine: “When rumours produce strong emotions – disgust, anger, outrage – people are far more likely to spread them.” This has been most conspicuously true in the case of conspiracy theories involving satanic child sexual abuse. Allegations of animal cruelty also spread like wildfire.
And here is Sunstein’s most important point: “Quality, assessed in terms of correspondence to the truth, might not matter a great deal or even at all.” What counts, all too often, is not evidence but the extent to which a claim bolsters a pre-existing belief or prejudice.
As Vance put it to CNN on Sunday: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
In this case, he and Trump have used a falsehood to shine the spotlight firmly on migration. Harris certainly won the debate and showed herself to be presidential. But how many people are now talking about her plans for an “opportunity economy” or her call for “a ceasefire deal” in the Israel-Gaza conflict?
According to a YouGov/Times poll last week, 55% of Americans think Harris beat Trump in Philadelphia. But voters still consider the Republican to be better-placed to manage the economy, crime, veterans’ affairs, inflation, taxes, national defence, foreign policy – and immigration.
In Los Angeles on Friday, Trump turned the Springfield furore into a case study justifying his plan to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants – ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the city’s Haitians are there legally. “We will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio,” he said. “Large deportations. We’re gonna get these people out.”
At the heart of MAGA culture is a sense of siege, horrifically dramatised by the two assassination attempts on the former president. The nation is supposedly being invaded by migrants; American values are being overturned; schools and universities are factories of far left propaganda; the family home is encircled by danger.
Children are the target of the sex-traffickers at the heart of the QAnon conspiracy theory, indoctrinated by “ultra-woke” teachers in the classroom, groomed by drag queens. And if children are at risk, surely household pets are, too? The cats and dogs who are cherished members of the family? What if the invaders are coming for them, too?
This is a story that has everything to do with primal emotion – the protective reflex – and nothing to do with truth. Vance spelt it out in a tweet on September 10: “In the last several weeks, my office has received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who’ve said their neighbours’ pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants. It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumours will turn out to be false. Do you know what’s confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.”
Shamefully, the prospective vice-president was connecting the baseless stories about pet-eating to a real-life tragedy in August last year, when Aiden Clark, an 11-year-old from Springfield, was killed in a collision between his school bus and a minivan driven without a licence by a Haitian migrant, Hermanio Joseph. In May, Joseph, who (contrary to Vance’s claims) had an Ohio ID and Temporary Protected Legal status, was sentenced to at least nine to 13 and a half years in prison for involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide.
For Trump and his running mate, this is all a game played in the pursuit of power. For Aiden Clark’s parents it is an intolerable reminder and exploitation of the worst day of their lives. On Tuesday, his father, Nathan, denounced the “morally bankrupt” politicians who have trampled on their pain. “I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man,” he said. “I bet you never thought anyone would say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone.”
Through his tears, this grieving parent displayed a dignity and moral courage that shames the entire MAGA movement. “This tragedy is felt all over this community, the state and even the nation,” he said, “but don’t spin this towards hate.”
This is the choice now facing the republic. As the presidential race enters its final weeks, decency itself is on the ticket.
