When Donald Trump said during the presidential debate on Tuesday that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Ohio, it was probably the first time most Americans had ever heard such a ridiculous thing. But it’s clear it won’t be the last time if our dumbest living president has his way.
The idea that migrants to the U.S. are eating pets is a lie, of course. It’s a lie that bubbled up from the worst corners of the internet before being repeated by a man who wants to become the most powerful person in the world again. And it’s now become obvious that Trump is going to keep repeating that lie on TV, at his rallies and using AI-generated images on Truth Social to help make his insidiously racist point.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating… they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said during the debate against Kamala Harris in Philadelphia on Tuesday.
Police in Springfield have denied that any reports exist of anyone—let alone migrants in the town—stealing and eating household pets. But that hasn’t stopped a torrent of abuse and intimidation from descending on the town’s immigrant community. Several buildings in Springfield received bomb threats on Thursday, forcing an elementary school and City Hall to shut down for the day as a precautionary measure. And Springfield City School District told ABC News on Friday that two elementary schools, Perrin Woods and Snowhill Elementary, had to be evacuated on Friday.
Trump helped bring national attention to Springfield, Ohio, and it’s been quite a nightmare for residents there. One father whose son was killed in a car accident asked the former president to stop using his son as a political weapon during a city council meeting on September 10. The Haitian Times also reports that some migrants who live in Springfield are being terrorized by right-wing extremists who are vandalizing cars. One woman reported that her car even had acid poured on it and said she was afraid to leave her home.
“I’m going to have to move because this area is no longer good for me,” the woman told the Haitian Times. “I can’t even leave my house to go to Walmart. I’m anxious and scared.”
The city manager of Springfield, Bryan Heck, posted a video on Facebook about the “misinformation circulating on social media” that had been “further amplified by the political rhetoric in the current, highly charged presidential election cycle.”
Heck didn’t mention Trump by name, but he didn’t have to. The Republican candidate for president is the one who’s brought this garbage to the mainstream after it percolated on Facebook, 4Chan, Truth Social, and Elon Musk’s X. And a presidential debate watched by roughly 67 million people on Tuesday helped catapult it to new heights.
Like all media in 2024, this kind of propaganda works within a kind of feedback loop. The worst of humanity spreads some far-right lies in places like X, a site that’s been overrun by Nazis ever since Musk bought the site in late 2022. Then Trump helps elevate it onto traditional media channels before it makes its way back to the internet. Audio from Trump’s insane ramblings quickly became a meme, both during and after the debate, and continued to get remixed on more mainstream social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
JD Vance, Trump’s running mate and all-around weird guy, did his part as well, spreading the racist bullshit on X both before and after the debate. Vance claimed that his office had gotten calls about incidents where migrants had eaten pets, but he provided no evidence for that claim and admitted in the tweet “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.” And as a reporter at PBS Newshour mentioned while reporting on Vance’s nonsense, you have to ask yourself one simple question: who seems like the person you’d call if your pet was stolen? The police, who reported that no incidents like this have occurred in Springfield or your local member of Congress?
Trump posted a number of AI-generated images about the slanderous lies against migrants Thursday on Truth Social. Many of the images featured cats, including one that read, “Don’t let them eat us, vote for Trump!” and another that read, “Kamala hates me.”
One older man outside Trump’s rally in Tucson, Arizona on Thursday was spotted with a sign that looked identical to one of the AI images Trump shared on Truth Social. The image depicts Trump running away from two Black men while carrying cats. The text on the racist sign reads, “Make Pets SAFE Again.”
The rally inside was particularly hateful, even by Trump standards. And it was just the latest sign that Trump wants to make these lies about migrants a regular part of his stump speech. The former president talked repeatedly about Springfield, Ohio, insisting that Haitians are “destroying their way of life” in that community.
At his rally in Arizona today, Donald Trump continued his racist assault against immigrant Haitians, claiming they're taking the geese from the park and eating the pets.#TrumpRally #DonaldTrump #theyreeatingthepets #TheyreEatingtheCats #TheyreEatingthedogs pic.twitter.com/O13A3OVSZw
— Dana Abercrombie (@sagesurge) September 12, 2024
Trump talks a big game, but for all his bluster picking on migrants, he’s clearly terrified of Harris. Writing on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump announced that he wouldn’t be participating in another debate with his Democratic opponent, despite her campaign asking for another debate. Trump wrote a very long-winded build-up, giving excuse after non-sensical excuse, before finally dropping the news in all-caps.
“KAMALA SHOULD FOCUS ON WHAT SHE SHOULD HAVE DONE DURING THE LAST ALMOST FOUR YEAR PERIOD. THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” Trump wrote.
Trump is doing poorly in the polls, with new surveys taken after the debate and published Thursday showing Harris with a strong lead in the national tally. A new poll from Morning Consult has Harris at 50% and Trump at 45%. A poll from Ipsos released Thursday had Harris 47% and Trump 42%.
And Harris is doing much better when you look at likely voters rather than just registered voters, a group that probably features many registered Republicans who will stay home on Election Day because their candidate is such an embarrassing loser. A new YouGov/Times poll had Harris 49% and Trump 45% among likely voters, and up just one point, Harris 46% and Trump 45% among registered voters.
Nobody knows for certain who’s going to win on November 5. But we can say with some confidence that Trump is going to get increasingly desperate with his attacks on immigrants, women, and who knows what other vulnerable group he sets his sights on. With any luck, the American public will ignore him and we can get out of this thing without any violence. But if the tone and tenor of Trump’s rally in Arizona is any guide, the former president is poised to hurt a lot of people before he vanishes from the public eye.
