Less than 30 minutes into the presidential debate, former President Donald Trump advanced a racist lie about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and repeated it after fact-checkers asserted it was untrue.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs – the people that come in – they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people who live there,” Trump said in response to a question about why he asked Republicans. After Trump ended his tirade, ABC News host David Muir clarified that the Springfield city manager told ABC reports that immigrants were eating pets was false, but that Trump repeated the lie. “People on TV said, ‘My dog was taken away and used for food,'” Trump interjected.
Trump’s resistance to fact-checking is not surprising at this point. In fact, his campaign is leaning squarely into this claim, which trended on right-wing social media over the weekend and has since been mainstreamed by the likes of Elon Musk and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
On Tuesday, vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance claimed that his office has “received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield about their pets being eaten,” which contradicted Springfield police and city officials’ claims that they had not There are conflicting accounts of the receipt of such complaints. While Vance acknowledged that “all of these rumors could turn out to be false,” he encouraged supporters to continue spreading them. Vance posted on
Since the Springfield rumor went viral, Trump supporters and campaign surrogates have embraced it, releasing artificial intelligence-generated images depicting Trump as a defender of America’s pets. The Arizona Republican Party displayed more than a dozen billboards referencing the meme in the Phoenix area, urging Arizonans to “eat less kittens” and vote Republican.
The memes have become visual shorthand for Trump and his supporters’ belief in the white supremacist Great Replacement theory. Rather than acknowledging that the rumors about Haitians in Springfield are lies at their core, Trump supporters argue that the media’s focus on fact-checking viral lies obscures the fact that Haitian immigrants are “replacing” Americans in Springfield. fact.
Trump, the Republican standard-bearer, has not bothered to obfuscate these baseless claims and tie them to broader concerns about immigration. Instead, he tells the most blatant lies.
