Donald Trump reportedly plans to visit Springfield, Ohio, the Midwestern city that’s become the subject of his and running mate JD Vance’s false claims regarding Haitian migrants stealing people’s pets and eating them. Trump’s plans were revealed Sunday by NBC News, and if you think it’s a good idea for the former president to show up in Springfield at a TBD date, you probably also believed Trump when he declared at last week’s presidential debate, “They’re eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats.”
To be clear, it would surely be helpful for Trump to go to Springfield and say the words: “There is absolutely no truth to the baseless claims that migrants here are consuming people’s pets, and anyone saying otherwise is simply trying to stoke division and hate. These claims have been thoroughly debunked and must stop now.” But obviously that’s not going to happen.
One reason that’s clearly not going to happen is that Trump is Trump, and he is incapable of uttering a coherent thought. Another, as The Bulwark notes, is that the Trump campaign is not actually bothered by the fact that it’s “been widely condemned for spreading the urban legend of Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio,” because it allows Team Trump to avoid discussing things like abortion. These people want to keep these repugnant lies about Haitian migrants going, which Vance effectively admitted over the weekend when he said he was happy to “create stories.”
In an interview on Sunday, the Ohio senator told CNN’s Dana Bash: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. 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 gonna do.”
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After Bash noted that it sounded a lot like Vance was saying he’d made these stories up, he insisted: “It comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents. I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it. I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’s policies. Her policies did that. But yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris’s policies.”
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