Donald Trump was poised to defeat Joe Biden. A short time ago, his campaign expected to win in a landslide. They might well have done so -- with a game plan tailor-made for defeating an old, diminished candidate. And then Democrats pulled an unprecedented switch: Biden was out; Kamala Harris was in (while Trump became the old, diminished candidate).
The Trump campaign, thrown for the loopiest, most confounding of loops, began scrambling to find its footing. Trump was on his heels. The Trump-Vance campaign strategists were off their game. The question posed prominently in the media for the next several weeks: How would Trump and his campaign respond to the Harris candidacy?
By the September 10 debate with Harris, Trump had already played the race card, challenging her racial identity. At the debate he launched another line of attack: "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."
In the same response (in answer to a question about why he had killed the bipartisan immigration bill, which "would have put thousands of additional agents and officers on the border"), Trump began by insisting that he had "the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics," pronounced the U.S. a failed nation, invoked World War III, and then decried immigration into our country. Hence the lie about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH eating pets.
This lie about Haitian immigrants, which found fertile ground in the fever swamps of MAGA social media (after having begun with a third-hand account posted on Facebook), had been raised by Trump's running mate JD Vance a day earlier. "Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country. Where is our border czar?" Prominent Republicans jubilantly spread the lie.
When pressed, at times, Vance didn't deny that the accusation was unsupported (though his explanation changed day to day), but he stuck with the story. In fact, he excused the baseless report as a means to draw the media's attention to Springfield, telling CNN's Dana Bash, "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, Dana."
Immediately after Vance's initial post days earlier, his staff had called city officials in Springfield to confirm the story. They were told clearly and unambiguously that it was baseless:
Springfield city manager Bryan Heck told the Wall Street Journal that a Vance staffer reached out to him on Sept. 9 to conduct a fact-check.
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- "He asked point-blank, 'Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?'" Heck said.
- "I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless."
So Vance knew it was a lie from the start. But it didn't matter. Vance continued to spread the 'rumor' because it highlighted an issue the Trump campaign wished to amplify in the mainstream media. The senator encouraged his followers to continue spreading the tale about Haitians eating cats: "In short, don't let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing."
The effects have been widely reported: bomb threats, closed schools, lockdowns at hospitals and city hall. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine sent in state troopers to guard local schools. Fine, but how do parents of 6- and 7-year olds explain "bomb threat" in a way that doesn't terrify their kids? And the controversy emboldened the Proud Boys to stage a march and the KKK to distributes fliers. Haitians are uneasy, as are many other residents of Springfield.
Haitians, who have revived the local economy with their hard work, have begun to learn the language, register their kids in schools, join local churches, and seek to assimilate as best they can. The Republican governor celebrates the contribution of Haitians, while acknowledging the challenges their arrival in large numbers has brought. DeWine decries the lies spread about Springfield, but still supports the Trump-Vance ticket. He writes in a New York Times op-ed:
As a supporter of former President Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance, I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield. This rhetoric hurts the city and its people, and it hurts those who have spent their lives there.
The Biden administration’s failure to control the southern border is a very important issue that Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance are talking about and one that the American people are rightfully deeply concerned about. But their verbal attacks against these Haitians — who are legally present in the United States — dilute and cloud what should be a winning argument about the border.
As with many elected Republican loyalists, the governor misses the point (or pretends to). Donald Trump doesn't seek to win an argument about the border or about immigration. He seeks to evoke fear and stoke division about race, to scare white folks about newcomers who are not white. And neither Trump, nor Vance care one whit about harm to the Springfield community engendered by their hateful rhetoric and lies.
Trump instituted a Muslim ban, separated children from their families at the border, and denounced "shit-hole countries"-- including Haiti, African nations, and El Salvador. This week, at a rally in New York, Trump offered shovelfuls of more lies:
... I've been talking about migrant crime for five years. I said, if you let 'em in, it's going to be hell. They are vicious, violent criminals that are being led into our country. They are people that their countries, who are very smart, they don't want them. That's why all over the world -- a lot of people coming from jails out of the Congo in Africa.
Where do you come from?
The Congo.
Where in the Congo?
We come from jail.
What did you do?
We will not tell you.
They're coming from the Congo, they're coming from Africa, they're coming from the Middle East. They're coming from all over the world. Asia. Lot of it coming from Asia.
And what's happening to our country is we're just destroying the fabric of life in our country. And we're not going to take it any longer. And you gotta get rid of these people.
At an April rally in Green Bay, Trump referred to immigrants as subhuman, "The Democrats say, 'Please don't call them animals. They're humans.' I said, 'No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals.'" The former president has repeatedly asserted that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country," employing language echoing Hitler.
"Migrant crime," a MAGA and Fox News talking point, doesn't represent a surge. Quite the contrary. That's a lie.
But it scares voters. And that's the point. So we have our answer. How will the Trump campaign respond to the challenge posed by Kamala Harris, a Black/South Asian woman? With the familiar Trump playbook that focuses on racial resentment and fear, supercharged with lies.
I don't think this is going to work. I base that on a faith in the American people, though the race is too close to call, which voters turn out is unpredictable, and the Electoral College doesn't always favor the democratic choice. I'll stick with my simple faith until proven wrong.
September 25 update: Adam Serwer posted on Bluesky, "I wrote about a dynamic that I haven’t seen acknowledged: The Trump campaign is desperate to make race the issue of the election even if they have to lie about it, because their strategy is to scare white people ..." His article ("The Trump Campaign Wants Everyone Talking About Race"), which appeared the day after my post, illustrates why he is a professional and I'm an amateur. Describing a comment by JD Vance, he crisply sums up the MAGA game plan: "What’s going on here is emblematic of the Trump campaign’s strategy, which is to try to make race the big issue of the campaign, via incessant trolling, lying, and baiting of both the press and the Harris camp. The racism rope-a-dope is one of Trump advisers’ favorite moves—say something to provoke accusations of racism, then ride the wave of outrage over your critics’ perceived oversensitivity."