This Will Be— Fittingly— A Weird Debate A Week From Tuesday
I didn’t realize that Trump— petrified to debate Kamala again— is allowing his weirdo running mate to debate Tim Walz. And it’s in just 11 days! I wonder how much time will be spent talking about Vance’s pet eating lies and the attendant racism, xenophobia and inability to be truthful. Yesterday, Adam Serwer tackled the real reasons why Vance— and Señor T— refuse to stop spreading the calumny about legal Haitian immigrants.
“Six days into terrorizing the city of Springfield, Ohio, with baseless nonsense about Haitian immigrants kidnapping and eating people’s pets,” wrote Serwer, “the Republican vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, admitted that the tales were intended to push a certain narrative. ‘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,’ Vance told CNN on Sunday. Days earlier, Vance had acknowledged that ‘it’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false’— a confession that implies that he does not care whether they are true.”
Trump, a virulent lifelong racist and xenophobe, and Vance, who’ll be anything he has to be from moment to moment, are now centering “their campaign on lies about Haitian immigrants being ‘dumped’ on Springfield,” causing their MAGA followers to call in bomb threats to municipal buildings, schools and a local festival that have had to be evacuated or canceled. “Asked whether he condemned the threats against Haitian immigrants, Trump couldn’t even bring himself to say that the threats were wrong, and instead simply spread misinformation about the migrants again: ‘I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats. I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened.’ Besides failing to offer even a shred of concern for residents menaced by bomb threats, the statement was also false: The Haitians in Springfield are living and working there legally though Trump has vowed to deport them anyway.
Serwer noted that “the most employed rhetorical device of the Trump campaign: point to someone’s suffering and then offer as a solution the application of state violence against a disfavored group, using Americans’ problems as a pretext to harm people they have chosen to hate.” The firehose explosion of lies from Trump and Vance “are all long-standing staples of anti-immigrant rhetoric regardless of the origin of the immigrants, attempts to use shocking, disgust-provoking anecdotes to overcome people’s ability to reason.”
Conservative Republican Gov. Mike DeWine has said that “the Haitian migrants came to work and have benefited the town’s economy; they were not ‘dumped’ there. The Haitians’ arrival did not hurt Springfield; it helped revitalize the kind of town that Trump and Vance claim to want to help. The Republican ticket’s allegations about disease and pet-eating appear to be completely spurious— the author of the Facebook post from which those stories originated has publicly apologized for spreading them and acknowledged that they have no evidence to support them… [T]he arrival of the Haitian workers helped spur an economic revival, exactly what Vance has said he wants for his home state of Ohio.”
Why are Trump and Vance so fixated on deporting the Haitians?
One reason is Trump has a particular, well-documented hatred toward Haitians. The former president infamously referred to Haiti as one of the “shithole countries” that the United States should reject immigrants from, in favor of those from countries “like Norway.” Trump had also previously complained that Haitians “all have AIDS.” Trump’s hostility to Haitians extends to other Black immigrants— he also reportedly complained that if Nigerian immigrants were allowed to stay, they would “never go back to their huts.” Nigerian Americans are the most highly educated immigrant subgroup in America, and Haitians, as the Cato Institute’s David Bier has documented, have a higher rate of employment than native-born Americans and are much more likely than other immigrants or native-born Americans to join the U.S. military. Trump apologists have repeatedly insisted that Trump simply wants immigrants who can contribute to American society, but Trump himself ignores Black immigrants’ contributions in favor of his own ingrained stereotypes about Black people.
Another reason is Trump and Vance appear not to be interested in helping anyone in Springfield, or anywhere else for that matter. Their actions point to a political theory of the election, which is that fearmongering about immigrants, especially Black immigrants, will scare white people into voting for Trump. They also point to an ideological theory of the nation, which is that America belongs to white people, and that the country would be better if it were poorer and weaker, as long as it were also whiter. Trump and Vance have a specific policy agenda for socially engineering the nation through state force to be whiter than it is now: mass deportation, repealing birthright citizenship, and denaturalization of American citizens. This agenda, in addition to being immoral, would wreck the American economy. Republican elected officials in Ohio are defending the Haitians in Springfield because they understand that removing them would have a terrible effect on their town and state— the same terrible effect that Trump’s agenda would have on the country.
Trump’s and Vance’s statements reveal a belief that it would be better to leave dying towns in the Midwest to wither away than revive them and have to share that prosperity with people who are Black, and they seem to be betting that enough American voters in enough swing states agree that it would be better to be broke than integrated. In exchange for these fearful votes, a second Trump administration would proceed to shower tax cuts on the wealthy, raise them on everyone else, slash regulations on big business and further undermine unions, while towns like Springfield would be left to tumble further into decline.
That message, spoken plainly, is not as appealing as they wish it were. So to justify hatred toward the Haitian migrants, Trump and Vance chose to smear them as pet-eating savages. Saying “we will invest more in these communities to ensure that they continue to prosper” would not have been good enough. It would not have removed what Trump and Vance see as the actual problem, which is not poverty, addiction, lack of affordable housing, or job loss, but the mere presence of Haitians on American soil.
It’s worth noting that the first time Vance ran for office, the 2022 Senate race, Clark County was all in for him. He won statewide with 53.1% but he won Clark County with 61%:
JD Vance (R)- 27,131 (61%)
Tim Ryan (D)- 17,141(39%)
Clark is in between Montgomery and Franklin counties, each of which backed Ryan, narrowly in the case of Montgomery Co. but massively in the case of Franklin Co. That Vance is now causing so much pain and suffering in Clark— on behalf of Trump— should tell Ohio voters, if no one else, all they need to know about Senator JD Vance. I can't wait to see how much better Kamala does in Clark County than Biden did.
Greg Sargent added that Vance’s weak excuse for the pet eating lie just blew up in his face. Vance knew along along that the pet-eating rumors “were flatly false. But Vance then amplified the claim,” Señor T quickly following suit, “adding— because nobody out-embellishes Trump— that along with cats, Haitians are also consuming Springfield’s dogs.” Loomer outbid them both, claiming Haitians eat humans. “They knew it was all a lie. But they kicked off this whole campaign of hate and demagoguery anyway.”
Sargent denounced Vance’s excuses— damage control— on CNN last Sunday, in effect “that lying in this manner is acceptable to force discussion of a supposedly overlooked public problem— on its own terms, as its own act of grotesque public misconduct. If it is OK to level such a despicable, dehumanizing smear at a vulnerable minority population to corral media attention in this fashion, then what sort of lying and propaganda about an exposed, assailable, encircled out group would not be justified? Does Vance’s code of political ethics have any limiting principle that you can discern?… Vance’s dishonesty about Springfield goes well beyond the pet-eating scam and strays into other really dangerous territory. Vance has repeatedly cited a need to draw attention to other problems supposedly inflicted by Haitians, again and again claiming that “communicable diseases” are “on the rise” and have “skyrocketed.”
You might describe this as the art of the “secondary lie.” Even as the pet-eating ruse sucked up all the attention, MAGA figures have advanced other claims along with it that have passed into the discourse with little scrutiny. It’s a trick that MAGA propaganda often employs.
But it’s very hard to square Vance’s claims of “skyrocketing” diseases with official health data from Clark County, home to Springfield. That data shows that reportable communicable diseases in the county— excluding Covid-19, which dwarfs all others and surged during the pandemic for many other reasons— actually have declined in a broad sense. Despite a rise in 2022 that was the exception, they were actually lower in 2023 than they were in 2021 (when the Haitian influx gained steam), which in turn was lower than 2020 (before their arrivals really got going). The overall trend from 2020 through the end of 2023 is downward, not upward.
“If you look at all reportable diseases as a whole, they’re actually going down,” Chris Cook, the health commissioner of Clark County, told me.
Vance has also specifically suggested that cases of tuberculosis and HIV are rising or even soaring. But according to the county’s data, there was one case of T.B. in 2021, three cases in 2022, and four cases in 2023. OK, that sort of constitutes “rising.” But it’s a tiny handful of cases out of a county population of 135,000.
What about HIV? Well, in 2022— the latest year of finalized data— there were around nine cases of new HIV diagnoses per 100,000 people in Clark County. That is up from five cases in 2020, but that nine cases is barely higher than the current rate across all of Ohio, which had seven new cases per 100,000 people in 2022. And if you look at the numbers of people living with HIV as a condition— as opposed to new cases of it— there are fewer per 100,000 in Clark County than there are statewide, Cook points out.
Every case of T.B. and HIV is serious. But there is no plausible way to describe any of that in Vance’s hyperbolic terms. Indeed, Cook describes those diseases as getting only a “slight bump” and suggests that singling out individual diseases is not particularly illuminating to begin with.
“As a measure of total health of a population,” Cook told me, “individual diseases” are less informative than “trends of groups of diseases.” And those trends are down. It’s hard to see how anyone could seriously cast all this as a severe blight caused by Haitians.
At bottom, Vance’s whole purpose of running with the grotesque pet-eating lie has not been to draw attention to the story of Springfield, but to rewrite it. He wants to transform the Haitian influx into a symbol of immigration that’s uniformly understood (as in the Trump-MAGA worldview) as a massive and disorienting alien invasion responsible for unleashing all manner of debilitating social and societal ills. This is what Vance means when he says the pet-eating ruse was necessary to highlight the “suffering of the American people” inflicted by current immigration policies, an absurd construction that reveals more about MAGA’s own fear and loathing of immigration than it does about anything else.
Springfield simply does not tell that larger story. Yes, of course there are difficult challenges associated with this specific influx and with immigration more broadly. But Springfield’s own leaders see the arrivals as manageable, and they’ve clearly been a positive for the city. Immigration has been helping revitalize other, similar Rust Belt communities in postindustrial population decline. Haitians assimilate well into U.S. society as a rule. And Vance has zero standing to lecture anyone about the broader handling of immigration, having joined with Trump to cynically kill the most comprehensive border and asylum management bill Congress produced in many years.
In a way, it’s useful that Vance described his zeal to “create stories” so candidly. Because we can now scrutinize this as its own act of public misconduct, one that telegraphs what a Trump-Vance presidency would really look like. Imagine this fondness for fabricating stories about immigrants supercharged by the federal bureaucracy and the White House press operation, and you get an inkling of what could be coming. The Springfield pet-eating lie is best seen as a cautionary tale— an extremely harrowing one.
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