Less than 30 minutes into the presidential debate, former president Donald Trump unleashed a viral racist lie about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio — and repeated it after fact-checkers insisted it wasn’t true.
“In Springfield, they eat the dogs – the people who come in – they eat the cats, they eat the pets of the people who live there,” Trump said in response to a question about why he asked the Republican lawmakers who voted against a bipartisan border security law. After Trump finished his tirade, ABC News moderator David Muir clarified that Springfield’s city manager had said reports of migrants eating pets were false — but Trump repeated the lie. “People are saying on television, ‘My dog was taken and used for food,'” Trump interjected.
Trump’s resistance to fact-checking should come as no surprise at this point. In fact, his campaign leaned entirely on the claim, which took off 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 JD Vance said his office has “received many inquiries from actual Springfield residents” about their pets being eaten, contradicting statements from to Springfield police and city officials that they have received no complaints. While Vance acknowledged the possibility that “all these rumors are going to be false,” he nonetheless encouraged supporters to continue spreading them. “In other words, don’t let the crybabies in the media stop you, fellow patriots,” Vance posted on X. “Keep the cat memes flowing.”
In the days since the Springfield rumor went viral, Trump campaign supporters and surrogates have embraced it, posting AI-generated images depicting Trump as a champion of America’s pets. The Republican Party of Arizona put up a dozen billboards in the Phoenix area referencing the meme, urging Arizonans to “eat less kittens” and vote Republican.
These memes have become a visual shorthand for Trump and his supporters’ belief in the white supremacist great replacement theory. And instead of recognizing the lie at the center of the rumor about the Haitians in Springfield, Trump supporters suggested that the media’s fact-checking focus on the viral lie obscured the “replacement” of Americans in Springfield among Haitian migrants.
Trump, the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, didn’t bother to dilute the baseless claims by tying them to broader local concerns about immigrants. Instead, he goes for the baldest version of the lie.
