Less than 30 minutes into the presidential debate, former President Donald Trump brought up a viral racist lie about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio — and repeated it after fact-checkers claimed it was untrue.
“In Springfield, they eat the dogs — the people who came here — they eat the cats, they eat the pets of the people who live there,” Trump said in response to a question about why he urged Republican lawmakers to vote against a bipartisan border security bill. After Trump finished his tirade, ABC News anchor David Muir clarified that Springfield's city manager had told ABC that reports of migrants eating pets were false — but Trump repeated the lie. “People on TV say, 'My dog was taken and used for food,'” Trump interjected.
Trump's resistance to fact-checking should come as no surprise by now. In fact, his campaign has relied entirely on this claim, which made the rounds on right-wing social media over the weekend and has since been adopted mainstream by the likes of Elon Musk and Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
On Tuesday, vice presidential candidate JD Vance claimed his office had received “many inquiries from actual Springfield residents” about eating their pets, contradicting statements from Springfield police and city officials that they had received no such complaints. While Vance acknowledged the possibility that “all of these rumors may turn out to be false,” he nevertheless encouraged his supporters to continue spreading them. “In short, don't let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots,” Vance posted on X. “Keep the cat memes flowing.”
In the days since the Springfield rumor went viral, Trump supporters and campaign aides have seized on it, posting AI-generated images depicting Trump as a champion of America's pets. The Arizona Republican Party unveiled a dozen billboards in the Phoenix area referencing the meme, urging Arizonans to “eat fewer kitties” and vote Republican.
These memes have become visual shorthand for Trump and his supporters' belief in the white supremacist Great Replacement theory. And rather than acknowledging the falsehood at the core of the rumor about Haitians in Springfield, Trump's supporters have suggested that the media's focus on fact-checking the viral lie obscures the “replacement” of Americans in Springfield with Haitian migrants.
Trump, the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, doesn't bother to disguise the baseless claims by linking them to broader local concerns about immigrants. Instead, he tries the most blatant version of the lie.