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 asserted that it wasn’t true.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs — the people that came in — they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said in response to a question about why he asked Republican legislators to vote against a bipartisan border security bill. After Trump finished his tirade, ABC News moderator David Muir clarified that Springfield’s city manager told ABC reports of migrants eating pets were false — but Trump repeated the lie. “People on television are saying, ‘My dog was taken and being used for food,’” Trump interjected.
Trump’s resistance to fact-checking shouldn’t come as a surprise by this point. In fact, his campaign has fully leaned into the claim, which took off on right-wing social media over the weekend has since been mainstreamed by the likes of Elon Musk and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
On Tuesday, vice presidential candidate JD Vance claimed his office had “received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield” regarding their pets being eaten, contradicting statements from Springfield police and city officials that they had received no such complaints. Though Vance acknowledged the possibility that “all these rumors will turn out to be false,” he nonetheless encouraged 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’s supporters and campaign surrogates have embraced it, posting AI-generated images depicting Trump as a champion of America’s pets. The Republican Party of Arizona unveiled 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 rather than acknowledging the falsehood at the heart 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 Republican Party’s standard-bearer, isn’t bothering to obfuscate the baseless claims by tying them to locals’ broader concerns about immigrants. Instead, he’s going for the baldest version of the lie.