New reporting today from NBC News reveals Donald Trump’s unhinged and racist rants on debate night about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were inspired by neo-Nazis.
On Tuesday night, Trump shocked the nation by yelling debunked conspiracies that Haitian immigrants were stealing pets from homes in Springfield and eating them. Trump doubled down on his claims in the spin room and at his rally two days later in Tucson, Arizona, were he claimed immigrants were “taking the geese” from local parks.
Despite Trump’s lengthy record of attacking foreign countries like Haiti and calling them “shitholes,” many were left wondering why the Republican nominee for president would make such outlandish claims.
According to NBC News, the racist lie was started by the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe and was promoted by right-wing conspiracy theorists like Laura Loomer, who traveled with Trump to the debate this week.
Learn more about how Trump’s racist debate rant made it to the stage:
- Around 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, tens of millions of television viewers watched as Donald Trump spread an unsubstantiated and racially charged rumor running wild online.
- “In Springfield they’re eating dogs,” the former president said, referring to an Ohio city dealing with an influx of Haitian immigrants. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating … the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
- The extraordinary moment — the airing of a claim worthy of a chain email while participating in a prime-time presidential debate — probably puzzled most of the 67.1 million people tuned in for Trump’s clash with Vice President Kamala Harris. But the rumor, which has been criticized as perpetuating racist tropes, was already thriving in right-wing corners of the internet and being amplified by those close to Trump, including his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.
- No one involved in Trump’s debate preparations or in a position to speak for his campaign agreed to discuss the strategy on the record or answer questions about how it mutated from a fringe obsession to a debate stage sound bite.
- “Just, suffice to say, he was aware of it. He decided to bring it up,” Tim Murtaugh, a senior Trump adviser, told NBC News. “Now it’s a major story. We would otherwise probably not be talking about immigration if not for that.”
- While the fallout has been a combination of bafflement and outrage, the makings of the moment are rooted in grievances that have long defined and animated Trump and his followers — and on the platforms where those grievances blossom.
- Trump, who launched his first presidential campaign with a speech that broadly characterized Mexican immigrants as dangerous criminals, has kept immigration and border security issues central to his third White House bid.
- Meanwhile, the right-wing social media ecosystem that rose up around his 2016 run has calcified as an additive and disruptive force: Trump now has his own social media network, Truth Social, and ally Elon Musk controls X, formerly Twitter. Vance in particular has reveled in fighting the culture wars and other right-wing causes online and often assumes a trolling posture on X while acting as a filter of information between the fringe and the mainstream.
- Vance and others close to Trump have argued that, even if the claims are false, they have served a purpose by pushing the Springfield story into the spotlight.
- “The media didn’t care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats, and that speaks to the media’s failure to care about what’s going on in these communities,” Vance told CNN after Tuesday’s debate. “If we have to meme about it to get the media to care, we’re going to keep on doing it, because the media could, should, care about what’s going on.”
- The issue in Springfield, about 45 miles from Columbus in southwest Ohio, involves thousands of Haitian immigrants who have settled in the city in recent years, many of them there legally under federal programs after having fled violence and political turmoil. Residents and political leaders, including Vance, have for months raised economic and public safety concerns, asserting that an influx of as many as 20,000 immigrants to a city that in 2020 counted a population of 59,000 has strained resources.
- Claims about pets being abducted, slaughtered and eaten are more recent.
- Blood Tribe, a national neo-Nazi group, was among the early purveyors of the rumor in August, posting about it on Gab and Telegram, social networks popular with extremists. While the group’s leader has taken credit for Trump’s indulgence of the claims, Blood Tribe’s reach is unknown; its accounts on those sites have fewer than 1,000 followers.
- Some Blood Tribe members also planned a couple of events in the real world, like a small Aug. 10 march in Springfield protesting Haitian immigration and an appearance at a city commission meeting later that month.
- The rumor soon crossed over to mainstream social media, like Facebook and X. NewsGuard, a firm that monitors misinformation, traced the origins to an undated post from a private Facebook group that was shared in a screenshot posted to X on Sept. 5.
- “Remember when my hometown of Springfield Ohio was all over National news for the Haitians?” the user wrote. “I said all the ducks were disappearing from our parks? Well, now it’s your pets.”
- Around that time, other social media posts about the rumor sprouted and went viral, some of them based in part on residents’ comments at public hearings. On Sept. 6, there were 1,100 posts on X mentioning Haitians, migrants or immigrants eating pets, cats, dogs and geese, according to PeakMetrics, a research company. The next day there were 9,100 — a 720% increase.
- The number of posts spiked again Monday, to 47,000, when Vance advanced the rumor on X.
- “Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio,” Vance wrote, referring to remarks he had made at a Senate hearing. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”
- Vance, as he noted in his post, had been raising the issue for months, but in less provocative terms.
- “Now go to Springfield, go to Clark County, Ohio, and ask the people there whether they have been enriched by 20,000 newcomers in four years,” he said in early July, before Trump selected him as his running mate, at NatCon, a right-wing nationalist conference. “Housing is through the roof. People, middle-class people in Springfield who have lived there sometimes for generations cannot afford a place to live.”
- Soon after Vance’s post Monday, Springfield police officials told the Springfield News-Sun — and, later, NBC News and other national media — that they had received no credible reports of such incidents. Vance issued a follow-up post the next day, writing that his office had received reports of “pets or local wildlife” being “abducted by Haitian migrants.”
- “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false,” he added.
- But by that point, Trump was fully on board with them. At 5:19 p.m. Tuesday, less than four hours before his debate with Harris, Trump posted to Truth Social a meme showing cats armed for war and wearing MAGA hats. Fifteen minutes later, he shared a second meme depicting him surrounded by cats and ducks.
- Then came the debate. When moderator David Muir of ABC News asked about his opposition to a bipartisan border bill, a distracted Trump first insisted on responding to a jab Harris had landed about people leaving his campaign rallies early. His meandering answer eventually turned to Springfield, where, he said, “they’re eating dogs … and cats.”
- Those looking for someone to blame offered several suspects. Laura Loomer, a right-wing political activist and conspiracy theorist who had been posting about the rumor, traveled with Trump to the debate Tuesday.
- Others focused their suspicions on Vance, given how he had forced the issue into the spotlight.
- Another source close to Trump’s campaign said Trump and Vance did not discuss the Springfield issue ahead of the debate.
- The blame, this person said, solely rests with Trump. “You don’t prep Donald Trump,” the ally added. “You can make suggestions.”
Published: Sep 13, 2024 | Last Modified: Sep 17, 2024