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In recent days, the Republican presidential ticket has decided to promote incendiary lies about a roughly 15,000-person immigrant community in one small Ohio city.
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance introduced this line of messaging Monday, when he declared that “Haitian illegal immigrants” are “causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio,” and that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”
Every aspect of this claim was untrue. The Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio, consists overwhelmingly (if not entirely) of legal US residents. And there is no evidence whatsoever that any pets have recently been abducted in Springfield, let alone ingested; local police and authorities say they’ve received no reports of such animal abuse.
Nevertheless, other GOP senators and Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee immediately amplified Vance’s claim. Subsequently, the GOP vice presidential candidate told his followers on X that in Springfield, “a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.”
This was also untrue. Vance was referring to the death of 11-year-old Aiden Clark (which the Trump campaign had previously publicized). But Clark was not murdered. Rather, he died in a car crash in which a Haitian immigrant who had no driver’s license crashed into a school bus. Clark’s father has begged the Trump campaign to stop exploiting his son’s death to spread hate.
Then, at Tuesday’s presidential debate — on the largest political stage of this campaign season — former President Donald Trump reiterated his running-mate’s falsehoods, saying, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
There is nothing new about Trump fomenting xenophobia for political gain. The Republican has been agitating for Muslim bans and mass deportation for nearly a decade. Yet the GOP ticket’s libelous campaign against the Haitian community of Springfield is distinctly pernicious.
Trump’s demonization of entire categories of immigrants is dangerous. But when he advocated for a Muslim ban during his first presidential run, he did not direct his followers’ anxiety and loathing toward worshippers at one particular mosque or community.
With this new smear, Trump and his running mate are fomenting hatred for a discrete group of 15,000 people in one location. This dramatically increases the risk that their campaign of dehumanization will lead to acts of violence. And indeed, on both Thursday and Friday, Springfield was forced to shutter its public schools and municipal buildings in response to bomb threats. Meanwhile, a Haitian community center in the city is getting threatening calls and Haitian families are keeping their kids home out of fear for their safety.
The juxtaposition between the victimization of such innocents, and Republicans’ gleeful dissemination of AI-generated cats that are purportedly imperiled by the existence of Springfield’s Haitians, is morally nauseating, at least to any person who believes in the equal dignity of all human life. And the fact that Vance has implored his social media followers to keep spreading such libelous memes, at the expense of his own constituents’ safety, is similarly disgraceful.
The ugliness is the point
Yet all this raises the question: Why do Trump and Vance believe it is in their interest to advertise such moral bankruptcy and recklessness?
The Republican ticket’s foray into inciting ethnic hatred in a single municipality cannot be understood as unthinking or impulsive. Sure, Trump routinely makes demagogic statements that are inspired less by political calculation than whatever he happened to just witness on Fox News.
But Vance is nothing if not a ruthless and self-disciplined striver. One does not rise from his humble origins to Yale Law School without some ability to filter one’s thoughts or rationally pursue one’s goals. And a person capable of likening Trump to an opiate in 2016, and then becoming an apologist for his insurrection just a few years later, when that posture became politically useful, is plainly willing to do most anything in a calculated bid for power.
Vance did not smear the Haitian community of Springfield just once. He chose to double and triple down on that smear, reiterating it again in an X post on Friday morning, in which he blamed Haitian immigrants for bringing “communicable diseases” to Ohio (without presenting any evidence to substantiate that timeless nativist trope).
So why would a ticket with strong incentives to project moderation and reassure swing voters choose to direct hatred against a small community, even after their words have already yielded bomb threats?
I suspect the ugliness is the point.
Republicans have a large advantage on the issue of immigration. In the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll of the likely electorate, voters favored Trump over Kamala Harris on immigration by a 53 to 43 percent margin. That finding is consistent with other national and battleground state polls.
Surveys of Americans’ views on immigration policy tell a similar story. In Gallup’s polling, for the first time in 20 years, a majority of Americans say they want immigration decreased, while just 16 percent say they want it increased. A recent Axios/The Harris Poll survey found a majority of voters voicing support for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
If voters choose to back the candidate who best represents their perspective on immigration, Trump will win in a landslide. From this, it follows that the more that voters are thinking about immigration come Election Day, the better off Trump and Vance will be.
Getting the media to focus on any given issue or storyline over others is not easy. Yet precisely because Vance’s attack on Haitian immigrants in Springfield is so incendiary, it has generated great quantities of media coverage.
What’s more, because Trump and Vance’s behavior is so repugnant to liberal values, it has provoked Democratic politicians and commentators into advertising their sympathy for immigrants and concern for their welfare.
The calculation here is that it could nudge a swing voter rightward, even if they find Vance’s conduct off-putting. That voter can disapprove of Vance’s cat memes and still glean from the conversation around them that Republicans are the party that’s harsher on immigration.
The Republican ticket, if this reading is correct, is betting that voters are looking for someone who can get an ugly job done. The health of our republic, and the safety of its most vulnerable residents, depends on this being a mistake.
