Think that Trump’s false claim about pet-eating Haitians is hurting him? Think again!

Andres Oppenheimer

It has been more than a week since Republican candidate Donald Trump repeated the false rumor that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating Americans’ pets, and the conventional wisdom is that he has hurt himself politically by telling such a racially-tinged lie. But perhaps it’s working for him.

The fact that both Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have repeated the dog-and-cat-eating Haitians claim several times since the former president echoed it at the Sept. 10 presidential debate makes me think that they are spreading it purposely, even if they know it’s untrue.

Their fake news claims about Haitian immigrants helps them draw national attention on their dubious claim that America “is being destroyed” by undocumented immigrants. Now that inflation is going down and the U.S. stock market is at its record high, they need to keep the narrative of an immigrant invasion alive. It’s the biggest issue they have to campaign on.

It doesn’t seem to matter to them that the pet-eating migrants story has been debunked by the Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, and by city and police authorities in Springfield, the town where the rumor originated. And it doesn’t seem to matter to them that amplifying a racist conspiracy theory has already led to bomb threats to Springfield legal immigrants and residents.

Here’s how the Trump-Vance fake news strategy has worked for them:

First, Trump repeated the false claim at the presidential debate in front of 67 million people, amplifying a falsehood that had already been spread by Vance and X owner Elon Musk.

Then, when reporters descended on Springfield to find out whether the story was true, Springfield’s mayor Rob Rue, also a Republican, denied that Haitian immigrants were eating pets, or geese and ducks from public parks. At the same time, Rue emphasized that the massive influx of immigrants over the past three years has caused serious problems such as strains on the city’s infrastructure and reckless driving accidents, which was exactly the message that Trump and Vance wanted to get across.

Vance has pretty much admitted that Trump and he are consciously spreading fake news about Haitians eating pets for their own political gain.

Vance told CNN on Sept. 15 that “the American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.” He added, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

As a result, Trump gets the country to focus attention on his other wild claims that undocumented migrants are bringing crime to America, and that they are allegedly taking jobs away from U.S.-born Hispanic and African Americans. Both claims are false, according to FBI statistics and U.S. Chamber of Commerce studies, respectively.

While it is true that the flow of undocumented migrants rose to record highs in 2023, it has plummeted this year since the Biden Administration enforced new restrictions on refugees. Many migrants have been bused to northern U.S. states by the Republican governors of Texas and Florida, creating large concentration of immigrant communities in some cities.

I’m sorry, but demonizing Haitian immigrants — many of whom, it now turns out, were legally in the United States — with false conspiracy theories is not fair game in any democracy. It’s a dangerous game that can easily lead to violence against innocent people who have come to this country to make a living, and do jobs that most Americans don’t want to do.

The fact that Trump and Vance have repeated the racist lie over and over in recent days, long after it was debunked by Ohio’s own Republican authorities, is shameful. They are putting into practice the old propaganda rule used by rightist and leftist populist demagogues: “Repeat a lie over and over, and people will eventually come to believe it.”