Well, JD Vance said the quiet part out loud again, y’all…
The craziest moment in the presidential debate last week was undoubtedly when Donald Trump — in an attempt to rile people up about immigrants — spouted seemingly out of nowhere:
“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.”
We just love how right-wingers started claiming Kamala Harris only won the debate because she cheated by getting the questions or used a secret earpiece. As if that could make Trump say something so nonsensical and awful.
As he was missing key details, he sounded even more unhinged than the racist conspiracy theory that had been going around. Essentially it was an oldie but a baddie: “The immigrants are so weird and subhuman that they’re eating the cute animals we keep as pets. And they’re so evil they’re just stealing them from your homes. Fear them, hate them.” In this specific case, the group being targeted were an influx of Haitian immigrants in Ohio — immigrants who had come there legally, mind you.
As ridiculous as this all sounds, you have to remember how much Trump’s cult-like base listen to every word he says — and how xenophobic and prone to violence they already are. Since Trump amplified the pet-eating story last week, there have been multiple bomb and mass shooting threats that caused the closure of several college campuses, elementary schools, hospitals, and other municipal buildings on Thursday, Friday, and Monday. Wittenberg University said in a statement that the threat to their campus specifically targeted “members of the Haitian community.” Early Sunday morning a fire destroyed an apartment building, injuring two. At the same time, the neo-Nazi Proud Boys group arrived in town on Saturday to march. The town is a damned powder keg.
Silly words from Trump. But serious consequences in the real world.
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And here’s the insane thing. We KNOW none of Trump’s pet-eating crap is true. Skipping right past the fact it’s a really hackneyed vilification of foreigners, the local officials all say it isn’t true, that there’s “no credible evidence” of any such incidents. Even the Republican governor is trying to defend the Haitian community.
Not only that, a woman who was among the first to spread the rumor has come forward and admitted it was a lie, that she never had any evidence it really happened. She’s apologizing now, saying she didn’t expect it to get this out of hand.
You know who isn’t apologizing? JD Vance. The faux hillbilly Yale grad went on CNN Sunday and was confronted by Dana Bash about the fact there’s no evidence of immigrants eating people’s pets — and yet he was the first major political figure to push the rumor. Not only that, he and Trump have continued to say it all week! Well, here’s what Vance had to say to that:
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. 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.”
Vance claims he and Trump have to “create stories” about migrants eating cats and dogs “so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.”
There is then some awkward dead air as Bash tries to highlight the absurdity of what he just said pic.twitter.com/IN26ZGYsvE
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 15, 2024
Wow. He just said it. “If I have to create stories…” He’s lying about it, and he’s proud of lying about it. Why? Because it directs attention to… the real problem?
Let’s try to follow that logic for a moment. He’s saying he only spread a false accusation against a group of foreigners to draw attention to… the horrible things they weren’t really doing?? WTF sense does that make?
We honestly can’t believe he admitted to lying, but as we’ve said before, he’s really really bad at being a politician, so. Yeah.
They’re not deluded. They’re aware what they’re saying is a lie, and a blatantly racist one, designed to whip up anger at the thousands of legal (yes, LEGAL!!!) immigrants they plan to deport en masse. As Trump told reporters at his press conference in Southern California on Friday:
“We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country. And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora.”
Whenever we think we couldn’t be more disgusted, they find a new low. See the full interview (below):
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