Coming into Tuesday’s presidential debate, one question occupied my mind above all others: Is Trump going to say it? Is he going to accuse people of eating cats and dogs?
There’s no shame if you weren’t wondering the same thing. Knowing what the former president had planned required you to have spent the weeks before the debate ensconced in one of two niche circles: that of people who keep tabs on far-right influencers, hate groups, and racist memes; or that of Haitians, Haitian immigrants to the United States—and people who care about both. As it happens, I spend a lot of time in both circles, which put me in a somewhat unique position of understanding both and how the intersection of the two created one of the weirdest moments ever to occur in a presidential debate, as well as a situation that’s escalated into real dangers for innocent people.
To tell this story, we have to focus on two locations: Haiti, that Caribbean island nation, home to nearly 12 million largely impoverished people, and Springfield, Ohio, a small town nestled off Interstate 70 between Dayton and Columbus. In some ways—size, climate, language, terrain—the two places could not be more different. But they are intimately connected, especially in terms of economic history.
In the early to mid-twentieth century, Springfield was a bustling Rust Belt town, home to two major factories: the enormous Crowell-Collier publishing plant, which printed popular magazines like Collier’s and Woman’s Home Companion, and an even larger plant owned by International Harvester, the farm machinery giant. Those two plants employed the bulk of a population that would swell to more than 82,000 in the 1960s. In the decades leading up to this boom period, you wouldn’t mistake Springfield for a model of civic tranquility: A series of lynchings and attacks by white mobs on Black houses and buildings were recorded in the 1900s. In the 1920s the town became a stronghold of the revitalized Ku Klux Klan. But during the latter half of the century, Springfield was prosperous—and growing.
The good times didn’t last. The Crowell-Collier plant closed in 1957. Two decades later the International Harvester Company went into terminal decline, a victim of competition; attempts to wrestle away hard-won benefits from workers, resulting in a protracted labor strike; and ultimately the greed and shortsightedness of its owners. In 1983, Newsweek magazine devoted an entire special edition to Springfield, as a symbol of the decline of the American dream. The population would continue to decline for the next 40 years, falling to roughly 58,000 in the 2020 census—just 70 percent of its 1960 peak. (By contrast, the U.S. population nearly doubled in that time, from 179 million to over 331 million.) Manufacturing employment continued to plunge, falling from 13,000 in the mid-1990s to 6,000 on the pandemic’s eve.
In the 2010s, Springfield town officials and its Chamber of Commerce embarked on a revitalization plan to attract new businesses to town. It worked: New factories and businesses opened up, including a Japanese auto-parts manufacturer and a microchip manufacturer. There were also expanded operations at a Dole food-processing plant and metalworking plants, as well as the typical food-service, health care, and bureaucratic jobs that crop up to serve a new population.
But it wasn’t Ohioans who answered the call. Starting just before and then increasing in the wake of the pandemic, thousands of Haitians began moving to Springfield. They came slowly at first, then all at once. According to city officials, between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitian immigrants have moved to Springfield. If accurate, that would have nearly made up for the town’s population loss since 1970.
The Haitians who came were fleeing a series of disasters, both natural and man-made, many of them exacerbated or caused by the government and industries of the U.S. Like Springfield, Haiti had once been an industrial giant, producing at its eighteenth-century height most of the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe. But its enslaved workers rebelled, overthrowing French domination and declaring themselves the world’s first Black republic in 1804. Throughout the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and well into the twenty-first, the U.S. played a dominant role in roiling Haiti, brutally occupying the country from 1915 to 1934, bankrolling friendly dictators, and helping overthrow governments that did not play ball. Haitian leaders who refused to go along in full with plans for U.S. industrial development, especially low-wage assembly plants designed to create cheap clothes and other items for the U.S. market, were among those most likely to end up in the crosshairs of economic hit men, serving the interests of capital.
In 2010, a massive earthquake struck Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, killing 100,000 to 316,000 people. The international response, led by the U.S. military and a U.N. peacekeeping force, ignored reconstruction imperatives in favor of a misguided scheme to build more assembly plants far from the quake zone. (U.N. troops also introduced a devastating cholera epidemic that killed at least 10,000 people, mostly in the countryside.) Before and after, a series of devastating hurricanes, strengthened by climate change, ravaged a Haitian agriculture sector already weakened by drought and decades of U.S. and International Monetary Fund–imposed free trade schemes and competition from U.S. government–subsidized growers (many of whom still used International Harvester machines, often built in Springfield).
In 2021, the corrupt Haitian President Jovenel Moïse—whose party owed its power to U.S. interference in a post-quake election—was assassinated in his home above the Haitian capital. Ignoring a Haitian-led plan for a transitional government and new elections, the Biden administration stood by an incompetent caretaker prime minister for nearly three years. Paramilitary groups and street gangs filled the power vacuum as the U.S. put its diplomatic and financial muscle behind yet another international invasion—this one outsourced by both the U.S. and the U.N. to Kenya.
Understandably, almost any Haitian who could get away from this mess tried to do so. Some moved to Brazil and Chile, only to find that their host countries had also become inhospitable to dark-skinned foreigners, especially during the presidency of the pro-Trump Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro. By 2022, nearly 731,000 Haitian immigrants—many of whom had braved dangerous seas and crossed overland through drug cartel–controlled territories of Central America and Mexico—were living in the U.S.
The American right
wing has been obsessed with Haiti as a bogeyman—a literal bête noire—since
the Haitian Revolution. In the antebellum South, fears of Haitian
“contagion”—that Haitians would come and spur an armed freedom movement among
American slaves—motivated state militia crackdowns and white vigilante mobs
alike. (Indeed, various early attempts at self-emancipation, from Black-led
efforts to John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, were explicitly inspired by the
Haitian uprising.)
That future Haitians had fought alongside Continental forces during the American Revolution, and that the defeat of Napoleon’s forces by the Haitian General Jean-Jacques Dessalines paved the way for the Louisiana Purchase and the expansion of the U.S., rarely factored into American imaginations. Instead, Americans saw Haiti as a savage, alien place—home to a strange religion, vodou, and terrifying folk tales, particularly of the zombie, a Haitian creation that would be imported into U.S. pop culture during the early twentieth-century occupation.
These deeply ingrained attitudes, many of them unconscious and unexamined, were waiting for the Haitians in Springfield. At first, the new arrivals were welcomed, said Vilès Dorsainvil, the head of Springfield’s Haitian Community Help & Support Center—who himself moved from Port-au-Prince to the Ohio town in early 2021. The Biden administration’s immigration policy toward Haitians was schizophrenic: deporting tens of thousands to the U.S. policy–wracked country while granting hundreds of thousands of others temporary legal residency and providing an opportunity to work and contribute to the communities that hosted them.
“We were just here working peacefully and caring about our family and all of this. The community was OK. There was still a group of people in Springfield who saw the coming of the Haitians as a threat. But normally, generally, the community was so open with us,” he told me.
Then, in 2023, tragedy struck. A Haitian man—who had moved to Brazil in the aftermath of the earthquake, then came through Mexico in 2022—was driving through town when he crossed a median and plunged into a school bus. Several students were injured, and 11-year-old Aiden Clark was killed. School bus crashes are rare, but not unheard of nationally: From 2013 to 2022, there were 976 crashes in the U.S. involving school buses, killing a total of 1,082 people, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But instead of being treated as a referendum on traffic or bus safety—or a sign to spark an effort to make sure immigrants get the proper training and licensing to drive (the Haitian driver, who has been convicted of manslaughter and fourth-degree vehicular homicide, had an Ohio ID card but a Mexican driver’s license)—Clark’s death became a rallying point for nativists and xenophobes, inside Springfield and out.
Springfield’s Haitian community began to earn the attention of habitués of far-right message boards and anti-immigration spaces. The town’s name became a specific talking point for J.D. Vance, Ohio’s youngest senator and a protégé of the authoritarian internet billionaire Peter Thiel. In July, Vance brought up Springfield in a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, a far-right gathering obsessed, as the journalist Sarah Jones observed, with fertility, race, and the specter of a “post-white America.” Vance held up the Ohio town and its struggles to house and care for the new arrivals as evidence that immigration “has made our societies poor, less safe, less prosperous, and less advanced.” This was a classic white supremacist argument, as exemplified by the notoriously racist French novel The Camp of the Saints: If we take in those seeking refuge from poorer places—even places made poor by our own country’s heavy-handed policies and ruthless exploitation—we will become like them, if not be destroyed by them, ourselves.
Days later, Vance read a letter from Springfield’s city government about the strain on city resources into the record during a Senate Banking Committee hearing. Again, instead of using his office to, say, demand more federal resources to support towns like Springfield in welcoming their new arrivals and providing for their new workforces—a demand put forward by the town’s leaders themselves—he used the case as an opportunity for nativist talking points, asking Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell why immigration was the only solution to the ongoing U.S. labor shortage. (It’s part of the answer, but not the whole answer, Powell replied.) Trump named Vance his running mate shortly thereafter.
Vance’s focus on Springfield’s Haitian community catalyzed a reaction from the most extreme elements of the right. In August, the neo-Nazi faction Blood Tribe marched with guns and swastika flags through a jazz and blues festival in downtown Springfield, terrifying Haitian and other minority residents. The group’s leader appeared at a City Council meeting a few weeks later issuing a “word of warning”: “Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in, and with it, public frustration, threat and anger.”
Around the same time, a rumor appeared on a private Facebook group called “Springfield Ohio Crime and Information.” The post, from a Springfield resident named Erika Lee, claimed that a neighbor’s daughter’s friend’s cat had been taken by unnamed Haitians and “hung from a branch, like you’d do with a deer for butchering, & they were carving it up to eat.” Lee further claimed that “rangers & police” had told her that “they” had done the same with ducks and geese at a local park. (The neighbor later further changed her story, telling the blog NewsGuard that the alleged cat belonged to “an acquaintance of a friend” and that they, in turn, had heard the rumors about what happened to it from still someone else.)
Lee’s post was found and broadcast to the world by the X account @EndWokeness—a disinformation pipeline with 2.4 million followers that is often reposted by Elon Musk. (One online researcher has argued that the account is secretly run by alt-right Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec.)
Soon the rest of
the right-wing social web was adding to the noise. The Malaysia-based far-right
influencer Ian Miles Cheong posted a video of a Black woman arrested for
allegedly killing and eating a cat, falsely claiming she was Haitian and
implying it had happened in Springfield. (In fact the clearly disturbed woman
was born
in Ohio, with “no known connection to Haiti or any other foreign country,”
according to the Canton Repository. Canton, Ohio, where it happened, is some
170 miles away.)
A.I.-generated memes of cats, some being rescued by Donald Trump from savage-looking, shirtless Black men, proliferated. The day before the debate, Trump shared two on his Truth Social account: an A.I. image of him surrounded by cats and ducks on a private plane and another of rifle-toting cats dressed in paramilitary uniforms and black-and-red MAGA caps.
This sort of thing has a long pedigree. In the nineteenth century, American cartoonists and xenophobes spread rumors of Chinese immigrants eating rats and cats; in 1883, a customs collector deported a longtime U.S. resident who was trying to visit his fiancée in San Francisco, sending a poem to his attorney: “I’ve sent him back to China / where he can eat his mice.” In the U.K., 20 years ago, the trashy tabloid The Sun printed false rumors that asylum-seekers from Eastern Europe were poaching and eating the queen’s swans.
Food works as a wedge because it is a deeply personal cultural marker. Some Jews and Muslims may look down on those who eat pork. Vegetarians can look askance at people who eat any animals at all (and some vegans look in horror at them). Most Americans think of rabbits and guinea pigs as pets, but in Europe and parts of Latin America, they’re dinner—and often a gourmet one at that. It’s extremely rare, but some people in East Asia do eat dogs and cats. (I was once at a group dinner in rural southern China where stewed dog was served; I didn’t touch it for the same reason I don’t eat pig.) In nearly four years of living in Haiti and over a decade of traveling there, I heard jokes about cat eating—generally constructed on class and rural-versus-urban lines—but never saw or heard of anyone actually doing so. Still, stranger things have happened: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark frequently ate dog during their expedition to the Pacific, according to National Geographic. And until 2018, it was legal to commercially slaughter dogs and cats for human consumption almost everywhere in the U.S.
“We love dogs and eat cows not because dogs
and cows are fundamentally different—cows, like dogs, have feelings,
preferences, and consciousness—but because our perception of them is
different,” the social psychologist Melanie Joy wrote in a 2009 book. The
Springfield conspiracy theory combined these often unspoken taboos with another
piece of racist agitprop: the blood libel—except instead of medieval Christian
children, this time the supposed victims were household pets.
Vance again fanned the flames. On September 9, he boosted the pet-eating conspiracy in a post on X. Springfield police responded that Vance’s claim was false, saying “they have received no reports related to pets being stolen and eaten,” according to the Springfield News-Sun. A day later Vance came back with more: Repeating his claim that his office “has received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield,” he admitted that “it’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”
Then he significantly upped the ante, blaming “Haitian migrant[s] who had no right to be here” for the murder of a Springfield child, spreading diseases (including HIV), and raising rents so fast that “many Springfield families” were being made homeless. These too were lies: The HIV infection rate fell in Clark County, where Springfield is the county seat, between 2018 and 2022, the last year for which statistics were available, according to the Ohio Department of Health. And while housing prices have risen 9.3 percent in Springfield in the last year, according to the Zillow Home Values Index, that is in line with other nearby cities, including Dayton (7.4 percent) and Troy (6.5 percent), and has largely followed statewide trends going back to at least 2016. (It’s worth noting that rising home prices are also good for current homeowners, who make up nearly 70 percent of Clark County’s households, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.)
Trump was reportedly supposed to employ Vance’s gambit. In a postdebate write-up, The Guardian reported he had been prepped to bring up the “pet-eating” lie, then—when inevitably fact-checked by the moderators—use it to pivot into more insidious calumnies about the immigrants in Springfield. As it was, he proved too rattled by Kamala Harris and too undisciplined to pull it off.
But in the end, it doesn’t matter to the faithful. Baseless hatred of immigrants has been the driving force of Trump’s campaigns since he coasted down the golden escalator. They are the scapegoat for every problem that MAGA world encounters, be it real or phantasmic: housing prices, the labor market, health problems, bureaucratic dysfunction at state and federal agencies. Rounding up as many as 20 million people—the “largest mass deportation in American history,” as Trump continually promises—some of whom would by the sheer statistics have to be legal residents, if not U.S. citizens, is thus the panacea. And it will be violent: “a bloody story,” he recently vowed. And Haitians—Black immigrants, the inheritors of a fierce tradition of resistance against slavery and white supremacy—have often been a special target of Trump’s ire.
Following the debate, Nathan Clark, Aiden’s father, issued an impassioned plea to Trump, Vance, and other “morally bankrupt politicians,” as he called them, to stop using his son’s name in their efforts to “vomit” hate against immigrants. But Trump’s rhetoric—funny and weird as it was to most who saw it—threatens to unleash more unrest. One white supremacist group reacted to Clark’s statement by saying, “These parents should be executed.” On Thursday and Friday, Springfield’s City Hall, several schools, and the Bureau of Motor Vehicles were evacuated due to bomb threats. The city’s mayor called for calm, condemning, in an interview with The New York Times, “when national politicians, on the national stage, mischaracterize what is actually going on and misrepresent our community.”
Dorsainvil, the community leader, acknowledged that while Springfield’s Haitians are afraid, they are committed to staying. “Haitians are not here to leave anytime soon,” he said. “So we all have to work towards a peaceful community.” After enduring so much already just to get there, it’s hard to imagine them abandoning their new homes easily. Yet with Trump and the online right intentionally escalating tensions in a desperate bid to retake power over the nation, there is almost certainly another challenging road ahead.
