Trump Shares Bonkers “Proof” of Debunked Migrants Conspiracy Theory

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have decided to go all in on the outlandish conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Did you hear that sound? That was the American public discourse hitting rock bottom, and shattering into one million pieces.

During the presidential debate Tuesday night, Trump elevated a blatantly racist and thoroughly unsubstantiated rumor that individuals in a community of 15,000 Haitian immigrants had begun eating house pets.

“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 who live there,” Trump claimed while Kamala Harris laughed at him. “And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”

When ABC News moderator David Muir fact-checked him with a statement from Springfield’s City Manager Ryan Heck, who’d said they’d received “no credible reports” of any such activity, Trump fired back that it had to be true because he’d “seen it on television!”

Well, there you go.

Apparently, even Trump knew that wasn’t going to fly in terms of proof, so after the debate, he took to Truth Social in the early hours of the morning to post his own so-called evidence.

Trump posted what appeared to be a call report by the Clark County Communications Center, made on August 26, in which a caller alleged that they had seen a group of people walking down the street carrying geese. The caller “said he could tell they were Haitian because he was within earshot of them to hear them speaking Creole,” according to the report.

Trump also reposted audio of the call, which was obtained by The Federalist, a right-wing opinion blog. In the New York Post-ian world into which Trump has dragged us, it seems a police call is presented as tantamount to a conviction—and a wild goose is tantamount to a house pet.

Trump also posted the video that spurred the right-wing hysterics—of a woman from Canton, Ohio, who allegedly ate a cat. Not only is there no indication that the woman is a Haitian immigrant, but she is a U.S. citizen.

Meanwhile, J.D. Vance pushed back at a question from NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor that implied that he had helped spread the insidious right-wing rumor, which could possibly endanger Haitian immigrants. Earlier that day, he’d posted a rant about how it didn’t really matter if the rumors about pet-eating were actually true.

“No one spread false claims,” Vance said, as he reared up to spread more false claims.

“What they’ve said is that a small migrant community” has “caused a lot of problems,” Vance explained.

“It’s led to higher rates of communicable diseases, that’s a verifiable fact.” It is verifiable—but certainly not verified. In fact, on Tuesday, Ohio’s Department of Health director Bruce Vanderhoff said that Springfield has “not seen a measurable, discernible increase in vaccine preventable illness.”

“It’s led to animals disappearing,” Vance continued, citing reports from “many” of his constituents. He claimed that the city manager “isn’t fully in touch with what’s going on on the ground there,” implying that, somehow, he personally was.

Trump and Vance have chosen to double down on these distinctly unproven claims about a group of vulnerable people, because that is precisely what they have been doing for the entirety of their campaign. At his rallies, Trump has repeatedly cited instances of “migrant crime” ripped right from the pages of tabloids in an attempt to motivate voters to support his fascist plan for mass deportations.

Vance said his constituents reported seeing “abductions with their own eyes.” Earlier that day, Vance had said it was entirely possible that the rumors would “turn out to be false.” With his blatant flip-flopping, it’s clear that Vance doesn’t actually care whether the rumors are true.

“What do I think is a bigger problem: insulting 20,000 people or the fact that my constituents can’t live a good life because Kamala Harris opened the border? I think it’s Kamala Harris needs to do her job, and make people happier and healthier in this country,” Vance said Tuesday night before walking off.

After Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris Tuesday night, the worst person you know decided to weigh in.

Elon Musk had disgusting things to say after reading Swift’s Instagram post supporting Harris for president. “Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life,” wrote Musk on X. Talk about weird.

Musk’s response is in reference to Swift’s sign-off in her post, where she self-identified as a “childless cat lady,” a dig at J.D. Vance’s continuous attacks on single women. In her Instagram photo, the pop star is holding one of her three cats, Benjamin Button. Swift also criticized Donald Trump for using A.I.-generated images of her to make it appear that she was supporting him.

Though it’s not clear exactly what bump Swift’s endorsement might give Harris, clearly it was big enough to trigger the billionaire funding Trump’s ground campaign.

Musk is known for threatening to spread his seed as part of the pro-natalist movement and regularly stokes fear about birth rates. But before Musk threatens to impregnate another female musician, maybe he should focus on his own problems, like winning his custody battle with former girlfriend Grimes over three of his 12 known children.

After falling short in his debate with Kamala Harris Tuesday night, Donald Trump is lashing out at his favorite network.

Speaking on Fox News Wednesday morning, Trump told Fox & Friends that he would prefer Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters, or Laura Ingraham to moderate any future debate, saying that Watters “was fantastic last night, what he said.”

“Jesse really got it. Jesse said that Trump won that debate. We won that debate by a lot. No, I wouldn’t want Martha involved. But I would take some others, yeah,” Trump said, arguing that Bret Baier and Martha McCallum aren’t qualified to moderate.

The small amount of praise that Trump received Tuesday night came from Hannity and Watters. Hannity said that the biggest loser in the debate was ABC, while Watters, trying to spin the debate in favor of the former president, said that “all of the memorable lines were from Donald Trump.”

Trump may not be willing to admit it, but he probably knows that his debate performance was a disaster. Harris’s strategy Tuesday night was to bait Trump into being himself and shooting his mouth off, and she succeeded, getting him to sound like right-wing mad libs at times. He went on a long-winded, inaccurate rant about Afghanistan, claimed that he had “concepts of a plan” on health care, and gave a disturbing answer about January 6.

Getting friendlier moderators may be the only way Trump could look better in a future debate. But it’s a very long shot that Kamala Harris would agree to a debate with his favorite anchors, as she already rejected a Fox News debate that Trump wanted to have on September 4. Plus, there’s the well-known fact that the conservative network is biased toward Trump and wants him to win. If Trump wants another debate, he’s going to have to go to a network that his supporters don’t run. Is he desperate enough to take the risk of being trounced again?

Donald Trump is trying to make it sound like Kamala Harris is creating transgender people from scratch, like his beloved “late great Hannibal Lecter.”

“Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” said Trump during the debate on Tuesday, sounding like your weird estranged grandfather at Christmas dinner.

The line quickly went viral for its truly wild combination of words in successive order.

If we want to give Trump a modicum of the benefit of the doubt, which it’s not really clear he deserves, the Republican nominee may have been referring to a recently uncovered 2019 American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire.

In the survey, Harris was asked if she would use “executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care—including those in prison and immigration detention—will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care.”

Harris replied, “Yes.”

But Harris, in her support for gender-affirming surgery several years ago, certainly isn’t making that a central part of her platform in 2024. 

Fearmongering about trans people and migrants is nothing new for Trump, though. At a Moms for Liberty conference earlier this month, Trump went on a similar rant when he alleged that public schools will provide surgery to a transgender minor without parental consent. “Think of it; your kid goes to school, and he comes home a few days later with an operation,” Trump said. “The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.” There is no evidence that any schools do such a thing, even with parental permission. However, that didn’t stop Moms for Liberty from thanking Trump for the lie.

But Trump never let the truth get in his way before.

During Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump had a long-winded, barely coherent answer about his administration’s Afghanistan policy, where the U.S. was negotiating with the Taliban.

Trump claimed that the Taliban was killing a lot of U.S. soldiers with snipers, and that he spoke to “Abdul,” who he claimed was and is the head of the Taliban, warning him against continuing those murders. Trump said that “Abdul” asked, “Why do you send me a picture of my house?”

Trump, by his own account, purportedly responded, “You’re going to have to figure that out, Abdul,” and said that for 18 months, no U.S. soldiers were killed.

In reality, almost none of this is true. The head of the Taliban since 2016 has been a cleric named Hibatullah Akhundzada, although one of the Taliban’s negotiators with the United States was Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of Akhundzada’s deputies. A former Wall Street Journal reporter also notes that the Taliban didn’t use snipers often and was more effective at killing people with IEDs.

Nor did Trump oversee an 18-month stretch where no U.S. soldiers were killed. There was one such stretch where no U.S. service members were killed in combat, but it happened from March 2020 to August 2021, half of which was during Joe Biden’s presidency.

Last month, Trump’s former national security adviser, General H.R. McMaster, told CNN that Trump’s negotiations with the Taliban resulted in the U.S. forcing the Afghan government to release 5,000 members of the extremist organization, a fact that Kamala Harris was only too happy to point out during the debate in her takedown of his word salad.

Trump tried to claim Tuesday night that if he were president during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, it would have gone a lot differently and favorably, with no U.S. casualties. In reality, it would have likely gone as badly, if not worse, and Trump would have had the benefit of a compliant right-wing media backing him to the hilt.