Ohio Mayor Trashes Trump’s Xenophobic Migrant Conspiracy

Springfield, Ohio, Mayor Rob Rue is setting the record straight after his town’s city hall was evacuated due to a bomb threat.

Rue spoke with CNN’s Laura Coates Thursday night to hit back at the outlandish claims that Haitian immigrants had begun eating their neighbors’ pets. He asserted that while it had been “difficult” to adjust to the influx of new residents, the city was certainly not “imploding” on itself.

“Unfortunately, right now we have to focus on making sure this rhetoric is dispelled, that these rumors are just—they’re just not true. You know, Springfield is a beautiful place and your pets are safe in Springfield,” Rue said, laughing slightly at how insane it all sounded.

Coates played a clip of Donald Trump giving a speech in Arizona earlier Thursday, during which the former president claimed that Haitian immigrants had descended upon Springfield, “destroying their entire way of life.” Trump again claimed that migrants were snatching geese from local parks and “even walking off with their pets.”

Coates sighed, exasperated, while Rue shook his head. “If you could speak to the former president what would you tell him?” Coates asked.

“We need help, not hate,” Rue repeated. He criticized lawmakers who carelessly cast the city of Springfield in a negative light.

“We have a beautiful city, and we need, we need the national stage to pay attention to what their words are doing to cities like ours,” Rue added. “We don’t need this pushback that is hurting our citizens and hurting our community—I would say that to anybody who would take a mic and say those things.”

Donald Trump flubbed the last debate. His allies know it, his fundraisers know it—but that doesn’t mean they’re willing to admit it.

On Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee announced that he had decided not to debate Vice President Kamala Harris for a second time, writing in a lengthy rant on Truth Social that “THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” (Apparently he’s counting his debate against Joe Biden.)

But less than 24 hours after the major reversal, Trump’s team was already working to explain away why the country would be getting less of their candidate.

“I admire President Trump for not debating her again,” South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem told Fox News. “He is recognizing the fact that it is a waste of time, that she is not going to say what she truly believes, she’s not going to be truthful with the American people, and he’s going to take his argument directly to families and to people that live in this country that are impacted by her policies.”

In an interview with CNN, former J.D. Vance Senate staffer Ryan Girdusky argued that Trump was vindicated in his decision on the basis that the vice president is “the least vetted candidate” in U.S. history.

Former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard touted a stale campaign line, telling Fox News that the debate was fundamentally flawed because of the presence of two ABC moderators.

“President Trump went into a debate where it was three versus one. It was completely biased,” Gabbard said. “Why would he walk into that again?”

(In reality, ABC actually allowed Trump to speak for six minutes longer than his Democratic opponent over the duration of the debate.)

But Republican donors saw through the act. Behind the scenes of the political theater, conservative fundraisers saw Trump’s reversal as a candidate left with no other options following a “disaster” debate performance.

“I think a lot of the donors, or at least the ones that I was texting with the night of the debate, were not exactly thrilled about how that debate went down,” GOP fundraiser Noelle Nikpour told Fox News Thursday. “What I will tell you, I do think it’s smart for Donald Trump not to do the debate. I think that that was a good decision with the campaign, and I’ll tell you why. Because depending on when that debate will be scheduled, and if he has another repeat performance like he did, I don’t know if the campaign can recover that quickly. I don’t think they have enough time to recover from that.”

CNN made a video comparing Donald Trump’s debate answers against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and his answers from Tuesday’s debate with Kamala Harris eight years later, and there’s a considerable difference in how the Republican presidential nominee spoke and conducted himself.

The video comparison, aired on Thursday night, shows how Trump would stay on topic and give coherent answers in 2016. In contrast, Trump earlier this week went off on tangents, rambling and avoiding specific ideas.

In particular, on immigration, 2016 Trump was able to hammer home his points about building a wall and stopping drugs from entering the country. On Tuesday, Trump ranted about the false rumor of Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio and a disproven story about a Venezuelan gang taking over an apartment complex in Colorado.

Trump’s performance during this week’s debate was widely seen as poor, as Harris was able to bait him into ranting about personal grievances, going against the game plan made by his advisers. At one point, he tried to combine right-wing talking points on transgender people, migrants, and criminals, and he also gave a word-salad answer about Afghanistan policy,

It’s a stark example of the convicted felon’s cognitive decline, which has become more pronounced during the current presidential campaign. Earlier this month, Trump appeared to forget at a Fox News town hall whether he was running against Harris or President Biden. A few weeks before that, he went on a weird rant about bacon and wind power and accidentally praised Harris’s record. As the 2024 presidential campaign enters its home stretch, it’s becoming more and more apparent to the public that Trump’s mind has lost a step.

The judge in Donald Trump’s Georgia election interference case tossed three of the charges, including two against the former president, Thursday. 

In his ruling, Judge Scott McAfee dismissed three counts related to filing false documents, finding that bringing such charges was outside Georgia’s jurisdiction. Instead, he determined they belonged in federal court. 

“Because Counts 14, 15, and 27 lie beyond this State’s jurisdiction and must be quashed, the Defendants’ motions to dismiss the indictment under the Supremacy Clause are granted in part,” McAfee wrote.

The three counts that were dismissed were criminal attempt to commit filing false documents, conspiracy to commit filing false documents, and filing false documents. Trump had been indicted on the latter two of those three counts.

The motion to dismiss the charges was brought by two of Trump’s co-defendants, John Eastman and Shawn Still, who argued that the charges were in violation of the supremacy clause. 

McAfee separately declined a motion to toss the indictment’s racketeering charge. He wrote that the charge remained “facially sound and constitutionally sufficient as alleged.”

Still, the case against Trump, which has been stalled for months, has only continued to narrow. McAfee previously threw out six counts in March, three of which were against Trump. The former president is still facing eight of his original 13 counts.  

Donald Trump’s meager attempt to prove a group of immigrants had begun dining on their neighbors’ pets has predictably fallen apart.

After Trump was brutally fact-checked during Tuesday’s presidential debate when he tried to baselessly claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating local pets, the former president took to Truth Social to provide his own so-called proof.

What he was able to provide were blurry screenshots of one call report from the Clark County Communications Center, which had been obtained by the right-wing opinion blog The Federalist. The report detailed a call from August 26, during which a caller claimed 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 Haitian Creole,” according to the report. The identifying information on the report had been removed.

The report was meant to justify Trump’s extreme claims on national television, but a closer examination of the facts—and testimony from the caller—shows that the right-wing hysterics are over basically nothing.

Steven Monacelli, a freelance investigative reporter for The Texas Observer, decided to follow up on the report with the Clark County sheriff’s office.

A clerk for the sheriff’s office passed along the original report, as well as a recording of the call. “At this time we have not found any other record concerning Haittians [sic] harvesting geese. At this time we have not found any record of Hattians eating pets,” the clerk wrote in an email, which Monacelli posted to X.

Monacelli also spoke with the caller, whom he identified simply as “Toby” to protect his privacy. Monacelli detailed what he learned in a series of posts on X.

Toby explained he was simply trying to report what was potentially illegal goose hunting, which requires a permit outside of goose-hunting season, which starts in September. Toby also pointed out that a viral photo of a man walking down the street holding a goose, which many on the right have cited when pushing this conspiracy, was from Columbus, Ohio, not Springfield.

“I’m not trying to really be put on the news, famous or anything, I was just a citizen on his way to his orientation, and just happened to see that,” Toby explained. “I just made a report, that’s literally all I did.”

When asked whether he had seen anything similar since making his initial report in August, Toby said, “No I haven’t.”

Monacelli asked what Toby thought about the right-wing claims that there had been widespread pet abductions, to which Toby replied he “hadn’t seen any pictures, or anything like that myself. But then again, I’m not on social media.”