Springfield’s GOP Mayor Issues Stark Warning to Trump After His Lies

The mayor of Springfield, Ohio, doesn’t want Donald Trump anywhere near the town.

At a news conference Tuesday, Mayor Rob Rue said that a visit from the former president and convicted felon would be too much for local authorities to handle as they grapple with the fallout from false rumors about Haitian immigrants capturing and eatings pets, ducks, and geese.

“It would be an extreme strain on our resources. So it’d be fine with me if they decided not to make that visit,” Mayor Rob Rue said, commenting on a report that Trump was planning to visit the town in the near future. Even Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, who visited Springfield Tuesday, said that while a campaign visit from a former president is “generally very, very welcomed,” he had misgivings about a possible Trump visit.

“I have to state the reality, though, that resources are really, really stretched here,” DeWine said. Neither Trump nor his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, have spoken to DeWine about visiting the town, he said.

Trump and Vance have continued to defend their part in spreading and amplifying the conspiracy, with the Republican vice presidential nominee even admitting that he was using the story for political purposes. Trump brought up the story in last week’s presidential debate and refused to back down, even when fact-checked by ABC News moderators.

Responding to Trump’s words at the debate, Rue warned last week that “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.”

Indeed, the rhetoric from the right, led by the former president and his running mate, has led to schools, government buildings, hospitals, and even a local festival receiving violent threats. What Springfield needs is solution and calm, not more political opportunism at the expense of an innocent populace.

Donald Trump may want to take one more geography lesson before he decides to shutter the Department of Education.

During a Fox News town hall in Flint, Michigan, on Tuesday, the Republican presidential nominee routinely mixed up two places that could not be more different: Alaska and Afghanistan.

While speaking about domestic oil reserves and the potential for U.S. energy independence, Trump incorrectly claimed that “we have Bagram” in Alaska—which is, actually, a military base in Afghanistan.

“We were energy independent, we were soon going to be energy dominant, and we would’ve been now having so much money coming out of the energy. We just have the best,” Trump said. “We have Bagram in Alaska. They say it might be as big, might be bigger than, all of Saudi Arabia. I got it approved. Ronald Reagan couldn’t do it. Nobody could do it. I got it done.”

But Trump appeared to realize that he had made a mistake, suddenly swapping Bagram for the name of an arctic national wildlife refuge in the Last Frontier known as ANWR.

“Check that one out, Bagram. Check that one out. It’s, it’s—no, think about this: Between Bagram, between—you go to ANWR, you take a look at the kind of things that we’ve given up. We should be—we should have that air base. We should have that oil,” Trump said.

Politicos caught the weighty mistake, deriding Trump as “clueless” for mixing up the name of a foreign site that he had considerable influence over.

“Bagram was the airbase he had in Afghanistan—the same base where we kept hundreds of Taliban and ISIS prisoners that Trump released back out into Afghanistan in his final year in office,” wrote Marine veteran and former Kentucky Democratic political candidate Amy McGrath on X. “He is CLUELESS folks.”

J.D. Vance made a new claim about why he isn’t responsible for spreading false rumors about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, that have led to nearly three dozen bomb threats.

During a rally Tuesday in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, CBS’s Katrina Coffman asked Vance about whether he had a responsibility not to spread racist lies if he could help it.

“So, a woman who was behind an early Facebook post about the Haitian migrants in Springfield has now apologized for spreading false rumors,” said Kaufman. “You say that you have a responsibility to share what your constituents tell you, but don’t you also have a responsibility to fact-check them first?”

“Well I think the media has a responsibility to fact-check the residents of Springfield, not lie about them,” Vance said, as the crowd roared in response.

It’s not entirely clear what this response even means, considering the fact that the media has fact-checked the residents who claimed to have had pets abducted by immigrants, and found pretty much every claim Vance has made to be as hollow as his Never-Trump convictions.

The woman Kaufman referred to was Erika Lee, who wrote a Facebook post in the summer elevating the rumors that Haitian neighbors had stolen her other neighbor’s pets. Lee has since taken down the post after she realized she had no actual information about the incident, which, it turns out, hadn’t even happened to her neighbor, according to The New York Times.

Anna Kilgore, another woman who claimed that her pet was abducted and eaten by her neighbors in a police report obtained by the Vance campaign, told The Wall Street Journal that her cat returned to her just days later.

Vance actually did bother to fact-check—he just didn’t actually care about what he found. Vance’s team was told as early as September 9 by Springfield City Manager Ryan Heck that there was no “verifiable evidence” of Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets. But by that point Vance had already posted about it, and the Ohio senator continued to spread the racist lies anyway.

Vance’s other claim, that cases of tuberculosis and HIV are on the rise in Springfield, has also met a similar fact-checking fate. The Clark County Combined Health District Commissioner Chris Cook said Friday that Vance’s claims were completely false.

Over the weekend, Vance said he had to “create stories” so the media would focus on the real ones. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine said there had been “at least 33 bomb threats” in Springfield as of Tuesday.

Senate Republicans for the second time blocked a measure on Tuesday to protect in vitro fertilization, with only two members of the party backing the bill.

Hard-line abortion opponents on the right have sought to restrict and even ban IVF ever since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February that frozen embryos are children. Republicans have openly supported restrictions to IVF alongside a national abortion ban.

The Right to IVF Act also failed to pass two months ago in a 48–47 vote. In a dismal sign of progress, the bill on Tuesday failed by a 51–44 measure. Like the last time, only two Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, voted for the bill Tuesday, with every single Democrat present voting in support.

This time, five senators were listed as “not voting” by the Senate website: Democrat Cory Booker (New Jersey), independent Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Republican Mike Rounds (South Dakota), Republican Thom Tillis (North Carolina), and Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance (Ohio).

Here’s the full list of Republicans who voted against the bill:

• John Barrasso—Wyoming
• Marsha Blackburn—Tennessee
• John Boozman—Arkansas
• Mike Braun—Indiana
• Katie Britt—Alabama
• Ted Budd—North Carolina
• Shelley Moore Capito—West Virginia
• Bill Cassidy—Louisiana
• John Cornyn—Texas
• Tom Cotton—Arkansas
• Kevin Cramer—North Dakota
• Mike Crapo—Idaho
• Ted Cruz—Texas
• Steve Daines—Montana
• Joni Ernst—Iowa
• Deb Fischer—Nebraska
• Lindsey Graham—South Carolina
• Chuck Grassley—Iowa
• Bill Hagerty—Tennessee
• Josh Hawley—Missouri
• John Hoeven—North Dakota
• Cindy Hyde-Smith—Mississippi
• Ron Johnson—Wisconsin
• John Neely Kennedy—Louisiana
• James Lankford—Oklahoma
• Mike Lee—Utah
• Cynthia Lummis—Wyoming
• Roger Marshall—Kansas
• Mitch McConnell—Kentucky
• Jerry Moran—Kansas
• Markwayne Mullin—Oklahoma
• Rand Paul—Kentucky
• Pete Ricketts—Nebraska
• James E. Risch—Idaho
• Mitt Romney—Utah
• Marco Rubio—Florida
• Eric Schmitt—Missouri
• Rick Scott—Florida
• Tim Scott—South Carolina
• Dan Sullivan—Alaska
• John Thune—South Dakota
• Tommy Tuberville—Alabama
• Roger Wicker—Mississippi
• Todd Young—Indiana

During a congressional hearing on hate crimes Tuesday, Republican Senator John Kennedy accused Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, of supporting terrorism.

Berry was invited to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the rise in hate crimes against Arab and Jewish Americans since October 7. Instead of hearing her thoughts, the Louisiana senator advanced an antagonistic and acrid line of questioning.

“You support Hamas, do you not?” asked Kennedy. Berry replied, to the applause of some in attendance, “Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization that I do not support, but you asking the executive director of the Arab American Institute that question very much puts the focus on the issue of hate in our country.”

Kennedy continued, “You support Hezbollah too, don’t you?” Over interjections from the senator, Berry said, “Again, I find this line of questioning extraordinarily disappointing, Senator. You have Arab American constituents that you represent.… The answer is I don’t support violence, whether it’s Hezbollah, Hamas, or any other entity that invokes it.”

“You can’t bring yourself to say no, can you?” Kennedy persisted. “Do you support or oppose Iran, and their hatred of Jews?” Berry’s response was again interrupted by Kennedy, who cast aspersions on her for having previously criticized Congress’s decision to cut funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, which provides relief to Palestinians.

The move to defund UNRWA, which was based on unconfirmed Israeli allegations that 12 of its staff had been involved in the October 7 Hamas attack, was widely criticized by Palestinian rights activists, including Berry—who began explaining that her criticism was based on foreign policy. Kennedy again cut in: “Let me ask you one more time, you support Hamas don’t you? You support UNRWA and Hamas, don’t you?”

“Sir, I think it’s exceptionally disappointing that you’re looking at an Arab American witness before you, and saying, ‘You support Hamas.’ I do not support Hamas,” Berry responded, before another interruption from Kennedy. “You know what’s disappointing to me,” the senator said. “You can’t bring yourself to say you don’t support UNRWA, you don’t support Hamas, you don’t support Hezbollah, and you don’t support Iran. You should hide your head in a bag”—a comment that elicited gasps from attendees.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has condemned Kennedy for his display of anti-Arab bigotry and deployment of “common anti-Arab and Islamophobic stereotypes during his questioning.”