The Next January 6 Could Happen in Places Like Springfield, Ohio
At Tuesday’s presidential debate, Donald Trump launched into a rant about Haitian immigrants kidnapping and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. “They’re eating the dogs!” he bellowed. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats! They’re eating the pets of the people that live there!” No spectators were allowed inside the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where the debate was held, which meant Trump’s live audience consisted primarily of Kamala Harris, two stone-faced moderators from ABC News, and the cavernous silence of the auditorium. He looked and sounded unwell, like a man who had totally lost control of himself.
Observers were quick to assume that Trump had fallen for a right-wing conspiracy theory that began as a rumor simmering in the bowels of Facebook and was later pushed by, among others, his own vice-presidential candidate, J.D. Vance. But that impression was somewhat misleading. Though Trump had spent much of the evening spiraling off-topic, his rant about Haitians was made at least partially by design. The point was not whether the claims were true or false but to snatch at any excuse to proclaim that brown and Black immigrants should be ostracized — and to use a cadre of conservative influencers and memelords to encourage a conspiratorial frenzy that could easily spill into violence.
It was Vance who first brought the Springfield rumor to Trump’s attention. Since the pandemic, the city has attracted as many as 20,000 Haitian immigrants with promises of warehouse jobs and manufacturing work. Last year, one of them veered a minivan into oncoming traffic and struck a school bus, killing an 11-year-old boy. The boy’s father has since insisted his son’s death was an accident and implored people not to exploit it for hateful ends, but that is precisely what happened. There remains no evidence that Haitian migrants have been killing and eating pets — a fact that has been confirmed by both the police and countless reporters who have investigated the rumor. Yet on Monday, the day before the debate, Vance posted about it on X: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”
The post soon began percolating throughout the conservative web. Ted Cruz and Elon Musk posted memes of kittens begging to be saved from Haitian dinner plates, racking up hundreds of thousands of reposts. Even after local authorities had confirmed the claim was baseless, Vance was undeterred, inviting his followers to “keep the cat memes flowing” anyway. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked him, “Why push something that’s not true?” Vance replied with a slight smirk, “Whether those exact rumors turn out to be mostly true, somewhat true, whatever the case may be, this town has been ravaged by 20,000 migrants coming in.”
When Trump boosted the story at the debate, the reverberations were felt instantly. A so-called social-media war room that included the notorious conspiracy theorists Laura Loomer, Jack Posobiec, and Chaya Raichik spammed the web with defenses of Trump and attacks on Springfield’s Haitian population. Google Trends reported that the top search in 49 states during the debate was “abortion” — except in Ohio, where it was “immigration.” The day after the debate, Musk responded to Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris on X by pledging to “give” her a child and “guard” her cats. On Thursday, bomb threats in Springfield containing what the city’s mayor, Rob Rue, described to the Washington Post as “hateful language towards immigrants and Haitians” prompted the evacuations of City Hall, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the Springfield Driver’s Exam Station, an Ohio License Bureau, and two schools — the Springfield Academy of Excellence and Fulton Elementary.
“We want to move forward together,” Rue told the New York Times of the unwanted attention Trump’s rant has brought to his city, “and it just makes it more difficult to do that when we have violent actions and threats.” The chaos continued on Friday, when police announced they had received unspecified “information” that led them to close an additional middle school and evacuate two more elementary schools. At a press conference in California, Trump said “mass deportations” of immigrants could begin in Springfield if he is elected president.
It was all emblematic of the former president’s ability to turn whole communities upside down with just a few words. For all the ways Trump has declined of late, he remains masterful at reading and cultivating his base, which wants stories about immigrants so grotesque that their xenophobic paranoias feel not only sane but righteous. Somewhat new are the droves of conservative influencers descending on Springfield and spreading viral videos of residents calling immigrants “sand monkeys.”
It’s worth remembering that we’ve seen Trump make this play before. His lies about endemic migrant crime date back to his campaign announcement in 2015 when he characterized all Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” Ahead of both the 2018 midterms and the 2020 general election, the then-president induced panic about invading migrant caravans that abruptly disappeared from his rhetoric after votes were cast. Haiti itself has made a previous appearance on Trump’s reported list of “shithole” countries whose denizens he sought to deny immigration protections.
Trump’s brand of conspiratorial lying transformed his unfounded claims of election theft in 2020 into a rabid mob that descended on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Now, the question of whether Trump’s lies lead to actual violent behavior is no longer conjectural. And as Vance helpfully articulated, the point of the lying is to capture and channel a desired mood, a rallying cause that motivates people to action.
The Republican ticket’s exploitation of that mood has now sent hundreds of Springfield children fleeing from their schools, led to the terrorization of countless city employees, reopened the psychic wounds of a grieving father, and placed a target on the backs of a migrant minority that was already regarded with suspicion. It reaffirms that Trump’s vision for returning to power will likely require an indiscriminate range of casualties. What we saw onstage on Tuesday was not merely a meltdown but a vision of the future: an angry man howling at hordes of disciples he does not see, who await his signal to spring into action.