Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Haitian immigrants are in the country legally, and they do not eat cats. On Monday, however, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, falsely claimed otherwise. “Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio,” he posted on X. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” Other conservatives quickly repeated Vance’s lie.
Here’s Senator Ted Cruz of Texas:
The X account for Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee joined in, referencing the cat lie and another baseless rumor that a Haitian immigrant killed a duck in a Springfield, Ohio park:
Representative Mike Collins of Georgia would not be outdone:
And Elon Musk, the right-wing billionaire who owns X, has tweeted the lie repeatedly.
Vance and his allies are lying about Haitian immigrants because they don’t care about the truth — and because racism is the glue that binds their coalition together. Racism is how they connect with their party and with Trump, the leader of that party.
Monday’s racist attacks did not occur in a void, as bigotry is not a new feature of the Republican Party. For many decades, it has festered, sometimes veiled behind the party’s “law and order” messaging. Who breaks the law, and who threatens the order of things? Republicans point the finger at new immigrants and Black Americans over and over, ad nauseam. As strategies go, it’s never been all that subtle, but it has been successful, winning the party white Southern voters in the wake of the civil-rights movement. In 2015, Trump entered the presidential race on the heels of the tea party, whose members broadly — and falsely — thought Barack Obama was actually born in Kenya and had abandoned red-blooded (white) America to work on behalf of Black Americans and liberals. Republican history directs us inexorably toward Trump, who capitalized on the party’s racism to win the presidential election months later.
Trump’s racism is blatant and extensive, stretching back decades. After a jury wrongly convicted five Black and Latino teenagers of a notorious rape in Central Park 1989, he took out newspaper ads calling on New York to adopt the death penalty. The five men have since been exonerated, but Trump has refused to apologize for the ads. He was a prominent birther, promoting the lie that Obama was not born in the U.S. As a candidate and as president, he has singled out immigrants in particular as a grave threat to American security, a claim that animates his base and his allies in elected office alike. When he announced his candidacy for president in 2015, he declared, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best …They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Later in one 2016 debate, he warned of “bad hombres” coming across the border. As president, he surrounded himself with anti-immigrant racists like Stephen Miller, who helped write Trump’s blood-and-soil speeches and would become an architect of family separation during the Trump administration. In 2018, Trump referred to Haiti and several other countries as “shithole countries.”
The former president’s racism hasn’t faded over time. In fact, it remains key to his appeal, thanks in part to Trump surrogates who hope to cast his opponent, Vice-President Kamala Harris, as weak on the southern border. Though President Joe Biden never appointed Harris the “border czar,” as Vance implied on Monday, Republicans still hope to link her to the issue. Vance has been especially vocal on the subject of Springfield’s Haitian residents and said they had “overwhelmed” the town in a July speech at the National Conservatism conference. The truth is more complex than Vance, a Trump critic turned sycophant, wants voters to believe. A report in the New York Times uncovered strain but revitalization, too. “They come to work every day. They don’t cause drama. They’re on time,” one local employer told the newspaper.
To be an elected Republican these days is to support Trump, and to support Trump is to fall in line with his racism. Vance knows that well. He has long since abandoned any semblance of integrity for the pursuit of power and is willing to smear the Haitian residents of Springfield in order to fan the flames on behalf of his boss. Cruz is an even more pathetic figure, another Trump critic turned useless surrogate. (He has less to show for his sycophancy than Vance, who might be able to say that Trump made him vice-president someday.) Collins, of Georgia, once called for an immigrant to be thrown from a helicopter. (“Come for the memes, stay for the policy,” reads his bio on X.) Musk, a prominent Trump supporter, has long accused Democrats of “importing voters,” among other false immigration claims. (Musk is himself an immigrant.)
Vance’s cat-eating comments are false, and he knows it. His comments may even put Haitian immigrants in danger, all in a desperate bid to score political points. In another sense, though, he’s done us a favor. Now it’s much more difficult to ignore the rot at the heart of the GOP. We’re overdue for a more honest conversation about our political opponents — and what it means to capitulate to the right on immigration policy.
