Listen To This Story

Does anyone seriously believe that illegal Haitian immigrants are rampaging through Springfield, OH, in a sudden effort to steal neighborhood dogs and cats for dinner? Donald Trump has made a lot of outrageous remarks lately, but his latest bit of insanity has pushed the limits. 

The immigrants in question are neither rampaging nor illegal.

In all fairness, it looks as though Trump lifted the threat of pet stealing and butchery from his running mate, JD Vance, who, during his time at Yale Law School, apparently never read Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous comment that freedom of speech is not freedom to cry fire in a crowded theater. 

Vance’s explanation for making this obviously false charge is that even if it isn’t true, it was necessary to call attention to immigration across the southern border. 

The fact that the influx of undocumented immigrants dropped sharply at the beginning of the year apparently escaped the senator’s attention. He also ignored the fact that Trump forcefully used his personal influence to stop a bill in Congress that would have increased protection along the border and taken a significant step towards improving America’s hopelessly outdated immigration policy. 

Trump’s reason for sabotaging the border bill? He needed to use immigration as a campaign issue for the November election. 

To Vance, the “Let’s eat your pet” scare tactic seemed as good a device as any to revive what he admitted to CNN had lately become a dead issue. It didn’t matter whether his allegation was true or not. In fact, his aides had checked with city officials in Springfield and were told that the rumors were baseless. 

Vance decided to keep pushing them anyway, and he fed the false information to Trump, who then repeated the fictional claim during his debate with Kamala Harris, watched live by 67 million Americans, with tens of millions more picking up the viral reverberations. 

Both Springfield’s mayor and Mike DeWine, Ohio’s Republican governor, denounced the rumor as having no substance. Their denials had no effect on either Vance or Trump, who continued to double down on the false information. When the Trump/Vance gambit led to a rash of bomb threats in Springfield, DeWine was forced to call in the Ohio State Police to ensure the safety of school children going home after class. 

Trump and Vance seem proud of their accomplishment. No one else is, except for late night TV comedians, who see Vance and Trump as rich material for delicious satire. 

The fact is, however, that Trump and Vance may have farther reaching motives. It’s a pretty safe bet that both Trump and Vance were well aware that the explosive rumor they were concocting was totally fictitious. What they appeared to be engaging in is a current political technique commonly known as the “dog whistle.” 

In politics, a “dog whistle” is a coded message, rife with innuendo, that might seem perfectly innocent to the public at large but speaks volumes to a target group of true believers. The phony rumor spread by Trump and Vance might sound crazy to any rational member of the public, but to the MAGA/QAnon conspiracy crowd, it was calculated to stir an automatic response. They know instinctively what Trump is really trying to say.

Trump and Vance apparently calculated that it is worth appearing to be ridiculous by pushing a patently false story if that is what is needed to motivate his ultra-credulous MAGA core supporters. After all, these are the people who believed the “PizzaGate” conspiracy, which falsely alleged that a child sex trafficking ring was secretly based in a Washington, DC, pizza joint. They believed that Barack Obama had really been born in Kenya, despite his government-issued birth certificate and hospital records attesting to the fact that he was born in Hawaii. 

The people Trump is trying to reach, in short, have been conditioned to believe almost anything their master says.

What Trump is really saying is that if you feel that you are slipping behind financially and socially, feel deep down that you are a loser, the MAGA Messiah says you’re not and has your back. Because it’s not really your fault. It’s these other people, these foreigners, who are cheating and stealing what’s rightfully yours.

When Trump claims that millions of escapees from insane asylums and prisons scattered across the globe are “pouring over our borders,” an average sane person might conclude that the ex-president is exaggerating. But the hard-core MAGA crowd hears a different, deeper message that relates to their personal circumstances. 

Trump knows as much as anyone else that America is going through a period of rapid technological change and that that, in turn, triggers a rapid economic change — the kind of change that inevitably produces winners and losers. What Trump is really saying is that if you feel that you are slipping behind financially and socially, feel deep down that you are a loser, the MAGA Messiah says you’re not and has your back. Because it’s not really your fault. It’s these other people, these foreigners, who are cheating and stealing what’s rightfully yours. They are the real reason that success has somehow passed you by.

In Springfield, it doesn’t really matter that many Haitian immigrants are actually doing jobs that no American wants to do. Or that they are willing to work for pay that most Americans find unacceptable. Or that because immigrant workers are willing to do more for less, it makes dining out at a local restaurant or building a house or obtaining any number of other basic necessities more affordable for the average middle class American.

Trump skips over those facts of life as irrelevant. Which they are — to him. After all, he is a billionaire. He can afford anything he wants at almost any price. Most Americans can’t. Trump is gambling that his core supporters are too uninformed, too besotted, or too obtuse to realize that. 

His strategy is based on feeding just enough envy and sense of injustice to swing the vote in his favor. Thanks to the vagaries of the Electoral College, he doesn’t have to convince everyone — just enough frustrated voters in fly-over country to make a difference. Failing an election victory, there is always the possibility that they might even launch an insurrection, taking the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol to the next level.

The egregious behavior of Trump, and Vance, is not exactly a new phenomenon. Trump’s gambit — inspiring distrust of outsiders — has been around for centuries. 

Hitler pushed antisemitic tropes in order to amass personal power and to convince the German public that it needed to engage in global conquest. We fought World War II to ensure that kind of barbaric thinking stayed in the past. Trump and Vance are doing their best to bring it back.

Just as Vance and Trump tried to use the spurious rumor about pet butchery to inspire hatred for Haitian immigrants, medieval tyrants regularly targeted vulnerable Jewish communities, labeling them outsiders and encouraging pogroms to get the blood flowing. To stir hatred back then, the tyrants falsely claimed that Jews ritually sacrificed Christian children at Passover to obtain blood, which they supposedly used to make their ritual unleavened bread. 

Hitler pushed similar antisemitic tropes in order to amass personal power and to convince the German public that it needed to engage in global conquest. We fought World War II to ensure that kind of barbaric thinking stayed in the past. Trump and Vance are doing their best to bring it back.

Nor are Trump and Vance the first American office-seekers to deploy such racist rhetoric. In the 1860s, a campaign against Chinese immigrants led to outrageous accusations that the Chinese were ready to dine on rats. That movement followed an influx of Chinese immigrant workers streaming into California to participate in the Gold Rush and later to help build the transcontinental railroad. 

In 1888, Grover Cleveland, running for president, issued an edition of popular trading cards that suggested that the Chinese preferred to eat rats. The campaign eventually led to the Chinese Exclusion Act, which effectively outlawed immigration from Asia until Congress repealed all such exclusion laws aimed at specific nationalities in 1943 (although quota systems severely limiting the flow of immigrants from most countries outside Europe remained in effect until 1965). 

Like Trump, Cleveland tried playing the racecard. He had already served one term as president, and he hoped that race-baiting would help to mobilize support in his campaign to defeat Benjamin Harrison. He was wrong. Harrison won.

In the case of Trump and Vance, the furor over the false claims directed at Haitian immigrants in Springfield may serve a second function. From Trump’s perspective, it has already distracted his followers from noticing the incoherence and defensiveness of his remarks during his disastrous debate with Kamala Harris. 

As Richard Friedman, who teaches clinical psychiatry at Cornell, observed in an article in The Atlantic, many of Trump’s responses during the debate were impossible to follow. Trump was clearly confused and ended up uttering a long series of nonsequiturs. The obvious takeaway from the debate was: Why would anyone vote for a candidate to be president of the United States who was so obviously unable to handle even simple questions about facts and policy or stand up to the needling of a debate opponent? How could such a leader stand up to hostile counterparts on the world stage?

Friedman points out that when this type of behavior occurs in someone Trump’s age, it can be an early warning of cognitive decline. It is not implausible that if Trump were to win the election, Vance might soon accede to the presidency. So far, everything that Vance has done since being nominated as the Republican candidate for the vice presidency has turned out to be politically disastrous. Not a reassuring performance for someone in line to become the most powerful leader in the world, with the nuclear codes at his fingertips. 

Trump, whose world-view seems stuck in the late 19th century, counts on dividing and conquering the American electorate because he understands that that is what it will take to win the presidency. 

Harris, in contrast, favors getting Americans to work together and has even said that she is prepared to include Republicans in a future government. She argues that the MAGA approach runs counter to America’s finer traditions, which are closer to “United we stand, divided we fall.” 

Most of all, she is against trying to return to a past that never actually existed. 

Both sides have presented their arguments. The test for American democracy rests on which option the American electorate will finally choose in November. And, it must be said, it further depends on whether that choice will be respected and accepted by the defeated.

Comments are closed.