Cat ladies and dog-eating: MAGA can't quit the weird talk about pets

The less popular pet species — your gerbils, iguanas, and cockatoos — should be grateful. So far, at least, they haven't become the focal point of a deranged MAGA urban legend, conspiracy theory, or bigoted meme. The same cannot be said for America's two most popular animal companions: cats and dogs. This election cycle has been dominated by discourse about cats and dogs, and not in a fun way. Instead, it's been one news cycle after another involving the deeply unpleasant combination of a household pet plus bizarre far-right behavior.

So it's time to ask the question: Why can't MAGA Republicans leave pets alone?

Looking back over the past few months, it is startling how many gross stories of Trumpist weirdness involve dogs and/or cats, who do not have partisan preferences. Though, if animals could vote, I suspect they'd turn out for the Democrats, because Republicans can't seem to talk about pets without giving everyone the heebie-jeebies. In her springtime bid to be Donald Trump's running mate, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota bragged about shooting her dog in the head. (She also killed a goat for the high crime of annoying her.) Not that Trump's actual pick, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, is any more pet-friendly. The man has an alarming obsession with "cat ladies," his go-to insult for women who haven't — or even haven't yet — given birth.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former Democrat-turned-MAGA hype man, admitted he'd eaten a dog, which somehow is the least strange of his many animal encounters involving dead bears, dead whales, and a dead worm in his brain. MAGA hoaxsters started a conspiracy theory falsely accusing Vice President Kamala Harris's running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, of faking photos of his dog, Scout. One of the architects of Project 2025, which functions as the Trump campaign's policy arm, rants in his book about the evils of city-funded dog parks.

The pet-related freakishness reached downright frightening levels this week when Vance floated the racist lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are kidnapping people's cats to eat them. There is no doubt that Vance, a Yale graduate whose wife is a daughter of Indian immigrants, is well aware that it isn't just a lie, but a dangerous one. Already there's been a bomb threat to Springfield City Hall. Trump picked up the lie during Tuesday's presidential debate, raving incoherently about how immigrants are "eating the dogs" and "eating the cats," which caused Harris to reply with a guffaw, "Talk about extreme."

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What all these stories, memes, and lies have in common is that they take a practice most people experience as normal and wholesome — owning pets — and wed it to the uncanny and cruel rhetoric of MAGA. All these bits of pet-related political ephemera are unnerving, and I suspect that's the point. MAGA will rub its filth on every part of people's lives, even something as personal and innocent as your relationship with your pets.

The fixation on cats and dogs makes more sense in this light. Most won't own it, but MAGA is a fascist movement,  focused on controlling American lives down to the smallest, most intimate details. In real terms, that means forcing childbirth, dictating who you can marry, banning books, and punishing families who accept LGBTQ children. But in a larger philosophical sense, it's about a vision of family life that mirrors the far-right's hierarchical and cold-hearted worldview. As I noted in a recent newsletter, this is a view that rejects the notion that family is about love, but instead about establishing a pecking order of status and submission.

This isn't even something many on the right would bother to deny. In the world of Christian fundamentalism, for instance, this is a popular meme illustrating how they see family:

In this view, every family member exists to serve the power structure, regardless of how they feel about it. Women exist to serve men. Children exist to be molded into Christian nationalist warriors. Men exist as leaders, even as they cough up self-serving justifications about "serving God" to explain why they get the plum gigs. This is why it's skin-crawling to hear Vance agree with a podcast host arguing "the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female" is to provide free childcare. The possibility that a person has value outside of serving the patriarchal social order is not even considered.

As I argued in the newsletter, pets disturb this worldview. Even if they "rank" lower than the human family members (cats disagree), they don't serve any "purpose" in a conservative social order. They're just there to love and be loved. So it's no surprise there's so much hostility to pets in MAGA rhetoric, or even downright violent urges towards animals.

That the weirdness about pets is tied to this right-wing obsession with controlling people's personal lives was put on full display this week by — who else? — Twitter owner Elon Musk. First, he sexually harassed pop star and famous cat lover Taylor Swift, by tweeting, "I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life." As journalist Kelly Weill noted in her newsletter, it was "a mask-off moment when pregnancy, which pro-natalists uphold as women’s almost mystical purpose, is invoked as punishment."

When he was called out for it, Musk sent another tweet sneering, "Toxoplasma gondii is a danger to our democracy," a reference to the debunked myth that cat owners have a mentally destabilizing parasite. Normal people find it endearing that Swift is a cat person. Musk, however, is threatened. Because a woman he probably doesn't even know would choose cats over a life of sad subservience to a man. (An entirely sensible decision, in non-MAGA land.)

When the racist urban legend about Haitian immigrants started to spread, a friend texted to ask if perhaps Vance is trying to cast himself as a protector of pets, to push back against his reputation as a cat-hating misogynist. Obviously the main purpose is entirely evil, which is to dehumanize immigrants in hope of scaring up a few more votes from racists. But sure, Vance is full of dumb ideas and that's possible. But what's been striking about the MAGA discourse is that, even when casting themselves in the fantasy role as protector of pets, they can't help but express contempt for people who actually care about animals.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas posted this meme this week:

Somehow it manages to be indefensible racist propaganda while also shaming people who take real animal abuse seriously. Similarly, the AI-generated images of Trump "protecting" animals manage to convey a distaste for real-life animal lovers.

One reason all these pictures have to be generated is that Trump is a known hater of animals and there is probably no real-life picture of him touching, much less cuddling, a real cat. But there's also a deliberate ridiculousness to these images. The viewer is meant to laugh at how preposterous it would be to see Trump treat a cat with anything but disdain. The memes are racist. They also ridicule cat lovers, the same ones Republicans say they wish to "protect." (We see this same two-step when Republicans claim they wish to "protect" women's sports from trans players. Such proclamations tend to come with sideswipes about how women's sports aren't real sports.) Even when spreading a vile lie, these MAGA messengers can't bring themselves to talk about cats with anything but contempt. Notably, the images never seem to include dogs, which are still seen as a more respectable pet in far-right circles. It's only funny because it's cats, an animal coded as "feminine."

All this disturbing MAGA talk about cats and dogs is ultimately not about the animals themselves, who remain blissfully unaware of being exploited in the jingoist rhetoric of bigots. It's about the MAGA project of dehumanization, not just of people they dislike, but frankly of themselves. That's why Noem's story is so haunting. The moral of the story is that it's a good thing to suppress humane qualities like kindness, in favor of violently eliminating anyone not serving the right-wing social order. Certainly, no one is spreading the "cat-eating" lie out of sincere concern for cats, but because they wish to dehumanize people whose only crime is looking and speaking differently. It's about taking something as sweet and harmless as a pet and using it as yet another ugly weapon in MAGA's endless culture wars.