Here’s Where Trump Got That “They’re Eating the Dogs” Debate Lie
As we get closer to the election, the Republican Party is finding it increasingly politically useful to fix the public’s attention on the supposed dangers of immigrant populations. The Trump campaign keeps calling Vice President Kamala Harris the “border czar” in its attacks. (In actuality, Harris was tasked by the Biden administration with addressing the root causes of migration from Central America in 2021.)
Conservative media have played up stories of an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, that was supposedly taken over by a Venezuelan gang (it wasn’t), and the Heritage Foundation has pushed the idea that noncitizen voters pose a serious threat to the legitimacy of the upcoming presidential election (they don’t). On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: Victim Perspectives,” exploring “the effects of the Biden-Harris Administration’s open borders policies on American families and communities” through testimony from “victims of fentanyl poisoning” and “criminal illegal aliens.”
But no anti-immigrant scare tactic has captured the troll internet space quite like the Haitian pet-eating panic.
On Monday, social media was flooded with A.I.-generated images of Donald Trump holding kittens and ducks—and sometimes carrying them away from Black people giving them chase. The images, which as memes are meant to convey an own-the-libs kind of dark humor, are based on a false claim that has bounced around the conservative internet—that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating Americans’ pets.
As racist misinformation goes, this instance of fake news is particularly vile and dehumanizing, in a kind of classically nativist way. There’s no dog whistle here—the bigotry is open and gleeful. The claim originated with a fictitious Facebook post about Springfield, Ohio, in which the user said that their neighbor’s daughter’s friend’s cat was cooked and eaten by Haitians. The post also said that Haitians were cooking ducks and geese in a local park. These claims were utterly false, but some people on social media conflated it with an unrelated story from Canton, Ohio, in which a woman killed and ate a neighborhood cat. The woman does not appear to be an immigrant.
In reality, the city of Springfield has experienced a large surge of immigration from Haiti since the pandemic, in part because of a boom in manufacturing and warehouse jobs, and some residents have complained bitterly about it. The New York Times noted that the city has recently seen a Nazi march and had a town meeting derailed by bigoted complaints, but that “by most accounts, the Haitians have helped revitalize Springfield.”
The pet-eating rumor spread quickly, though. On Sunday night, a popular “breaking news” account shared the Facebook post onto X, where it took off. The account paired the Facebook post with a photo of a Black man walking down a residential street carrying a Canada goose by its legs. (The photo is from Columbus, Ohio, not Springfield; the person who took the photo has protested that it is not proof of anything.) In an effort to back up the bird-eating-related claims, social media users posted a clip of a man in a Springfield meeting saying, “They’re in the park, grabbing up ducks by their necks, and cutting their heads off and walking off with them, and eating them.” There is no evidence of this.
Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, a man who has promoted white nationalist positions, went all-in on the story, tweeting repeatedly about how Harris’ “plan is to turn America into a destitute refugee colony.” The Trump campaign posted on X that Harris would send “migrants who eat pets” to “your town next.”
Elon Musk, who has 197 million followers on X, was particularly obsessive, posting or sharing posts about Springfield and immigrants eating pets at least eight times. Several of the posts featured A.I.-generated memes. Others were pure speculation.
But what was really remarkable about the chain of events was how quickly the talking point was embraced by Republican lawmakers. Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia posted: “They’re in the park. Grabbing up ducks. By they neck. And eatin ’em.” Rep. Lauren Boebert wrote: “No one was eating your pets when President Trump was in the White House…” Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio posted twice about migrants eating pets, warning, “Don’t think it can’t happen where you live too.” Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs posted: “Protect America’s pets!”
They got into the memes, too. The Republican House Judiciary Committee account shared an A.I. image of Trump cuddling animals in a lake. Sen. Ted Cruz didn’t go for the A.I. images, but he did post a meme in the style of an earlier internet era, showing two embracing cats with the text “Please vote for Trump so the Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.” He captioned it with three laughing emojis.
And by Tuesday afternoon, the internet meme discourse hit the real world. According to the Arizona Republican Party, it had erected 12 digital billboards in the Phoenix metro area featuring a joke about it. On the billboards, which are a spoof of Chick-fil-A’s famous “Eat Mor Chikin” ad campaign, A.I. kittens wearing cow costumes have painted a message: “EAT LESS KITTENS. Vote Republican!”
It remains unclear how much any of these people actually believe that Haitian immigrants are eating pets. It’s all too easy to point out that pet-related conversations have not favored conservatives in recent months, given J.D. Vance’s misogynistic comments about “childless cat ladies”; South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s writing about shooting her dog; and the published photo of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has thrown his support to Trump, miming the act of eating a barbecued dog. The A.I. memes, which are extremely plentiful on X, aren’t actually implying any level of seriousness about endangered pets; they’re just absurdist racist jokes. There’s a kind of internet shock humor to it all, an ugly meeting of Stephen Miller’s 19th-century-style racism with Elon Musk’s messageboard racism, plus some dissonant echoes of the heyday of the cat internet in the mid-2000s.
But whether or not they believe in the pet-killing story, the country’s most powerful Republicans are trying to incite some kind of moral panic. On Monday morning, Sen. J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, posted on social media that he had previously raised concerns about Haitian immigrants in Springfield. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” he wrote. “Where is our border czar?”
Tuesday morning, he doubled down, bringing up the death of an 11-year-old Ohio boy who was killed in a car crash caused by a Haitian man driving without a valid driver’s license. (The boy’s family has disavowed the hateful rhetoric around the Haitian community in Springfield.) Vance wrote:
In the last several weeks, my office has received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who’ve said their neighbors’ pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants. It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.
Do you know what’s confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here. That local health services have been overwhelmed. That communicable diseases—like TB and HIV—have been on the rise. That local schools have struggled to keep up with newcomers who don’t know English. That rents have risen so fast that many Springfield families can’t afford to put a roof over their head.
It was a tirade meant to stir up the fears that Trump loves to provoke. There was a political argument here—even if it’s a xenophobic one—based on the idea that migrant populations are straining public resources. The New York Times reported that in Springfield, the Haitian population has taxed certain institutions, such as the health care and educational systems, but that it simultaneously rescued the town’s flagging local economy. That kind of nuance is seemingly uninteresting to Vance, who indicated he cared less about the truth of the situation than in stoking hate. “Don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots,” he wrote. “Keep the cat memes flowing.”
Need advice on living through this historic and nerve-racking presidential election? Slate wants to help. Submit your questions to Wedge Issues here. It’s anonymous! No question is too dumb—or too existential.