The Trump-Vance “Migrants Eating Cats” Lie; Preposterous, Racist, and Now a Menace to Immigrants: But, Guess Who Believes It ? And So On …

Vice President Kamala Harris succeeded in baiting the former President during the debate, provoking the cuckoo to pop out of his head frequently, including his preposterous pronouncement that, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people who came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people who live there.”

 Sixty-seven million households tuned in to the debate, and the nonsense exploded onto the national scene, culminating in bomb threats closing schools in Springfield, Ohio. Many media outlets  debunked the statements during this period, even during the debate, when ABC host David Muir told Trump that the City Manager of Springfield, Ohio had reported to ABC that there had been no credible reports of immigrants abducting, harming, or abusing pets.  Trump and J.D. Vance doubled down on the comments after the debate (Vance had posted the lie on his twitter account before the debate), and I checked a Yahoo You Gov poll that came out the day after the debate to see how the public was receiving the pet-eating misinformation. Here is the demographic and partisan breakdown:

This initial poll had only 20% of the 1,391 adults believing the claim, 50% not believing it, and 30% weren’t sure. And you guessed it – 44% of Republicans believed it (see above), only 15% of Republicans disbelieved it, and 40% didn’t know.

A Washington Post fact-checker backgrounded the story, which began with a rumor on Facebook and began going viral on J.D. Vance’s X account before the debate, even though a City official had told a Vance staffer who called about that the rumor was false. The following Sunday after the debate, after a week of fact-checking and debunking the claim, J.D. Vance, in a CNN interview with Dana Bash, virtually acknowledged the claim was false but justified it as necessary to focus attention on illegal immigration.

A week after the massive national publicity, another YouGov poll showed public opinion had sharpened:

Twenty nine percent of registered voters overall said the claim was definitely or probably true, including 56% of voters saying they were planning to vote for Trump and 49% of Republicans. 58% of voters said the claim was definitely or probably false, including 24% of voters planning to vote for Trump and 31% of Republicans. 19% of both Republicans and Trump voters remain unsure about the claim. On September 18, J.D. Vance, in response to information that the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were lawfully in the United States under a program called Temporary Protected Status, said he would continue to call them “illegal aliens.”

On Saturday, September 21, Trump neither referenced migrants eating pets at his Wilmington, North Carolina rally nor mentioned the Republican candidate for Governor, Mark Robinson, whose campaign is imploding as the public becomes aware of his insane remarks.

It takes a Trump lie to be spoken during a national debate where half the electorate hears it on television, followed by a week of the rationally-based national media reporting the falsehoods to the electorate, to achieve partial success in a truth-telling exercise.

Trump and Vance will move on soon from this particular meme as it runs its course as a story, but the attacks about immigration will continue.

Why?

It’s the Republicans’ main issue and was a major source of Trump’s strength in 2016. In 2020. the national public health emergency enabled Trump to effectively close the border, only for the issue to be renewed when the COVID sealing of the border ended in 2023 and migrants by the tens of thousands began crossing. It remains the Republicans’ strongest line of attack against Harris and the Democrats as polls show negative feelings about the economy are receding. It’s everything else, abortion, health care, education, social justice, that has the potential to save the Democrats.