During last week’s Presidential debate, Donald Trump brought up a fake Internet rumor about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, abducting and eating pets. Later in the week, he promised to do “large deportations” in Springfield and accused Haitian immigrants of “destroying” the city. After news organizations debunked the claim, Trump’s running mate, the Ohio senator J. D. Vance, told CNN, “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” (There are currently some twelve to twenty thousand Haitian immigrants in Springfield, the majority of whom arrived legally; they came largely at the request of groups like the local Chamber of Commerce, which were struggling with job vacancies and a declining population.)

To better understand Trump’s rhetoric and its precedents in American history, I spoke by phone with Kathleen Belew, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University, who’s an expert on white nationalism. (She is also the author of the book “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.”) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what makes Trump’s specific attack so disturbing, how America has dealt with previous panics about immigrants, and how much the white-nationalist movement is dependent on Trump’s political success.

What is it about this latest rhetoric that feels new to you, and to what degree does it feel like more of the same, especially since Trump came onto the scene a decade ago?

I think the closest historical parallel from the recent past had to do with the arrival of large numbers of Vietnamese immigrants during and after the Vietnam War. Those immigrants were sometimes colloquially referred to as “boat people,” and there were major misinformation campaigns around whether they were eating rats. People reported that they were eating rats caught in peanut-baited traps.

This was used to paint that community as being not only unassimilable but also dangerous, as vectors of disease or vectors of uncleanliness. And particularly it was used in very material ways by the Klan, for instance, in Galveston Bay, Texas, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, to wage targeted campaigns of harassment against Vietnamese immigrants that entailed ginning up anti-immigrant sentiment, creating paramilitary training camps, and training white fishermen to target the Vietnamese immigrants with paramilitary violence. So this is connected in history not only to anti-immigrant animus but to direct targeted harassment, threats, and violence.

Was this type of rhetoric taken up by politicians, or was it more just happening with anti-immigrant groups, like the Klan, on the ground?

I think that’s where it is very, very different. In this time period, there was anti-immigrant rhetoric from politicians, but it was never something targeted like the way this latest rhetoric about Haitians has been.

What we see here is the clear circulation of ideas about Haitian immigrants from troll accounts to white-power groups to mainstream Republican talking points, and then back to the base and back to white-power movements again. The attachment of this kind of demonizing rhetoric to actual Presidential candidates is just beyond the pale. And we are already seeing a string of bomb threats in Springfield, and we’re seeing white-power and white-nationalist groups return to Springfield to do marches. These statements by Trump are likely not consigned to the realm of rhetoric, and these are things that can have real violent consequences for immigrant communities.

As a nonexpert, the focus on what people eat—which, again, is in fact false in this case—there is something that feels very, very creepy about it.

The idea of immigrants as being unassimilable or even dangerous to American cultural norms goes back a very long time. We can look back and see people being demonized for eating different foods. There’s a substantial body of work on immigrant children being teased over what they bring to school for lunch—for instance, smells, tastes, and visuals—that people aren’t used to, and how that shows some kind of inexorable difference.

But I think the thing that’s interesting here is that the kind of “They’re not like us” discourse is colliding with a demonizing discourse, which is, to my mind, a level up. So I’m thinking more of the language that holds that an entire immigrant population is unclean, unhealthy, or dangerous, or how we often see immigrant populations described as a flood, a surge, or a plague. Scholars have found that these kinds of linguistic markers correspond with real violence against immigrant communities. And that’s been true all the way through the twentieth century.

The other interesting thing about the pet stuff, in particular, is that there’s this implication within it that not only are such immigrants unassimilable and fundamentally at odds with American culture but also that they’re a threat to the American home. It’s very similar to how people have talked about immigrants as threats to the American body politic, whether it’s as sexual threats to American white women or by being threats to children in various ways. It’s mobilizing a set of fears that has to do with defensiveness around the home.

Those fears are linked to other rhetoric we have been seeing recently, like the ones around medical care for trans children, around school-board and library policy regarding gender and sexuality. I think all of these things are attached to a deep-seated fear about changes to what home and family might look like in a new political moment. That fear gets articulated in a wide variety of tenors, and this is one of the very loud, scary versions.

Right, kids being teased for what food they bring, or the idea that people are unclean, or that they’re vectors of disease—which are all gross and bigoted—also don’t have the angle that this has, and that’s “Literally, these people are going to come and steal your pets, and eat them.”

Yeah, I agree. And I think that it is a step up to think about people purportedly eating pets instead of purportedly eating vermin, like valued versus non-valued animals. Some of the rumors have expanded to be about geese at parks, so this is now an idea that is on the ground, taking different forms, as it basically goes through a game of telephone from ideologues and activists to regular people who are just spreading this around through their social media.

You said that this comes up from the grassroots and then politicians use it, and then it filters back down. Can you talk about how that process works?

Yeah, this one is really interesting and multidirectional, because it came out of Twitter accounts. One posted information about this, purportedly, and later on it got picked up by a neo-Nazi group called Blood Tribe, the founder of which has been in the news for trying to buy land to start paramilitary training camps in Maine. Another member of that group took this to the city council and made a claim about it on camera. And then that got picked up as a usable sound bite for politicians who want to draw our attention to immigration.

J. D. Vance is telling us very clearly that what they’re doing is using an on-the-ground story with a lot of momentum behind it, basically a viral moment, to direct attention to the broader issue of immigration. It was striking during the debate, too, how many of Trump’s answers went back to immigration, even when that was not what he was asked. The moment when he said “They’re eating the pets” was just one of them. It’s an example of people at the highest levels grabbing these viral, grassroots pieces of misinformation and using them for their own purposes.

And then, after that happens on a national debate stage, other white-nationalist groups pick up on it, and then the Proud Boys and other groups go march in Springfield. A whole bunch of different groups and activists will turn up. There’s going to be a range, from public-facing demonstrations and marches to flyering and bomb threats.

Is this filtering process that you’re describing mostly an Internet-based phenomenon, or is it similar to how it worked decades ago?

I think it’s very similar. What the Internet does is make it bigger and faster. Even back in the late seventies and early eighties, the Klan was using much of the same playbook, in terms of figuring out what ideas would stick with its base, finding communities that were already frustrated and trying to galvanize action in those communities.

For instance, in Galveston Bay, Vietnamese refugees who had been settled by church groups and sponsorship organizations elsewhere had become secondary migrants to this part of the Texas coast, because they were fishermen and they already knew the climate. They knew how to run fishing boats. There’s this massive population influx, the white fishermen felt like they couldn’t keep pace, and there was an economic pinch. The Klan arrived after people were already upset.

So it wasn’t that the Klan showed up and told them what to be upset about. It’s that the Klan figured out how to put their finger on an existing problem and use kind of a ready-made scapegoat to recruit a bunch of people into these paramilitary camps and escalate tension. And that’s something the Klan has always done. They did it a lot in the twenties, because at that point the Klan was huge. Around ten per cent of the state of Indiana was enrolled. It was like four million people nationwide. It was very, very mainstream.

And when people learn about that Klan in school, they usually learn that it’s anti-Black and antisemitic, and that’s true, but the Klan was also anti-immigrant in the Northeast, it was anti-Mexican on the border, it was anti-labor in the Northwest, where people were going through timber unionization. Again, the model is, you pick up on the existing scapegoat and figure out how you can explain that for your own purposes.

I don’t think it is a huge leap to note that this is exactly how Trump’s campaign is working. He figures out how to pick up on anger and dissatisfaction in the community, and then use that for his own purposes. However, the community he’s talking about is not Springfield, which had put out calls for Haitian immigrants to settle there because they wanted them for labor. The community is the nation that’s using Springfield as a story to tell about immigration. It is meant to reflect their own economic concerns.

That’s a really interesting distinction, because it doesn’t necessarily seem that all the anger about this was coming from Springfield.

Not at all. I mean, it sounds to me like—and again, I’m new to this story, as many people are, but the leader of Blood Tribe was in Maine, doing that work to try to build paramilitary camps there. It’s not like he’s a longtime resident of Springfield in some meaningful way. I believe that what we are seeing is the same model of figuring out an issue that they can build up into a recruitment event, and then using it for their own purposes.

It’s worth remembering that these white nationalists and white-power groups are aligned behind Trump right now. But that doesn’t mean that he is leading the charge or commanding what they are doing. Should the dynamics change tomorrow and Trump is no longer sort of their figurehead, they’re not going to go back in the box. They have their own vision for what they would like to achieve in the country, and it’s a dramatically anti-democratic, anti-immigrant, white, ethno-state version of the United States.

One tendency that I find myself falling into frequently, and I think a lot of people who watch Trump find themselves falling into this, is to say, “Oh, my God, he’s getting so much worse. The rhetoric’s worse than ever. Everything’s worse. He sounds so crazy, et cetera.” And then you watch the rallies in 2015, and you’re like, Oh, a lot of this has been going on for nine years.

In my view, Trump has been very consistent on immigration. From that first speech, when he came down the golden escalator and talked about Mexicans being rapists, he has been mobilizing the same fears about immigrants as threats, campaigning on and making major media events out of every crime committed by an undocumented immigrant. Even in the Springfield example, they were mobilizing the story of an eleven-year-old boy killed in a car accident by a Haitian driver. It’s stunning to me that we want to talk so much about that child, at the objection of his parents, when we aren’t talking about children being killed in much more common ways, like with firearms in schools, for instance.

But, that aside, I think Trump has been very consistent in his demonization of immigrant populations. And one of the things I thought was so striking in the first term was the set of proposed policies on how the border itself could be made more painful to cross, via shooting people in the legs, via physical obstacles. And then, of course, the huge moments, like the Muslim ban, family separation—many of those children were lost in the foster-care system and never reunited with their families. There has been rhetoric and a policy of outright cruelty to immigrant communities all the way through.

What is different is that we are now post-January 6th, and post the galvanizing of white-power groups as part of the Trump campaign. It isn’t just extremists with a wink and a nod but people being invited to dinner at Mar-a-Lago, people being welcomed. We can see that with Blood Tribe. There’s no disavowal. Instead, there’s doubling down and the embrace of these overtly white-power and neo-Nazi groups. That’s different.

Yeah, and one difference is that there’s just so much less resistance within the Republican Party, which during Trump’s first term pushed back against some things, like child separation. Now it feels like the Party is both bigger in terms of encompassing these sorts of extremist groups, and much more united.

I think that’s right. I mean, part of that has to do with the work that these extremist groups have done to normalize themselves, not only to Trump but within the command structure of the G.O.P. So you have had Oath Keepers being elected to office, Proud Boys assuming positions within the G.O.P. at the state level. And then they’re doing things like showing up for school-board meetings. That’s not just marching in intimidation. That’s an attempt to engage themselves within the normative political structures that have been opened by the Trump Administration and campaigns.

I know you said that, even if Trump were not on the scene anymore, these groups would still have been sort of normalized in a way that they hadn’t been previously. But as we see with this Haitian immigrant story, Trump provides so much of the energy. You could imagine a lot of these stories and a lot of the energy of the movement petering out if he wasn’t so central to the larger conservative movement.

Yeah, I’m not sure if I would agree about petering out, but I would definitely agree that what he does is throw gasoline on the fire, right? Everything just gets so much bigger and louder. And what he does is bring many, many, many more people into whatever the rhetoric is that is floating around. So it’s just a massive amplification of what they’re trying to do.

Are there any other historical examples that you’ve been thinking of that, in the context of Springfield, you think are helpful?

I think the Mariel boatlift is another one. There’s interesting scholarship on waves of immigration from Cuba. The first two waves are comparatively much whiter, well-educated, and wealthy Cubans. And then the third wave is the Mariel boatlift, in 1980. Castro allowed more than a hundred thousand people to leave Cuba, and they were younger and more male, and in part because Castro wanted to color people’s opinions of immigrant Cuban communities in America. They were also described by him as criminals. This meant that there was significant opposition, not only among white-power groups but generally around the country. Politicians in the U.S. were talking about those Cuban immigrants as being “criminal,” as being people that were sent out from Castro’s prison regime and, therefore, were unassimilable, and not people we could incorporate into the American body politic. But there was not the intensive demonizing rhetoric we see today.

Maybe I’ve seen “Scarface” too many times, but Castro did allow a lot of prisoners and people that he did not want in Cuba to come to the United States, correct?

Yes. Well, here’s the thing. Some of the people who were in prison and then released as part of the boatlift were in prison for political objections to Castro, right? The rhetoric was that all of them were criminally dangerous to the American public, even though less than four per cent of the people allowed to come had criminal records. And, of course, many of them are just people escaping a regime where they felt they didn’t have a good future and later settled in the United States—as many other immigrants have throughout our history—and became assimilated and valued parts of our national body politic. Some of them, yes, were criminals, and some of them were problematic. But you can see all sorts of examples of immigrants being demonized throughout the past century. That is not a new thing. ♦