It has been over a week since Donald Trump stood on a debate stage and repeated the bogus claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets in a small Ohio city. And it’s pretty obvious that he, his running mate, JD Vance, and their campaign see longer-term utility in keeping this narrative going.
In a speech Friday, Trump said, “I’m angry about illegal Haitian migrants taking over Springfield, Ohio,” even though the majority of the Haitians in Springfield are there legally.
In an interview on Sunday, Vance left the impression that he was making things up to amplify the smear against Springfield’s Haitian community: “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.”
What Trump is doing is important to the outcome of the election, and it’s not simply the usual race baiting aimed at charging up part of his base. He has failed for weeks to come up with an effective line of attack against Kamala Harris. But with Springfield, he has found a fear-driven argument that places the issue of immigration right into the town square of a Midwestern city in one of the most electorally important states, and it looks like he and Vance see this as a more potent argument than just talking about the Southern border: There’s reason to believe that they’re trying to stoke public anger and garner public support around immigration policies that Trump promoted in his first term and that he presumably hopes to act on in a second.
Trump has spent years barking about the purported scourge of immigration from Mexico and Central and South America, but that didn’t quite produce the poster villain that would perfectly focus public sentiment — it didn’t give him Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” or George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton.
But Trump knows what works and how to lean into it. He began his 2016 presidential campaign by disparaging Mexican immigrants as people “bringing crime,” “bringing drugs” and “rapists,” but he would later train his rhetoric on inner cities, painting Black Chicago, especially, as a lawless hellscape.
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