Around 9:30pm on Tuesday, tens of millions of television viewers watched Donald Trump spread an unfounded and racist rumor that ran rampant online.
“In Springfield, they eat dogs,” the former president said, referring to the Ohio city dealing with an influx of Haitian immigrants. “They’re eating cats. They’re eating … the pets of the people who live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
The extraordinary moment — making a chain-email-worthy argument in the prime of a presidential debate — probably confused most of the 67.1 million people tuned in to Trump’s showdown with Vice President Kamala Harris. But the rumor, which has been criticized as perpetuating racist tropes, was already flourishing in right-wing corners of the Internet and was amplified by those close to Trump, including his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.
No one involved in Trump’s debate preparations or speaking on behalf of his campaign agreed to discuss the strategy on the record or to answer questions about how it transformed from fringe agitation to a vocal burst on the debate stage.
“Suffice it to say, he knew it. He decided to bring it up,” senior Trump adviser Tim Murtaugh told NBC News. “Now that’s an important story. Otherwise, we probably wouldn’t be talking about immigration if it wasn’t.”
Others close to Trump expressed their doubts about the execution.
“Immigration should be talked about because Harris as border czar has failed,” said a Trump adviser who, like others, was granted anonymity to speak openly. “Has the problem been solved in the best way? Probably not. But it shouldn’t be avoided.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally from South Carolina, questioned the former president’s focus.
“I don’t know about dogs and cats,” Graham said in an interview Thursday. “But there are scores of young women who have been raped and murdered by people here illegally detained, and we let them go. That’s what I would talk about. That should be the face of a broken immigration system, not cats and dogs.”
While the outcome has been a combination of confusion and outrage, the reasons for this moment are rooted in the grievances that have long defined and animated Trump and his followers — and the platforms on which those grievances thrive.
Trump, who kicked off his first presidential campaign with a speech that widely characterized Mexican immigrants as dangerous criminals, has made immigration and border security issues central to his third bid for the White House.
Meanwhile, the right-wing social media ecosystem that sprung up around his 2016 race has morphed into an augmented and disruptive force: Trump now has his own social media network, Truth Social, and ally Elon Musk controls X, formerly Twitter. In particular, Vance has enjoyed fighting the culture wars and other right-wing causes online, often adopting a trolling stance on X, acting as an information filter between the fringe and the mainstream.
Vance and others close to Trump have argued that while the allegations are false, they have served a purpose by putting the Springfield story in the spotlight.
“The media didn’t care about the carnage caused by these policies until we turned it into a cat meme, and that says the media doesn’t care about what’s going on in these communities,” Vance told CNN after Tuesday’s debate. “If we have to remember it to get the media to care, we’re going to keep doing it because the media could, should, care about what’s going on.”
The case in Springfield, about 45 miles from Columbus in southwest Ohio, involves thousands of Haitian immigrants who have settled in the city in recent years, many of them there legally under federal programs after fleeing violence and political turmoil. For months, residents and political leaders, including Vance, have raised economic and public safety concerns, arguing that an influx of up to 20,000 immigrants to the city, which had a population of 59,000 in 2020, has strained resources.
Allegations of kidnapping, slaughtering and eating pets are more recent.
The national neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe was among the early spreaders of the rumor in August, posting about it on Gabi and Telegram, social networks favored by extremists. Although the leader of the group has taken credit for agreeing to Trump’s demands, the reach of the Blood Tribe is unknown; its accounts on these sites have less than 1,000 followers.
Some Blood Tribe members also planned a few events in the real world, such as a small August 10th march in Springfield protesting Haitian immigration and an appearance at a city council meeting later that month.
The rumor soon spread to mainstream social media such as Facebook and X. NewsGuard, a misinformation monitoring firm, traced the origin to an undated message from a private Facebook group shared on X in a screenshot posted on September 5.
“Remember when my hometown of Springfield Ohio was all over the National News for Haitians?” user wrote. “Did I say all the ducks disappeared from our parks? Well, now it’s your pet.”
Around the same time, other social media messages arose and spread about the rumor, some of which were partially based on residents’ comments at public hearings. As of September 6, X had 1,100 posts mentioning Haitians, migrants or immigrants eating pets, cats, dogs and geese, according to research firm PeakMetrics. The next day there were 9,100, which means an increase of 720 percent.
The number of posts rose again to 47,000 on Monday when Vance aired the rumor with X.
“Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos throughout Springfield, Ohio,” Vance wrote, referring to remarks he made at a Senate hearing. “Reports now show that people who shouldn’t be in this country have kidnapped and eaten their pets.”
Vance, as he noted in his post, had been raising the issue for months, but less provocatively.
“Now go to Springfield, go to Clark County, Ohio, and ask the people there if they’ve gotten richer by 20,000 newcomers in four years,” he said in early July, before Trump chose him as his running mate at NatCon. right-wing nationalist conference. “Living is through the roof. Middle-class people in Springfield, who have lived there sometimes for generations, can’t afford to live there.”
Shortly after Vance’s post on Monday, Springfield police officials told the Springfield News-Sun — and later NBC News and other national media outlets — that they had received no credible reports of such incidents. Vance released a follow-up message the next day, writing that his office had received reports of “pets or local wildlife” being “abducted by Haitian migrants.”
“It is of course possible that all these rumors turn out to be false,” he added.
But at that point, Trump was totally on board with them. At 5:19 p.m. Tuesday, less than four hours before his conversation with Harris, Trump posted a meme on Truth Social depicting cats armed for war wearing a MAGA hat. Fifteen minutes later, he shared another meme that depicted him surrounded by cats and ducks.
Then came the conversation. When asked by ABC News Moderator David Muir about his opposition to the bipartisan border bill, a distracted Trump first insisted on responding to Harris’ claims that people were leaving his campaign rallies early. His convoluted response eventually turned to Springfield, where he said, “they eat dogs… and cats.”
The discomfort and disapproval of Trump’s fellow Republicans was soon palpable.
“I want to be clear on this. It’s a very small, minor issue in the United States,” Trump loyalist Byron Donalds of Florida told NBC News when asked about the pet remarks in the post-debate spin room.
Those looking for the culprit offered several suspects. Laura Loomer, the right-wing political activist and conspiracy theorist who published the rumor, traveled with Trump to the conversation on Tuesday.
“Why do you want to talk to me? I don’t work for President Trump,” Loomer responded to NBC News.
Loomer and Trump did not speak on the flight, said a source familiar with the trip. And a Trump aide noted that Loomer “is not a member of our staff.”
“The president is the most well-read man in America, and he has a pulse on everything that’s going on,” the aide added.
The Springfield rumor “reached his desk. He was aware of what these residents were saying.”
Others focused their suspicions on Vance for forcing the issue into the spotlight.
“It’s all about JD,” a source linked to the campaign said.
Another source close to the Trump campaign said Trump and Vance did not discuss the Springfield issue before the conversation.
“I don’t know what he was thinking,” another Trump ally said of his choice to bring up the Springfield rumor.
This person said Trump is solely to blame.
“You don’t manufacture Donald Trump,” the ally added. “You can make suggestions.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
