Seemingly out of the blue Monday morning, supporters of former president Donald Trump began posting myriad AI-generated images depicting the Republican presidential nominee as a savior. Not of the American Dream or of Christianity, mind you, the normal targets of such praise. Instead, Trump was shown protecting ducks and kitty cats.
If you are not a denizen of the right’s conversational bubble, this will probably strike you as incomprehensible. If you are such a denizen, though, you know what’s happening: Trump and his allies — and his running mate! — are elevating false or unsubstantiated claims about immigrants injuring and eating pets and other animals. And of course, blaming the Biden administration and Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, for this thing-that-is-not-demonstrably-happening happening.
The claim centers on Springfield, Ohio, a small city a bit southwest of the state capital of Columbus. A screenshot of a Facebook post purportedly from a local resident warns that the author’s neighbor’s daughter’s friend had discovered that her neighbors — supposedly Haitian immigrants — were trying to eat her cat. She also claimed (this time crediting “Rangers & police”) that similar fates were befalling ducks and geese at a local park.
This message was clipped and shared by a putative breaking-news account on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. It was paired with a photo of a Black man carrying a goose and walking down a street. In short order, the post was picked up by a number of prominent voices on the right, including Trump adviser Stephen Miller. From there it metastasized, with people plucking pieces of information off the internet and attaching it to the original claim as though it was supporting evidence. A guy at a community meeting mentioned the ducks! An Ohio woman was recently arrested for eating a cat! Just proves the point.
Except that the guy carrying the goose was photographed in Columbus a month ago and is not obviously an immigrant from Haiti, much less one in Springfield.
And except that the woman arrested for eating the cat was also not obviously an immigrant — and was arrested in a different Ohio town about 100 miles northeast of Springfield.
And except that the local police say they have no reports of pets being stolen in a manner consistent with the posts. That guy who mentioned the ducks? A local podcaster wearing a sweatshirt promoting his mayoral bid in next year’s election.
None of this stopped Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), from jumping into the fray.
“Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio,” he posted on X. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”
Reports don’t “show” that, certainly, and the video clip Vance linked, from several months previously, includes no similar allegations. Instead, it focuses on the strain on public services and particularly housing that the town faced in light of the increase in new arrivals, an issue common to other places as well. What’s more, the Haitian immigrants at issue aren’t there illegally, as the city’s website explains. But the conversation in Vance’s universe was focused on the purported threat to Springfield’s cats, so he jumped right on in.
So did X’s owner, Elon Musk, as you might expect. The guy who bought Twitter with the explicit aim of making it friendlier to outlandish right-wing claims helpfully pointed out the eating-cats thing to activist Charlie Kirk, lest Kirk have missed that component of the fearmongering.
The story snowballed from various unverified reports, with people all over X and other platforms chucking their own little hunks of snow at it. In MAGA world, the alleged pet-eating is already a matter of fact, and Republican elected officials, including Vance, are hurrying to join the clout rush, the scramble to get attention and likes and followers by treating it as a serious issue.
President Trump will deport migrants who eat pets.
Kamala Harris will send them to your town next.
Make your choice, America.
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 9, 2024
This is a central reason that Vance and others on the right are susceptible to being described as “weird.” There’s an online world in which things get taken to the nth-degree because its economy rewards that sort of hyperbole. But then these obsessions and claims are taken out of that bubble and presented to everyone else and they don’t hold up. What else can you do but marvel at how strange it all is?
There’s another small-town Ohio story that got some traction over the weekend, too. In this one, a guy claims that his daughter sought to enroll her kid in preschool, only to learn that she would need to hire a translator since the class would be conducted entirely in Spanish to accommodate the other kids. The claim, elevated by a prominent right-wing account, has been retweeted more than 20,000 times.
It comes from the account “christianprepperr” on TikTok, and, like the claims about the pets, offers no evidence beyond anecdotes a few steps removed from the original source. It does tell a useful political story, though, one that the right is eager to hear.
Unfortunately for christianprepperr, the Springfield story ticked a few more of the boxes that make a rumor popular within that bubble. There’s always next time.