Trump and Vance Are Preparing For a Bloodbath

What their racist lie about immigrants eating pets is supposed to accomplish.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

There were many striking moments from the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, but this one is going to stick with me, when Trump used the opportunity of speaking to the largest audience he’ll have during the campaign to repeat a rancid, racist lie about immigrants in Ohio allegedly kidnapping and eating people’s dogs and cats:  

“In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating — they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country.”

You have to watch the clip to understand it fully. You have to hear the way he lengthens the word “dogs,” the way his volume increases when he gets to the lurid part, the hint of rage in his voice. Harris laughs in response because it’s so ridiculous, and it is ridiculous. But it’s also terrifying. The news media may call this a “false claim” or a “debunked story.” It’s much more sinister than that. 

A few days ago, Trump said about immigrants, “getting them out will be a bloody story.” Indeed it will, if he manages to carry out the mass deportation he has promised. And if you’re planning for blood, you have to prepare people. You have to whip them up, stoke their rage, and suppress any moral qualms they might feel when they see people being arrested and beaten and even killed, because that will inevitably happen when you start rounding them up by the millions. You have to convince people that those at the sharp end of that bloody story are not really human at all. 

JD Vance gave Trump this tale

It’s thanks to his running mate that Trump knows about Springfield, Ohio at all. For some time Vance has been talking about Springfield as a cautionary immigration tale, since a large number of Haitian immigrants have moved there in recent years, drawn by job openings and a low cost of living. But it wasn’t until neo-Nazis began spreading a lie about those immigrants eating pets that Vance got people to really pay attention to Springfield. The story is false, but it ricocheted through right-wing social media, quickly being promoted by Elon Musk, various Republican members of Congress, and Vance himself, who was all too eager to spread it far and wide. 

When he has been challenged about it, Vance insists that while no one has been able to document a single incident of a Haitian immigrant (or anyone else) kidnapping and eating people’s pets in Springfield, his office is supposedly fielding calls from people who have heard the stories, and for some reason decided that they should call their senator about it. To say that strains credulity would be generous, but Vance’s point is that we don’t need genuine evidence, because it’s so clear that immigration makes Americans’ lives worse. This is what he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins when she challenged him: “Whether those exact rumors turn out to be mostly true, somewhat true, whatever the case may be, Kaitlan, this town has been ravaged by 20,000 migrants coming in.”  

In other words, the fake story reveals a deeper, more essential truth that it’s important for people to believe. And what is that supposed truth? Is it that we should be concerned about the effects of immigration on housing prices or school resources? No no no. It’s that immigrants must be seen as sub-human. Who eats dogs and cats? Humans don’t do that.

The accusation is meant to evoke fear and disgust; it’s closely related to the ancient blood libel against Jews, which said they were kidnapping Christian children to kill them and use their blood in dark rituals. JD Vance is no dummy; he is very conscious of the way he is kneading the clay of racist lies to arrive at what he believes is a more elemental truth. 

In a speech at the National Conservatism conference a couple of months ago, he said people should go to Springfield “and ask the people there whether they have been ‘enriched’ by 20,000 newcomers.” He called them “illegal” despite the fact that these immigrants are in fact in the country legally, mostly through temporary protected legal status, then made clear that he knew he was lying (“And of course the left will fact-check and say, well, they’re not illegal immigrants because through the abuse of asylum laws and through Joe Biden’s massive paroles, they are now no longer technically illegal aliens because according to Joe Biden nobody is an illegal alien”). That lie, he said, was in service to a more profound truth, that immigrants do not belong here and it is native-born conservatives who are oppressed, since “The only illegal people in this country are the people whose grandparents were born here, according to the Biden administration.” 

But it’s one thing to say that legal immigrants are in fact “illegal aliens”; it’s something else to say they’re grabbing up people’s pets and eating them. The horror of that imagined scene is precisely the point: This fictional barbarity, Trump and Vance are saying, must be met with genuine barbarity of our own. These are not humans but monsters, and if we have to spill their blood to purify our nation, it will be a righteous and glorious pogrom.

There are monsters in this story, but they aren’t the immigrants trying to build a better life for themselves and their families. They’re the neo-Nazis, the right-wing influencers, the ghoulish amen chorus online and on Fox, and most of all, Donald Trump and JD Vance. They’re seeding the ground for something truly horrifying, and no one should mistake it for anything else.