Donald Trump spreads an internet rumor: In a small town in Ohio, migrants are eating the pets of the locals. The story is completely made up. For Trump, disinformation is systematic.
Donald Trump has lost the televised debate against Kamala Harris. For many observers, his lowest point was the moment when he told an absurd horror story about migrants in a small town in Ohio. The millions of immigrants that the Biden administration has allowed into the country are a great plague for many towns, the former president said. “In Springfield, they eat the dogs. The people who came in eat the cats. They eat the pets of the people who live there.”
Harris shook his head and laughed at Trump. The moderator David Muir intervened. His television station had contacted the head of the city administration in Springfield. He had told them: “There are no credible reports that pets have been harmed, injured or abused by migrants.” Nevertheless, Trump shared a video shortly afterwards on his short message service Truth Social showing the arrest of a black woman. The caption above it read: “An Ohio woman allegedly killed and ate a cat in front of her shocked neighbors.”
Viral rumors without evidence
The Reuters news agency checked the video. The woman is not a migrant. She was arrested in Canton in August. The city in Ohio is 270 kilometers from Springfield. “She lived in Canton all her life,” said a spokesman for the local police.
Long before Trump told the story to millions of people on television, rumors had been circulating on the Internet for months. One important trigger was a post in a private Facebook group last September. “Springfield is a small town in Ohio. Four years ago, it had 60,000 inhabitants. Under Harris, 20,000 immigrants were shipped here from Haiti. Now ducks and pets are disappearing,” it said. A neighbor’s friend had lost her cat. One day, she discovered the dead cat hanging from a tree on the neighbor’s house, where Haitians lived: “Like slaughtering a deer, they had dismembered it to eat.”
Another germ of the story is the appearance of a local influencer at a town hall meeting in Springfield in August. The African-American Anthony Harris was angry about the many migrants in the city. He said he received a call from a single mother. “She really needs support from welfare. But there are only migrants there.” Something must be done about the Haitians: “They grab ducks in the parks, cut off their heads and eat them.”
Gradually, videos and posts were also shared online by right-wing conservative opinion makers such as Jack Posobiec. He has an audience of 2.7 million followers on the short message service X. Trump’s running mate J. D. Vance, who himself comes from Ohio, also spread the rumors about the Haitian migrants in Springfield. A picture of Trump, who appears to be fleeing from a dark-skinned crowd with a cat under his arm, soon circulated online. Republican MPs wrote posts online with the slogan “Cat Lives Matter” in reference to the battle cry of the left-wing anti-racism movement “Black Lives Matter.”
An accident stirs up bad blood
However, even if there is no truth to the cat story from Springfield, the migrants from Haiti are certainly a challenge for the small town. With them, the previously shrinking population has grown by 20 percent in recent years. The high influx is putting a strain on the infrastructure, the school system and the health system, explained Mayor Rob Rue to the television station PBS. However, many of the Haitians came to the country legally under a special residency status and have a work permit. And the migrants are good workers, says local metal construction entrepreneur Jamie McGregor: “I wish I had thirty more of them. Our Haitian employees come to work every day, have no drug problems and meet the targets.”
Even before the dubious cat story, a very real accident in Springfield heated up the tempers of the locals. In August 2023, a minivan collided with a school bus. Eleven-year-old student Aiden Clark died. The driver of the minivan was an immigrant from Haiti who did not have an American driver’s license.
Trump is trying to use the accident for his election campaign. His team recently wrote on X: “Aiden Clark was killed on his way to school by a Haitian migrant that Kamala Harris had allowed into the country.” The student was “murdered,” said Vance. Clark’s parents, however, strongly criticized this portrayal. Their son was “accidentally” killed by an immigrant. Politicians can stir up as much hatred against migrants as they want, but Aiden’s name must not be misused for political purposes, explained Nathan Clark, demanding an apology.
Trump is unlikely to apologize for this, however – or for the story about the tortured pets. Lies and disinformation are part of Trump’s political toolkit. He is convinced that their legs are longer than the experts generally think. Even if it may not be true, everyone is now talking about Springfield and Trump’s most important campaign issue: immigration. A moderator on the news channel News Nation asked: “If we take Trump’s words about eating pets in a figurative sense, is it perhaps a metaphor for really serious problems in Springfield?”