Republican vice presidential nominee, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), speaks with media at the airport before he departs on September 14, 2024, in Greenville, North Carolina. | Source: Allison Joyce / Getty
It appears that the Trump administration is currently scraping the bottom of its barrel of excuses for why Donald Trump and JD Vance keep lying to everyone about everything with no concern for who their lies put in harm’s way. On Sunday, Vance sat down for an interview with CNN, and, with a straight face, argued that he and Trump lie in order for the people to see the truth.
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” Vance said of his and Trump’s false claim that illegal immigrants were abducting and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — an internet rumor that made it all the way to a nationally televised presidential debate stage despite being based on zero evidence. “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.”
MORE: White Men, Not Haitian Immigrants, Keep Trying To Kill Donald Trump
Nah — being this evil shouldn’t be this easy.
Vance and Trump didn’t just “start talking about cat memes.” What they did was target an entire ethnic group in a specific location in the U.S. with egregiously racist and xenophobic lies stating blatantly that they were abducting people’s cats and dogs and eating them. And, again, the ex-president of the United States who wants to be president for another term took this ugly and baseless lie and repeated it in his presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. This resulted in MAGA minions across the MAGA-net digging up any story they could find that they could, in their own minds, plausibly present as evidence that Trump was telling the truth about the dangerous illegal Haitian immigrants — including a story about a cat-eating woman who, as it turns out, is not an illegal Haitian immigrant or an immigrant at all.
Now, after schools and buildings in Springfield have been evacuated during bomb threats and the Haitian community in Springfield has complained that they’re being targetted for violence due to Trump and Vance’s racist rumor spreading, Vance is out here casually admitting that it was, in fact, all a lie (after he had repeatedly defended his provably false claims by claiming he had received first and second-hand accounts of it).
When Vance says he and his running mate work to “create stories” so that the media “pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” he’s clearly only talking about white people. Also, even if he wasn’t being absurd his reason would still be illogical. Because of their spreading of a story that was not based on facts or credible reports, no one is talking about any aspect of the so-called immigration crisis in Ohio other than whether or not migrants are eating people’s cats. That’s it. That’s the sum total of the “attention” his bigoted white nonsense brought to what he claims is such an important issue. Even if he was merely “talking about cat memes,” all he brought to the dialog was more cat memes.
Hell, even when it was brought up to him that the Proud Boys were marching in Springfield in response to what he just admitted was a lie, Vance responded by continuing to double down on his anti-immigrant propaganda.
“I think we have to keep our focus not on 12 marchers going down the street but on the fact that thousands of residents have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s policy,” he said.
It’s worth mentioning that Vance isn’t the only one admitting this story about Haitian migrants eating pets was always a complete fabrication. In fact, a woman who has been credited with one of the earliest social media posts regarding the rumor is now admitting she had no first-hand knowledge of anything like that happening and that she never expected her post to blow up the way it did.
From NBC News:
“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday.
Lee recently posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat that went missing, adding that the neighbor told Lee she thought the cat was the victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbors.
Newsguard, a media watchdog that monitors for misinformation online, found that Lee had been among the first people to publish a post to social media about the rumor, screenshots of which circulated online. The neighbor, Kimberly Newton, said she heard about the attack from a third party, NewsGuard reported.
Newton told Newsguard that Lee’s Facebook post misstated her story, and that the owner of the missing cat was “an acquaintance of a friend” rather than her daughter’s friend. Newton could not be reached for comment.
Lee said she had no idea the post would become part of a rumor mill that would spiral into the national consciousness. She has since deleted the Facebook post.
Imagine Lee’s surprise when she found out her innocent little post about Haitians in Ohio had spread so wide that Donald Trump was hitting the verbal “share” button during the most important debate of his campaign for the presidency. That’s how irresponsible and casually racist Trump, Vance and their campaign are, and if they’re elected to office, it’s what marginalized people everywhere have to look forward to for the next four years.
SEE ALSO:
Haitian Community Says Trump’s Pet-Eating Lies Put Target On Their Backs While JD Vance Doubles Down
JD Vance Spreads Baseless Lies About Haitian Migrants Abducting And Eating American Pets
