The Republicans desperately need to distract voters away from abortion. They’ve now found the perfect new scapegoat
After Donald Trump’s disastrous debate with Kamala Harris on 10 September he decided to center his campaign on a single incendiary issue: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
When Trump was corrected during the debate by the ABC moderator David Muir, who pointed out that his statement about the Haitian community in the Ohio town was erroneous, he insisted it was factual. “Well,” he said, “I’ve seen people on television, people on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food.’” But there were no such “people on television”. There were no dogs taken for food. Trump called Muir a “foolish fool”, and said, “He’s a guy with good hair, but not as good as it was five years ago.”
Trump showed up at the debate with a new hairstyle and tint – less Liberace and brassy blond, cut a bit shorter and softer, and shaped without the stiff angular pompadour – to lend him a more youthful appearance. His hair is always a preoccupation that has in the past had priority over policy. On a visit to France, in 2018, he refused to attend a memorial service at the Aisne-Marne American cemetery of first world war soldiers near Paris in a light rain whose humidity might loosen the firm hold of his hairspray, and gave as an excuse that the fallen were “suckers” and “losers”.
At the debate, he was anxiously competing with someone on the stage other than Kamala Harris. He was fixated on the hair of the younger male journalist. His narcissism exhausts him. It gives him no rest. “It was three against one,” Trump said. “I was surprised at David Muir. I thought he was a high-quality person, but he is just a sleaze like the rest of them.”
But Trump quickly gave up on Muir’s hair to focus on the more significant issue of “eating the pets”. Trump’s obsession was not an absurd, spasmodic or random act. It was not an off-ramp along the winding road of his incoherent digressions. Trump homed in on the lie as a strategic necessity. Trump understood that its outrageousness would make it unforgettable and repeatable. The falsehood served to personify the fears he routinely seeks to arouse of an alien invasion. The dogs and cats substitute for his usual horror story about a young woman murdered by an immigrant in the country illegally. He moved the blood libel to lovable pets.
After the debate left him staggering into the spin room to proclaim, “It’s the best debate I ever had,” before confusedly retreating, Trump’s imperative has been to hold on to his base. He can afford no erosion. Losing even a point might be a falling rock that starts a landslide.
Trump desperately needed to distract the national discussion away from abortion. His pre-debate charade of gyrating positions failed to beguile women voters. His charm offensive was offensive without the charm. The gender gap widened to an even greater chasm.
The day before the debate, he held a commanding lead on the economy, 10 points over Harris, 55% to 45%, in a Pew poll. But afterwards, the FT-Michigan Ross polls showed Harris with an advantage on trust in her handling of the economy by 44% to 42%, and 48% to 42% among those who watched the debate.
Trump knows in his bones that his supporters will believe anything he says. If he ever feels they will abandon him, he cannot shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue. He does not require any evidence, not even spectral, to trigger their need to demonstrate unswerving faith. Once he speaks, declaring miracles, he is certain his supporters will fall to their knees. And, mirabile dictu, a majority, 52%, say it’s true that “Haitian immigrants are abducting and eating pet dogs and cats,” according to a post-debate YouGov poll. Only 5% are willing to confess the heresy that it is “definitely false”, while 25% are agnostically “unsure”.
Trump’s lie about “eating pet dogs and cats” is his best-polling lie. It polled nine points better among his supporters than his lie that “in some states it is legal to kill a baby after birth”. It polled 24 points better than his lie that “public schools are providing students with sex-change operations” and 44 points better than his lie that “noise from wind turbines has been shown to cause cancer.” The raw numbers dictated the emphasis of his fiction.
The illogic of his demagogy gives Trump no pause. He has railed that immigrants are stealing “Black jobs”. He says the Haitians of Springfield are illegal. But they are in fact legal and of course black. They are the black people usurping the “Black jobs”.
Trump knew before he uttered his lie in the debate about “eating pets” that it was untrue. The morning of the debate, according to the Wall Street Journal, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, had a staffer call the office of the Springfield city manager.
