During the first presidential debate on Tuesday night, former president Donald Trump baselessly claimed that immigrants in an Ohio community are slaughtering and consuming local pets.
“Our country is being lost,” Trump said. “We’re a failing nation.”
He urged viewers to look at what President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have “done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our county.”
“A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it,” he said, claiming that in Springfield, Ohio, immigrants are “eating the dogs.”
“The people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump claimed, before going on to suggest Harris would destroy the country if she were to become president. “We’ll end up being Venezuela on steroids.”
Trump’s comments refer to a popular conspiracy theory circulating among his followers online that Haitian immigrants in the Ohio community have been eating pets. The claims seem to stem from an amalgamation of several different stories, beginning with comments from a local resident who claimed at a meeting of the city commission last month that Haitian immigrants in the city were slaughtering park ducks for food.
A Facebook post claimed a cat had been killed by Haitian immigrants, though the claim was attributed to the poster’s neighbour’s daughter’s friend and was shared without evidence.
Users online have also pointed to a news report from last month about a woman who was arrested for killing and eating a cat; however, that incident occurred in Canton, Ohio, and the report says nothing of the perpetrator’s nationality.
The debate moderators pushed back against Trump’s claims on Tuesday evening, noting ABC News had reached out to the Springfield city manager, who said there had been no credible reports of pets being harmed, injured or abused by members of the immigrant community.
Nonetheless, Trump doubled down.
“Well, I’ve seen people on television. The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food so maybe he said that, and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager. People on television say their dog was eaten by the people who went there,” he said.
Harris, for her part, laughed off Trump’s claims and called him extreme. “This is I think one of the reasons why I actually have the endorsement of 200 republicans who had formerly worked with George Bush, Mitt Romney and John McCain, including the endorsement of former vice president Dick Cheney and Congress member Liz Cheney.”
Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, had peddled the claim in a post on X just one day earlier .
Vance claimed that illegal immigrants were “causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio”.
“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?” he wrote, referring to Harris.
Other Trump allies had latched onto the conspiracy theory, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Representative Nancy Mace.
Meanwhile, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby called the allegations “dangerous” and a “conspiracy theory… based on an element of racism.”
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