Gullible Mr. Trump

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Perhaps the most telling moment of last night’s debate was when former President Donald Trump, desperate for a compelling attack line against Vice President Kamala Harris, repeated the right-wing canard that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are stealing and eating people’s pets.

“They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump shouted into the microphone. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”

A moderator, ABC News’s David Muir, quickly noted that the city manager has said that the story is baseless.

A diminished Trump replied, “Well, I’ve seen people on television. People on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food.’” This was a tremendously revealing response about how Trump’s brain works—and by extension the minds of his Fox News–captured supporters, who will simply believe anything they are told, no matter how outrageous or false, as long as it aligns with their preexisting prejudices. Trump felt so wounded by the exchange that he went on Fox News this morning to demand that ABC News be “shut down” for fact-checking him, a reminder that Trump does not believe that Americans should have the legal right to criticize him.

This falsehood, directed at a community that has done nothing wrong besides being from a different place than the surrounding residents, shows how much the Trump campaign’s strategy hinges on polluting the information environment with lies about vulnerable groups that Republicans want to blame for the country’s problems. But for all their dishonest catastrophizing about immigrants, Republicans offer no solutions, only boundless cruelty toward scapegoats. Fact-checked in real time, Trump could provide no evidence for his smear other than that, like a small child, he believes everything he sees on TV.

[Read: What was he even talking about?]

Much of the Republican political strategy is based on pumping this kind of poison into the public discourse. It is idiotic nonsense that, as Trump has said, children are going to school and coming home having received gender-reassignment surgery. It is totally false that undocumented immigrants are swinging elections. It is a vicious fabrication that women are having their babies killed right after being born. Like the Trump campaign’s effort to incite hatred against Haitian immigrants, these are nothing more than lies meant to frighten the intended audience into endorsing extreme measures against constituencies that are too small or politically weak to defend themselves.

I don’t want to overstate the degree to which the media have acted as a bulwark against these falsehoods. Many members of the press have not covered themselves in glory, perhaps fearing that correcting Trump too aggressively would make them look biased in favor of Democrats. But misinformation has thrived mostly because social-media platforms have largely abandoned efforts at moderation, after a successful intimidation campaign by conservatives committed to ensuring that their most baseless propaganda can reach as large an audience as possible. Members of the press may fail at delivering the truth, but they will at least attempt to do so. Social-media platforms have no such commitment to providing accurate information to users; their priority is ensuring that you are glued to your devices for as long as possible. The extent to which this toxic information dynamic is due solely to the Republican interest in defending whatever baffling nonsense comes out of Trump’s mouth is probably understated.

In this environment, and especially on Elon Musk’s X, where the right-wing billionaire has used his account to boost one false claim after another, misinformation can thrive largely unopposed. This is why Russian influence operations have been so successful in paying conservatives to do their bidding; it is why Republicans in Congress used their authority to attack disinformation researchers; it is why conservatives are paying online influencers to spread misogynist lies about Harris. It is also why the lie about Haitian immigrants spread so quickly, despite having no basis in fact.

Trump had no evidence for this lie, which his running mate, Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, has repeated despite tacit acknowledgment of its inaccuracy, posting that “it’s possible these rumors will turn out to be false.”

Vance’s response deserves unpacking. About 15,000 Haitian immigrants have moved to Springfield, helping revitalize the local economy and filling the pews of local churches. There have also been problems; a sudden influx of people is likely to temporarily strain infrastructure that was built for a smaller population. A child was killed last year when a Haitian immigrant crashed into a school bus; the family of the child has said that the Haitian community as a whole is not at fault and has told the Trump campaign to stop exploiting their son’s death in a xenophobic campaign against immigrants. Besides, the Haitian community is not collectively responsible for the actions of one of its members any more than white people in Ohio are responsible for Vance.

[Read: How Harris roped a dope]

The Haitian immigrants in Springfield have been doing precisely what conservatives say they want immigrants to do: come legally, work hard, and contribute to their new home. But precisely because these immigrants were doing what they were asked, it was necessary to lie about them. As Vance’s response indicates, it does not matter to him if the scurrilous accusations he was making are true. He does not care. If immigration is bad and immigrants are bad, then even a lie serves a larger truth.

These smears of Haitian immigrants are dishonorable. They are cowardly. They are dishonest. And in that, they are as straightforward an example of the values of Trump-era conservatism as you could ask for: an entire political movement venerating an old man who believes whatever racist lies flash across his television screen.