What Was He Even Talking About?

Even in a debate full of bizarre statements from Donald Trump, the one about cats and dogs stuck out.

The question to the former president was simple: Why did you work to kill an immigration bill that would have added thousands of border guards?

His answer was not. He began with a mini-diatribe about his crowd sizes, responding to an earlier attack from Kamala Harris. Once that was out of his system, Trump turned to immigration. Sort of.

“You’re going to end up in World War III, just to go into another subject,” he said. “What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don’t want to talk—not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—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.”

[David Frum: How Harris roped a dope]

Trump never did explain why he’d killed the border bill. Then he returned to ranting about the rallies, probably leaving many viewers wondering what he had been talking about.

Here’s the background, for those not immersed in the conservative internet. For the past few days, allies of Trump have, without offering a shred of evidence, spread reports about Haitian immigrants in the central-Ohio town of Springfield eating pet cats. The town has seen thousands of new arrivals from the stricken Caribbean nation; authorities there say they’ve helped revitalize the local economy. But, as the debate moderator David Muir immediately clarified, the Springfield city manager says there have been no credible reports of pet-eating. Local police have said the same. Trump weakly protested that he’d seen the claims on television, though he of all people should know better than to believe everything on TV.

Despite the lack of evidence, conservative influencers have insisted that incidents are widespread, eager or content to spread hatred of dark-skinned immigrants and gin up votes. As my colleague Ali Breland explained yesterday, they’ve spread memes of Trump and cats and said he’ll protect the pets. “Taken seriously, the content of these posts is deeply offensive and dehumanizing. But the people sharing them get to hide behind a thin veil of irony,” Breland wrote.

[Read: The worst cat memes you’ve ever seen]

Trump’s own running mate has zealously spread the rumors, even after admitting that he had no proof. At the debate, Trump simply insisted that he was right, but J. D. Vance—always eager to prove he’s the smartest kid in the class—can’t help giving away the game. In a post on X yesterday, he acknowledged that there were no credible reports about pets being killed yet, though he said his office—he’s still a senator representing Ohio, after all—had received tips. (If you suspected that your cat had been snatched off the street, would you call local authorities, or your U.S. senator’s office?) Even so, he insisted, the memes were necessary to call attention to harms brought by immigrants, and encouraged his allies to keep spreading the fake claims: “Don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.” If politicians insist that they have to lie to you to get you to see the truth, how will one ever know when they aren’t lying to you?

When Trump blustered into bringing up the pet claim, some Republicans and conservatives were horrified—not because it was false and offensive, but because they knew it was politically stupid. “YOU STUPID MF’ers JUST GOT TRUMP TO REPEAT YOUR LIE ABOUT THE PETS. CONGRATS ON SETTING THE NEWS STORIES TOMORROW BY LYING SO TRUMP PICKS IT UP AND SAYS STUPID SHIT,” Erick Erickson wrote on X. But hey, Trump was just keeping the cat memes flowing, as Vance had exhorted.

(Of course, the Republican ticket makes for curious champions of pets. Trump has long used “like a dog” as a stock insult. Vance has dismissed women who are not mothers as “childless cat ladies.” And Trump recently scored an endorsement from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the less said about his unbearable history with animals, the better.)

[Helen Lewis: Taylor Swift’s three-word burn of J. D. Vance]

The pet-eating-immigrants moment was damaging because it is a reminder of how Trump cannot focus on issues, how he avidly divides people, and how he cannot resist the allure of the extremely online. As my colleague David Frum wrote, Harris’s debate strategy involved baiting Trump into appearing deranged. This wasn’t particularly novel; it was President Joe Biden’s strategy in the first debate, though he catastrophically failed to execute. But it worked for Harris, as Trump kept losing his cool and heading down strange avenues of thought.

Harris visibly enjoyed this game and kept batting Trump around with her paw. Sometimes, a split screen caught her grinning like the Cheshire cat as he rambled. And then, not long after the debate ended, the pop star Taylor Swift endorsed Harris on Instagram, alongside a photo of herself and a feline friend. She signed the post, “Childless Cat Lady.”