It was earlier this month when Donald Trump and JD Vance launched an ugly and racist offensive against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, falsely accusing them of being pet-eating, disease-ridden thieves. A dangerous national firestorm, including threats of violence, soon followed.
What might not be immediately obvious to the public is that the offensive isn’t over. The New Republic noted:
Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that the towns he smeared with anti-immigrant lies actually suffered ‘hostile takeovers’ by immigrants, and insisted that immigrants have been ‘taking over’ cities across America. During a campaign stop in Mint Hill, North Carolina, Trump continued to escalate his violent rhetoric about immigrant populations in Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado.”
In the same remarks, the former president said “illegals” are “creating havoc” in Springfield, despite the fact that the Haitian immigrants entered the United States legally, and the only people responsible for creating havoc in the Ohio community are members of the Republican Party’s presidential ticket.
A day earlier, Trump campaigned in Georgia, mocked Haitian immigrants’ accents, and said they’ll “have to” leave the country, despite the positive impact they’re having in Springfield.
The day before that, Trump held a rally in Pennsylvania where he said, in reference to the Haitian immigrants, “You have to get them the hell out” because they’ve “destroyed” Springfield. His followers responded by chanting, “Send them back! Send them back!”
Trump: Do you think Springfield will ever be the same? You have to get them the hell out. You have to get them out.
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 24, 2024
Crowd: *chants send them back* pic.twitter.com/0QVkXCQ9si
If there was another moment in this campaign as nauseating as this one, I can’t think of it.
His running mate, who ostensibly represents the community, isn’t letting up, either. After playing a direct role in picking this radical and unnecessary fight, Vance complained at a rally this week about news organizations daring to tell the public the truth about immigrants in Springfield.
A few days earlier, the Ohio senator dared journalists to go to Springfield and get the whole story — indifferent to the fact that when a Wall Street Journal reporter did exactly that, Vance’s lies actually looked worse.
All the while, local Republican officials have continued to confirm that Trump’s and Vance’s claims remain the opposite of reality. Even the editorial board of the local newspaper in Springfield condemned the senator’s lies as “unbecoming of his office.”
It was against this backdrop that the senator implored reporters to “tell the truth,” even as he expressed utter indifference toward the truth.
As for why, exactly, the GOP presidential and vice presidential nominees won’t let this particular lie go, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer had a smart piece along these lines, explaining, “What’s going on here is emblematic of the Trump campaign’s strategy, which is to try to make race the big issue of the campaign, via incessant trolling, lying, and baiting of both the press and the Harris camp.”
Adam added, “The theory is that by supercharging the salience of race — a reliable winner with huge swaths of the electorate — they can compensate for the unpopularity of the Trump campaign’s actual policy agenda: its plans to ban abortion, repeal protections for preexisting conditions in the Affordable Care Act, deregulate Big Business, and cut taxes on the wealthy while raising them on everyone else. The campaign wants people — white people in particular — thinking about race, and hopes that these kinds of appeals will activate the necessary number of voters in the key swing states where the electorate is more conservative than the country as a whole.”
With this in mind, it’s likely that the Republican ticket’s offensive against Springfield will continue for the next 40 or so days.
