The consequences of Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s ugly lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are quite real. Threats of violence in the community have become painfully common in recent weeks, and some locals have decided to take matters to a new level.
As my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained, a national non-profit organization called the Haitian Bridge Alliance announced this week that it’s seeking criminal charges against the former president and the Ohio senator, accusing the Republicans of making false alarms, aggravated menacing and telecommunications harassment.
Republican Rep. Clay Higgins saw the news and responded in an overtly racist way. NBC News reported:
Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., called Haiti the “nastiest country in the western hemisphere” in a post on social media Wednesday, saying migrants from the Caribbean country, the majority of whom are in the U.S. legally, should “get their ass out of our country.”
Even by contemporary standards, the GOP congressman’s rant was unusually ugly. “These Haitians are wild,” Higgins wrote in the since-deleted tweet. “Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters… but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th.”
There’s no point in fact-checking every individual claim in Higgins’ nonsense, though I’ll mention that “vudu” was probably a misspelling of “Voodou,” and Jan. 20 was almost certainly a reference to the day Donald Trump would be inaugurated for a second term if voters return him to power.
The backlash was immediate, especially from many of the Republican’s Black colleagues, though House Speaker Mike Johnson — a fellow far-right Louisianan — offered words of tacit support. Higgins, the speaker told reporters, “is a dear friend of mine and a colleague from Louisiana and a very frank and outspoken person.”
Johnson added that he’d spoken to Higgins about the tweet and that Higgins “went to the back and he prayed about it, and he regretted it, and he pulled the post down.”
Higgins soon after made the House speaker appear foolish by stepping all over his defense.
“I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to,” he told CNN amid the uproar. “I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want. … It’s not a big deal to me. It’s like something stuck to the bottom of my boot. Just scrape it off and move on with my life.”
The idea that Higgins “regretted” his racism was obviously proven absurd by his on-the-record indifference.
What kind of intraparty consequences will he face? Probably none, because in contemporary GOP politics, overt racism is too often tolerated.
For those unfamiliar with the far-right congressman Higgins, in his capacity as a local sheriff, appeared in a video in 2016 in which he described several Black criminal suspects as “animals” and “heathens,” adding, “You will be hunted, you will be trapped, and if you raise a weapon to a man like me, we’ll return fire with superior fire.”
After the video surfaced, Higgins resigned — which cleared the way for his election to Congress, where he’s best known for concocting deeply weird conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6 attack. This, of course, didn’t stop GOP leaders from assigning him to a task force investigating the Trump rally shooting. But stepping back, Higgins’ racism comes on the heels of allegations that Republican Mark Robinson of North Carolina described himself as a “Nazi” who argued that slavery wasn’t necessarily a “bad” thing, which came on the heels of Trump and Vance peddling racist lies about Springfield. Which came on the heels of Trump’s racist rhetoric about Vice President Kamala Harris. Which came on the heels of Trump pitching the idea that Black people like him more because he’s a criminal. Which came on the heels of Trump telling Time magazine, “I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed.” (The Republican added that he hopes to focus on the “problem” related to the “bias against white.”) Which came on the heels of Axios reporting that in a prospective second term, Trump and his team intend to “dramatically change the government’s interpretation of Civil Rights-era laws to focus on ‘anti-white racism’ rather than discrimination against people of color.” A couple of years ago, Republican officials expressed some confidence that the party’s strategic outreach to Black voters was starting to pay off. The Hill reported that the GOP believed its messaging was starting to “resonate with the crucial voting bloc.” The New York Times reported soon after that Republicans saw “a fresh opening” to “peel away some Black voters.” I don’t know whether Republicans will make gains with Black voters in the 2024 elections, but I do know that the GOP is asking Black voters to overlook an astonishing amount of recent, overt Republican racism.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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