Fitness for Office
Last Tuesday evening we learned, from his own words, what the former president considers a proper “fact” check. It was a stunning—and disqualifying—admission offered to a national audience. Below is the relevant part of the debate transcript published by ABC News (the bold is mine):
DAVID MUIR: Let me just ask, though, why did you try to kill that bill and successfully so? That would have put thousands of additional agents and officers on the border.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: First let me respond as to the rallies. She said people start leaving. People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can’t talk about that. People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That’s because people want to take their country back. Our country is being lost. We’re a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War 3, just to go into another subject. 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. As far as rallies are concerned, as far — the reason they go is they like what I say. They want to bring our country back. They want to make America great again. It’s a very simple phrase. Make America great again. She’s destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn’t have a chance of success. Not only success. We’ll end up being Venezuela on steroids.
DAVID MUIR: I just want to clarify here, you bring up Springfield, Ohio. And ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community —
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I’ve seen people on television
DAVID MUIR: Let me just say here this …
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: 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.
DAVID MUIR: I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking it from the city manager.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.
DAVID MUIR: Again, the Springfield city manager says there’s no evidence of that.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We’ll find out
First note that, as is so usual, he totally ignored the question asked. Then, in an unforced extra he riffed about immigrants (“people who went there”) killing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. (Elsewhere he and his running mate, JD Vance spoke of “Haitian immigrants”.) This racist, dehumanizing, xenophobic, unfounded rumor emerged from several sketchy Alt-Right posts in various social media. The original Far Right posts were researched by reporters Sarah Ellison and Jeremy B. Merrill of the Washington Post entitled, “Anatomy of a racist smear: How false claims of pet-eating immigrants caught on.” It’s a good read but I am unable to figure out how to “gift” it, and it lives behind the WaPo paywall. Importantly, the Springfield, Ohio, “police issued a statement ‘to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.’” In pre-Trump/Vance, pre-social media times the police disclaimer would have been sufficient to quash the rumor, but for Trump/Vance and Republican law makers like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Ga.), and Arizona’s conservative firebrand and Senate candidate Kari Lake it was too tempting to resist their confirmation bias in re-posting on social media. Then Trump broadcast the unfounded divisive, racist rumor to an audience estimated at 67 million people watching the debate.
Trump’s they’re-killing-and-eating-cats comment in Tuesday’s debate stoked the sort of divisive tension that is Trump’s stock in trade. The WaPo also reported that Thursday “The mayor of Springfield, Ohio, said a bomb threat Thursday that led to the evacuation of City Hall and numerous buildings ‘used hateful language towards immigrants and Haitians in our community.’”
Trump’s stoking of racism is not in doubt, nor is there any equivocation about his plan to round up and deport ten million or more undocumented aliens from the United States.
The Greater Admission
What should send a shiver down the spine of every voter is Trump’s admission, in all seriousness, of his source for the story: “Well, I’ve seen people on television.” A man who collects and acts on rumors generated on social media (by actors of unknown intent and trustworthiness) and cites what he sees on television without verification, accepts them as his truth, is a gullible twit who ought to be disqualified from service as local dogcatcher, much less returned to the White House and entrusted with the nuclear codes.
And then, of course, to round out the cat theme from the title we must touch on the weird ideas of the VP candidate:
In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
I hardly think Taylor Swift, when she signed off her Instagram endorsement of Kamal Harris, as “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady” was miserable. JD Vance has been branded (rightly) as a weird misogynist for his “Childless Cat Lady” remarks. Trump’s “Immigrants are killing and eating their neighbors’ cats” and Vance’s “miserable childless cat ladies” [my constructions-paraphrases, not direct quotes] capture these two perfectly.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. NPR offers a fascinating article titled “JD Vance went viral for ‘cat lady’ comments. The centuries-old trope has a long tail.” As always, click the underlined words (a “hyperlink”) to jump to the article.