Jamelle Bouie writes regularly for The New York Times. I subscribed to get extra writing from him. In this one, he asks the question that has undoubtedly occurred to many people.
Bouie writes:
On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.
The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.”
What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.
The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.
But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.
And then there is the rest of the agenda. Do Trump voters know that they voted for a Food and Drug Administration that might try to restrict birth control and effectively ban abortion? Do they know that they voted for a Justice Department that would effectively stop enforcement of civil and voting rights laws? Do they know they voted for a National Labor Relations Board that would side with employers or an Environmental Protection Agency that would turn a blind eye to pollution and environmental degradation? Do they know they voted to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act? Do they know that they voted for cuts to Medicaid, and possible cuts Medicare and Social Security if Trump cuts taxes down to the bone?
Do they know that they voted for a Supreme Court that would side with the powerful at every opportunity against their needs and interests?
I’m going to guess that they don’t know. But they’ll find out soon enough.
Some Republican leaders, including Trump, believe that climate change is a hoax. The Trump administration banned the use of the term by government agencies. Florida recently declared it would not adopt science textbooks that explain climate change. It’s not real.
In late June, as a group of mountaineers descended a treacherous glacier high in the Peruvian Andes, they spotted a dark, out-of-place lump resting on the blinding white snow.
When they approached, they realized it wasn’t a rock, as they had initially assumed.
It was a corpse.
When they got a little closer, they could tell from the out-of-date clothes and the condition of the skin that the dead man had been there for a very long time. A miraculously well-preserved California driver’s license in the man’s pocket identified him as Bill Stampfl, a mountaineer from Chino who had been buried by an avalanche in 2002.
Avalanches begin as loose, flowing rivers of ice and snow that sweep their victims off their feet and wash them down the mountain. When the frozen debris stops, it quickly solidifies into something like a concrete tomb. But in recent years, as the planet has warmed and ice has melted at an alarming rate, receding glaciers on the upper reaches of many of the world’s most celebrated and deadly peaks have begun surrendering the bodies of long-lost mountaineers. It’s a blessing and a relief for grieving families who crave closure, but it creates a grim chore for public officials whose job it is to respectfully remove the remains.
Last year, on the heels of a heat wave that triggered the fastest loss of glacial ice in Swiss history, the boot of a German climber who disappeared in 1986 began poking out of a well-traveled glacier near the mountain town of Zermatt, not far from the Matterhorn. In the Himalayas, where hundreds of adventurers have perished on the slopes of Mt. Everest since the 1920s, Nepali officials have been forced to launch risky, arduous expeditions to retrieve the recently revealed — and rapidly thawing — corpses. “Because of global warming, the ice sheet and glaciers are fast melting and the dead bodies that remained buried all these years are now becoming exposed,” Ang Tshering Sherpa, former president of the Nepal Mountaineering Assn., told the BBC in 2019. And now, a similarly gruesome scenario has played out on the slopes of 22,000-foot Huascaran, Peru’s highest mountain.
The warming planet is “definitely the reason we found Bill,” said Ryan Cooper, a personal trainer from Las Vegas who was among the group of climbers who discovered Stampfl’s body a few weeks ago. When Stampfl and two climbing partners disappeared in 2002, rescuers went looking for them. They found one body, that of Steve Erskine, but Matthew Richardson and Stampfl could not be located. “If Bill had been on top of the ice they would have found him, but he was buried back then,” Cooper said in an interview.
A lot has changed in 22 years. Hauscaran is the highest point, and crown jewel, of the Cordillera Blanca, a region of breathtaking natural beauty that’s home to a dozen peaks higher than 20,000 feet and hundreds of alpine glaciers. These ancient, frozen reservoirs supply irrigation and hydroelectric power to much of Peru. But, as with glaciers everywhere on the planet as temperatures have risen, those in the Cordillera Blanca have lost significant mass, as much as 27% in the last five decades, according to official estimates.
Cooper said he didn’t understand the extent and speed of the changes underway until days before his guided climb was supposed to begin. He and his brother, Wes Warne, were hanging out in the Peruvian mountain town of Huaraz, listening in as other climbers and guides compared notes. They heard the glaciers were melting so fast that previously manageable crevasses — cracks caused by natural movement of the ice — had turned into deep, yawning chasms up to 60 feet wide that could swallow an entire team of climbers. And they heard that many guides had begun steering their clients to more stable summits, because conditions on Huascaran had become so dicey. Nevertheless, Cooper’s team decided to give their planned route a try.
The five days they spent on the glaciers were tense, Cooper said, an up-close look at the chaos warmer-than-expected temperatures can cause. “You’re just hearing avalanches, you’re hearing rock fall, you’re hearing ice fall all around you,” Cooper said. “I’ve never been on a mountain that was so active.” Eventually, the guides decided not to push for the summit, Cooper said. Instead, they led the group down an older, less traveled route that had been the standard track “back in the day,” he said, before shifting terrain prompted climbers to start taking a different approach. That’s where they came upon Stampfl’s body, at about 17,000 feet, resting alone, undisturbed and almost completely exposed. In other cases, when just part of a body is sticking out of the ice, excavation can be a grueling ordeal. Rescuers use shovels, axes, boiling water — anything to help coax and pry remains free. As soon as they discovered Stampfl was American, Cooper said, he and his brother set aside their frustrations about not making the summit. They now had a much higher goal — getting Bill home. Once they had climbed down far enough to have cellphone reception, a flurry of text messages began, and Cooper’s wife joined the search for Stampfl’s family. Before long, Cooper found himself on the phone with Joseph Stampfl, Bill’s son.
Retired FBI agent Frank Figliuzzi writes on the MSNBC website about the internal dangers to America. It’s not from immigrants, who are typically more law-abiding than the native-born, but from Neo-Nazi gangs.
He writes:
The federal indictment of 68 defendants accused of being members of (or being associated) with a criminal gang driven by race-based hate followed an investigation that led to the seizure of Nazi paraphernalia, including Adolf Hitler posters, and 97 pounds of fentanyl, federal officials said Wednesday. U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada, who announced the charges, called it one of the “largest takedowns in the history of the Department of Justice against a neo-Nazi, white supremacist, violent extremist organization.”
That announcement landing in the final weeks of a presidential election prompts us to contrast the facts of our crime problem with the fiction that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, would have us believe.
The dismantlement of the group that called itself the Peckerwoods, a San Fernando Valley arm of the notorious Aryan Brotherhood white supremacy organization, came in the form of charges for allegedracketeering, firearms trafficking, drug trafficking and financial fraud. If convicted as charged, some members, who adorn themselves with tattoos of swastikas and other hate symbols, could face life behind bars. The group was so heavily armed and so violent that the FBI deployed its elite Hostage Rescue Team from Quantico, Virginia, to support the arrests. According to the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, the Peckerwoods, a derogatory name historically used against white people, “has as its mission to plan attacks against racial, ethnic, religious minorities.”
Agents seized an arsenal of illegal guns, “bomb-making components” and dozens of kilograms of fentanyl, methamphetamine and heroin, according to law enforcement officials.
The details of this multifaceted investigation reveal a significant component of America’s crime problem: hardened, U.S.-born criminals who traffic in the drugs, guns and violence plaguing our country. This contrasts with the fact-free fearmongering fabrications being sold to MAGA believers. It’s not that minorities don’t commit crimes; nor is that migrants never murder or rape. But Trump and Vance want voters to believe our gun, drug and violence problems are being driven by migrants when the opposite is true…
During the vice presidential debate, Vance claimed the vast majority of illegal guns used in crimes here come from Mexican cartels. The truth is quite different; it’s the U.S. that’s arming Mexican cartels. We have detailed data demonstrating the extent to which American weapons are fueling the violence in Mexico, right down to the make and model of the guns found at crime scenes across the border.
Please open the link to read more about crime statistics and Trump-Vance’s hateful and phony war against immigrants.
Rex Huppke is a columnist for USA Today. He wrote on Twitter about two important tech bros who are his pets. Then he quoted his own tweet as “evidence” that it was true.
Given all the uproar over GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s baseless, utterly false and profoundly racist claims that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets in an Ohio town, I would like to make a public statement that is supported by an equal amount of evidence:
“Not long ago, billionaire Elon Musk ate my cat, Mr. Smushyface. Days later, Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, stole and then barbecued and ate my dog, Zoe. I remained quiet about these incidents for fear other tech bros like Musk and Vance might come for my hamster, Dennis. But after much thoughts and prayer, I have decided to honor the memories of Zoe and Mr. Smushyface by letting the world know what I claim to be the truth.”
For those fortunate enough to not yet be aware of the “immigrants are eating our pets” allegations that bubbled up from the right-wing fever swamps and got spouted by Trump during Tuesday’s presidential debate, here’s the deal: A random Facebook post, grounded in something along the authoritative lines of “I heard from a friend of a friend’s kid,” claimed a cat went missing and was (maybe) eaten by a Haitian immigrant.
It’s true that JD Vance ate my dog because I wrote it on the internet
There’s no evidence of that happening, of course. But xenophobic fearmongers saw it is a perfect way to monger some xenophobic fear. So Musk started trumpeting the ludicrous claim on X, the enormous social media platform he owns, and then Vance was babbling about it and then Trump spoke the words no presidential-debate-watcher ever imagined they’d hear, saying of Springfield, Ohio: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
OK.
If an actual former president who is also the Republican Party’s standard-bearer and its presidential nominee is so concerned about a fabricated story aimed at dehumanizing an entire swath of people, he damn well better be equally concerned about my story, which is true because I read it on the internet. (Granted, what I read on the internet was from my own social media post, but that’s not important.)
My brave admission that Elon ate my cat
Here’s how this real-because-I-say-it-is story of Vance and Musk being ravenous pet devourers developed.
On Monday, I bravely posted the following on X, the social media cesspool formerly known as Twitter ‒ “True story: Elon Musk ate my cat. Please share your own story of Elon Musk eating your pet.”
The response was overwhelming and revealed my pet was far from the only victim of Musk’s decidedly un-American appetite. Others came out of the we’ve-lost-our-pets-to-hungry-tech-bros closet, with posts that included:
“Elon Musk ate my precious bearded dragon Cupcake.”
“Elon Musk ate my worm farm!”
“True story: Elon Musk ate my ferret.”
“He ate my kitten. I was at a conference where he was one day, holding my kitten. He grabbed it from my hand, poured ketchup on it, and just started chomping into it. It was so scary.”
There’s as much evidence Musk ate my cat as there is immigrants ate pets
Posts on X containing false or inaccurate information are often corrected with a “community note.” No such note appeared on my post or on any of the replies, which I took as proof that it’s all 100% true.
I added: “I fear there is widespread pet-eating in the tech-bro community. They’re coming to our cities and towns, we don’t know much about them, they bring radical new ideas about what they view as ‘free speech,’ and they are apparently eating our pets. This has to stop.”
Support from others who say their pets were eaten by Musk and Vance
Again, the responses revealed that Vance’s consumption of my beloved Zoe was not a one-off.
“I caught JD Vance running away with my dog in his grocery wagon.”
“I walked into my house only to find Elon up to his shoulders in my fish tank, bobbing for them while JD chased my cat with a fork and knife! It was horrifying!”
“My Pugs, Montez and Pearl, may they rest in peace, were also consumed by Elon Musk and JD Vance. They had a Pug-B-Que. I grieve every single day for my Pug babies.”
What monsters.
I hope Donald Trump condemns his running mate’s pet-eating ways
Clearly there’s more than enough evidence here for Trump to loudly address the problem, condemn his running mate and Musk and imply there’s something scary, evil and unwelcome about wealthy tech dudes who incorrectly think they’re hilarious.
Nothing will bring back my precious Mr. Smushyface or my lovable dog Zoe. Nothing can bring back any of the wonderful pets I know were stolen and eaten by Vance and Musk because I read something somebody posted on the internet and declined to consider it might just be fabricated bull(expletive).
Something must be done about these rabid tech bros before all our pets wind up down their seemingly bottomless gullets.
I look forward to Trump making this a central part of his campaign in the weeks ahead.
Jonathan V. Last is the lead editor of The Bulwark, the Never Trumper blog and one of the best political blogs.
He wondered whether Republicans in Springfield will vote for Trump after the venom he and Vance have directed at their town.He quotes from a Wall Street Journal article that dashed all of the spurious claims about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield. Yet Trump and Vance continue to spew their hateful lies about Haitians. On Twitter,
Jonathan Last wrote:
1. Cats and Dogs
Springfield, Ohio, is Trump country. In 2020, Clark County—of which Springfield is the major population center—went for Trump 61 percent to 37 percent.
The mayor of Springfield, Rob Rue, is a Republican.
(1) The Trump campaign contacted the Springfield government on September 10 to ask if the cat/dog eating stories were true. The campaign was told, point blank, that they were not. That night, Donald Trump asserted them on the debate stage anyway.
(2) This entire conflagration began with neo-Nazis deciding to make Springfield a cause célèbre. Meaning that JD Vance is literally following a playbook put together for him by white supremacists:
On Aug. 10, a group wearing ski masks and carrying swastika flags and rifles marched in Springfield. The ADL identified them as Blood Tribe, which it describes as a growing neo-Nazi group claiming to have chapters across the U.S. and Canada.
On Aug. 27, during the routine public-comment portion of the Springfield City Commission meeting, a man identifying himself as a Blood Tribe member said: “I’ve come to bring a word of warning. Stop what you’re doing before it’s too late. Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.”
(3) Vance produced the name of one person he said had experienced a kidnapped pet cat. The WSJ decided to check the story out:
A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement.
Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.
(4) The part of Vance’s assertion that “disease” was on the rise in Springfield? Also false:
Information from the county health department, however, shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023—the lowest since 2015. The tuberculosis case numbers in the county are so low (four in 2023, three in 2022, one in 2021) that any little movement can bring a big percentage jump. HIV cases did increase to 31 in 2023, from 17 in 2022 and 12 in 2021. Overall, sexually transmitted infection cases decreased to 965 in 2023, the lowest since 2015.
Springfield’s Republican mayor said this to the Journal:
“We have told those at the national level that they are speaking these things that are untrue,” added Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, a registered Republican. But he said claims have been “repeated and doubled down on.”
Here’s my question: How is Rue going to vote in November?
And the same question goes for Ohio Governor Mike DeWine.
These guys are on the ground. They see what’s happening. They know the truth. And they understand that Trump’s and Vance’s lies—which are approaching the status of blood libel—are hurting their constituents. Not in some theoretical, possible-future-case way. But in a real way. Right now. Today.
Are they going to vote for Trump and Vance? I feel like someone should probably ask them.
I think we know what Anna Kilgore’s answer will be. The WSJ shows a picture of this nice cat lady. In her Trump shirt. And her Trump hat. In front of her Trump flag. It seems not to bother her at all that the Trump campaign used her to lie about the people she felt the need to apologize to.
How does that work? What’s the psychology?
No, really. Give me your most charitable explanation. Because what gets me here is that Ms. Kilgore felt bad enough about have accused her neighbors of stealing her cat that she apologized to them. So she knows the difference between right and wrong.
Talk about this in the comments, please. And be kind. This is an exercise in understanding, not condemnation.
I keep pointing you to Radley Balko because he’s wonderful and you should subscribe to his newsletter. He has a piece up about what immigration has done to Springfield.
First there’s the Haitian immigrant supply part of the story:
The sole claim Trump and Vance have made about Springfield that’s actually true is that since 2021, about 12,000-15,000 Haitian immigrants have moved to the city. But no one — not the Biden administration, not George Soros, and not Kamala Harris — “sent” them there. . . .
After the devastating Haiti earthquake of 2010, the Obama administration allowed displaced people from that country to come to the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a policy created during the George H.W. Bush administration for refugees from countries in crisis. Thousands of Haitians took advantage of the opportunity.
Donald Trump revoked that status in 2019, infamously calling Haiti one of those “shithole countries” from which the U.S. should never accept immigrants. Trump would later add that all Haitian immigrants “probably have AIDS,” and lament that the U.S. doesn’t get more immigrants from better countries like Norway.
Trump’s TPS revocation threatened the immigration status of tens of thousands of Haitians who came after the earthquake, many of whom by then had children who were U.S. citizens. The Biden administration then reinstated TPS protection in 2021. This is why Trump and Vance blame Biden and Harris for Springfield.
Then there’s the Springfield demand side:
[L]ike much of the Rust Belt, the manufacturing plants began to close in the 1980s and 1990s, and Springfield atrophied. The ornate Victorian homes that lined the city’s main streets fell into disrepair as those with means moved away. The city has lost about 25 percent of its population since 1970.
So in the mid-2010s, city officials embarked on a campaign to lure new businesses to the area, citing Springfield’s low cost of living and ideal geographical position for shipping and manufacturing. The plan worked. Factories started opening up. Other businesses followed.
But there was a problem: The population that remained in Springfield and surrounding Clark County was aging. There weren’t enough workers to fill the available jobs. So the companies looked to immigrants. This happened to be right about the time Haitians were coming to the U.S. under TPS. Word quickly spread in the Haitian immigrant community that there was a town in Ohio with a low cost of living and lots of well-paying jobs. So that’s where they went.
The companies did not turn to undocumented immigrants to pay “slave wages,” as some immigration opponents have claimed. They were documented immigrants with taxpayer ID numbers paid at a market rate (as noted below, wages have increased in Springfield since the Haitians arrived).
Haitians with TPS can live where they like. A large number settled in Springfield because that’s where they found jobs. . . .
This is a recurring pattern with immigration in the U.S. Immigrants settle in geographic clusters, close to other immigrants from the same country. This allows them to establish networks, find housing, and open and patronize restaurants and businesses that offer the comforts of home. This is why Patterson, New Jersey, has a “Little Lima.” In the mid-20th century, Peruvian immigrants settled in the city after taking jobs in area textile mills. It’s why Nashville has the country’s largest Kurdish community, and Minneapolis to large Somali and Hmong populations. Terre Heute, Indiana once had a thriving Syrian population; Lowell, Massachusetts has the country’s second largest Cambodian population. Rochester; New York has a large Turkish community; and Russian immigrants settled in places like Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.
This is how immigration works.
When you put supply and demand together, good things can happen:
Income has gone up. In 2020, the median annual household income in the city was $39,344. Two years later — and the last year for which the U.S. Census has data — it was at $45,113.
Immigration opponents also claim that immigrants depress wages. But again contra Vance, that hasn’t happened in Springfield. The mean hourly wage jumped 18 percent between 2020 and 2023, from $21.33 to $25.16. That’s well above the 13 percent that wages increased nationally over the same period. . . .
Haitians have grown Springfield’s tax base. Because of TPS, they have Social Security or taxpayer ID numbers, so they pay all the same taxes any other resident pays. Those who have made enough money to buy a home now pay property taxes. Those who don’t own a home pay rent, which their landlords then use to pay property taxes. . . .
In a recent interview with CNBC, Vance said, “If the path to prosperity was flooding your nation with low-wage immigrants then Springfield, Ohio, would be the most prosperous country — the most prosperous city in the world. America would be the most prosperous country in the world, because Kamala Harris has flooded the country with 25 million illegal aliens.”
As with much of what Vance has said since his abrupt MAGA conversion, almost nothing in that quote is correct. There are nowhere near 25 million undocumented people in the U.S. in total. Kamala Harris doesn’t set the Biden administration’s immigration policy. And all the data suggest immigrants have made Springfield more prosperous, not less.
Kevin Williamson went to Springfield and wrote a fantastic piece.
Poor people have been coming to Ohio in search of jobs in its factories and warehouses for centuries: From the original New Englanders who settled in the Northwest Territory to the Scots-Irish to the Irish and Germans in the 19thcentury to the Haitians today, that story has been repeated over and over. At the turn of the 20th century, a majority of Cincinnati’s population consisted of those who either were foreign-born or were the children of foreign-born parents, mostly German. Naghten Street in Columbus, on the other hand, became “Irish Broadway” in the middle of the 19th century. The J.D. Vances of that era didn’t much care for the whiskey-drinking, potato-eating papists invading their cities, but they made good use of the canals and railroads built by those illiterate exotics from distant lands.
The guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy understood all that. This asshole who is running for vice president, on the other hand . . .
I fuel up and have the big 6.7L diesel spooled out and growling happily as I speed by the exit for Possum Hollow Road—honest to God, that’s the name of the place; you can’t make up details like that—way out here in the Blue Ridge Mountains where it is 40-odd degrees early in the morning in the last days of summer. The Appalachian Highlands are gorgeous this time of year, with all sunshine and sapphire skies and cool breezes, good green hills and splendid rivers, and pretty good asphalt that is, barring the occasional construction backup, wide open for RPMs. If you like to drive, it doesn’t get much better in the eastern half of these United States. There’s a lot of that gross, weird old leg-tattoo America out there, too, of course, including a guy with a leg tattoo of the Monster Energy logo, along with the inescapable herpetic rash of Dollar General stores and the strip-joint billboards sprinkled like pox along the highways and backroads from the fine vistas of southwestern Virginia to the alpine rivers of West Virginia to the literal amber waves of grain in Ohio’s cornfields.
It makes you wonder why they ever left—the Vances and the rest of those Appalachian folk who followed Steve Earle’s “Hillbilly Highway” up to Detroit or down to Houston or wherever else the Scots-Irish diaspora ended up. And then you remember why: need and desperation. There weren’t a lot of Dairy Queens or Walmarts out here, and even if there had been, there were no jobs to earn money to spend in them. It was a world—and a life—of subsistence agriculture and hustling, with very little in the way of rule of law or decent public administration, where the biggest business was organized crime and where politics vacillated between demagoguery and banditry, beautiful in some parts, hideous in others, and poisonously backward—you know: Haiti, but with white people.
Jay Kuo writes a delightful and informative blog called “The Status Kuo.” In his latest, he explains the origin of the phrase “jumping the shark,” which was new to me. He went on to show that Trump had grown so desperate as his polls declined that he had “jumped the shark.”
He writes:
Photo courtesy of ABC
Toward the end of the fifth year of the popular TV series Happy Days, the writers had The Fonz put on water skis and jump over a live shark. Everyone watching at the time had the same question: What the hell are they doing?
Jumping the shark became a cautionary metaphor for when a show goes awry and is desperate for new ideas and ratings. And since Trump is fundamentally a television personality, and we are all living through his twisted reality show, it is notable that, in desperation over his flagging candidacy and polls showing him trailing Vice President Kamala Harris, the writer, producer and chief protagonist of Unhappy Dayshas now jumped the shark, too.
In today’s piece, I’ll discuss three recent examples that demonstrate this phenomenon and signal that the draw of Trump’s show may be near its end. These examples are about as different as they can be, but they all point to the same conclusion: Trump’s sway over the American public is fading.
A chestnut of a blood libel conspiracy that could fall flat
During the recent presidential debate, the ex-president amplified a gutter internet rumor about Haitian immigrants eating the dogs and cats of Springfield, Ohio. Even after being fact-checked live during the debate and later by reporters, Trump and Vance continued to double down on this sick and false claim.
Trump refused to condemn bomb threats called in on Springfield buildings during the aftermath of his statements, making clear that he was perfectly okay with the chaos that he himself had created.
And on Sunday Vance gave a disaster class of an interview when he admitted to “creating stories” in an effort to draw the media’s attention to the problem of immigration while CNN’s Dana Bash brutally fact-checked him.
The confession was telling. Per Vance, the whole point of the made-up stories was to frighten enough voters (and therefore the media) into focusing on the immigrant question, even if that means demonizing an entire community of innocent residents, who by the way are there entirely legally. The Trump campaign will do whatever it takes to get the country talking about immigrants instead of Trump’s many crimes, his record on abortion, his poor debate performance, his declining mental acuity, and poll after bad poll.
Further, it is clear they intend to leverage the MAGA mob and a statistically predictable number of crazies to do their dirty work. But this kind of stochastic terror is hardly new ground for Trump.
He did it when he came down the escalator and called Mexicans drug dealers and rapists—rhetoric that fueled hate and led to the El Paso Wal-Mart massacre.
He did it again when he targeted the AAPI community during Covid by labeling it the “China Virus,” causing a sixfold increase in anti-AAPI hate crimes in America, followed by a deadly shooting spree in Atlanta at a Korean-owned spa.
Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was always destined for the final, lowest kind of take: blood libel.
We have to rewind over a thousand years to understand this canard. The blood libel conspiracy during medieval times falsely alleged that Jews were reenacting the crucifixion of Christ and required human blood for the making of matzo bread. Baseless but dangerous claims against Jews in England ultimately alleged they had actually killed a child as part of ritual sacrifice. This rumor spread and was amplified by politicians of the times, leading to widespread violence, mass executions and pogroms.
Trump and Vance’s false claims have led to a modern day version of this, where scary “others” are devouring the beloved family members, in this case pets, of the local residents. And it has had its intended effect. Schools and hospitals in Springfield are now closed due to threats of mass shootings and bombings. Immigrants are afraid to go outside and are keeping their children at home. Vehicles of Haitian immigrants have been vandalized and hit with acid. Meanwhile, Trump and the GOP continue their call for “mass deportations,” even of legal immigrants, in what is essentially a call for ethnic cleansing.
Trump is now planning an appearance in Springfield to drive home his false narrative, but this could backfire. To put it in television terms, the attention Trump hopes to draw has been overshadowed by the reckless stunt he pulled in an attempt to juice his ratings.
Trump has jumped the shark.
It is worth noting that Trump’s initial statement was initially met with derisive laughter and disbelief, not just from the left but from most of the center of the country. As Aaron Blake of the Washington Post noted, a poll of voters showed that independents disbelieved the claim by a factor of two to one, and five times as many independents are sure that it’s false as those who believe it’s true.
And according to a recent Data for Progress poll, huge majorities of voters of all persuasions believe that Trump’s statements about immigrants eating pets is a weird thing to say.
Trump’s ploy might well result in the worst of all outcomes for him and his campaign: the American public collectively shaking their heads at him with contempt over his racist targeting of a whole community and entirely unmoved by his upping the ante.
Collective yawn
As evidence that Trump has overplayed his hand in what we hope is his final season, it appears there was a second attempted assassination, this time by someone who was caught by authoritieswith an AK-47 a few hundred yards down the golf course where Trump was playing on Sunday. The only shots fired were by the Secret Service.
(To those on the right questioning how the would-be assailant could have possibly known where to find Trump, it was at his golf course. That’s where he always is.)
Note that the second would-be assassin is, like the first, also a white male. He is not an immigrant, a Haitian or a drag queen. He’s a gun enthusiast who voted for Trump in 2016 but soured on him by 2020, and whose social media indicates he is a vaccine conspiracy theorist while supporting a Haley/Ramaswamy GOP ticket. Not exactly a stable individual.
The first time Trump was shot at, there was a collective gasp from the public and an outpouring of condemnation of political violence. This time feels different. Once again, the perpetrator, however unstable is a statistically predictable outgrowth of the very toxic political environment that Trump himself created. Like his second indictment, this second attempt feels like more of the same, with Trump himself to blame for much of it.
It didn’t help that Trump squandered whatever political capital he might have had from the first attempt by brandishing his absurd ear bandage, later taken up as a symbol of fealty by the MAGA faithful because they’re not at all in a cult.
A second attempt on Trump’s life is therefore hardly shocking to anyone who understands the kinds of chaotic forces Trump himself has unleashed. It seems only Donald Trump could manage to make us all numb to the idea of two attempts on a candidate’s life in this election season. If we were in the writers’ room, the notion quickly would be shot down as an overreach.
In my best Miranda Priestly voice, “Another Trump assassin? Groundbreaking.”
Swift vengeance
One final indication that Trump has overreached and overplayed his hand: that Taylor Swift thing.
Right after that disastrous debate for Trump ended, the coup de grâce came from pop megastar Taylor Swift, who posted on her Instagram to her 284 million fans that she had watched the debate, done her research and would be voting for Harris/Walz. She encouraged folks to register to vote and do their own research into the election.
That endorsement led to some 400,000 visits to vote.gov and what appears to be a big surge in voter registration nationally. As Tom Bonier of TargetSmart observed, there was a “400% or 500% increase” in voter registration, meaning somewhere between 9,000-10,000 people per hour. “It’s really unlike anything I’ve seen,” Bonier said.
In a race where key battleground states may be won by a few thousand votes, this spike in voter registration among Swifties was terrible news for Trump. That’s apparently why he then went and did the worst possible thing in response. Over the weekend, an enraged Trump tweeted in all caps, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”
If you know anything about Swift’s fan base, this declaration of war was a terrible idea. It will only force more Swift fans to direct action and even greater involvement in the election, because nothing gets them riled up like their idol being attacked.
Perhaps in the back of his mind Trump intended to sow terror again by turning his MAGA faithful against Swift. After all, her concerts in Vienna were canceled due to actual planned terrorist attacks—something her fans are still in keen pain over. But if Trump believes creating online hate and stirring up further threats against Swift will cause her or her fans to back down, he has badly miscalculated.
Once again, in his desperation, he has gone a step too far.
Despite the debunking of the story about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, despite the story becoming a national joke, JD Vance continues to peddle it. Vance is a senator from Ohio, meaning that he is hurling insults at people he supposedly represents.
If Senator JD Vance of Ohio had a moral compass, a shred of decency or a belief in anything other than his own ambition and will-to-power, he would resign his Senate seat effective immediately, leave the presidential race and retire from public life, following a mournful apology for his ethical transgressions.
As it stands, Vance has done none of the above, which is why he is still, as of today, using his position in the United States Senate and on the Republican Party presidential ticket to spread lies and smears against his own constituents in Springfield — Haitian immigrants who have settled there to make a new life for themselves.
The main impact of those lies and smears — which began Monday when Vance told his followers on X that “reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” and continued Tuesday when Donald Trump told an audience of 67 million people that “they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats” — has been to terrorize the entire Springfield community.
On Thursday, bomb threats led to the evacuation of two elementary schools, city hall and the state motor vehicle agency’s local facility. The mayor has received threats to his office, and local families fear for the safety of their children. Several Springfield residents, including Nathan Clark — father of Aiden Clark, the 11-year-old killed when his school bus was struck by a minivan driven by a Haitian immigrant — have pleaded with Trump and Vance to end their attacks and leave the community in peace.
“My son was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti,” said Clark, rebutting a claim made by Vance. “This tragedy is felt all over this community, the state and even the nation, but don’t spin this towards hate,” he continued. “Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose.”
This direct rebuke from a grieving father has stopped neither Vance nor Trump from spreading anti-immigrant — and specifically anti-Haitian — lies and fanning the flames of hatred. “Don’t let biased media shame you into not discussing this slow moving humanitarian crisis in a small Ohio town,” Vance said on Friday. “We should talk about it every day.”
The “humanitarian crisis,” it should be said, is the revitalization of Springfield after years of decline. Haitian immigrants have filled jobs, bought homes and filled city coffers with property and sales taxes. And while there are growing pains from the sudden influx of new residents, the charge that Haitian immigrants have, in Vance’s words, brought a “massive rise in communicable diseases, rent prices, car insurance rates and crime” is false. He is lying about people, the very people he swore an oath to represent, in ways that will inspire additional threats of violence and may well bring physical harm to the community.
Springfield, Ohio, has been in the news lately, and not in a good way. At the debate between Trump and Harris, Trump claimed that Haitian immigrants were stealing pets and eating them. The ABC moderator corrected him and told him it wasn’t true. Trump refused to believe him, insisting that he saw it on television.
The next day, Springfield’s City Hall and other facilities were closed due to bomb threats. Municipal authorities released a statement denying Trump’s claim and expressing appreciation for the Haitians’ contributions to the town’s economy. They are legal immigrants.
A father in Springfield whose 11-year-old son was killed in a collision between a school bus and a minivan driven by a Haitian pleaded with Trump, Vance, and other Republican politicians to stop using his son’s name in their campaigns. He was not murdered, he said; he died in a traffic accident. “Please stop the hate,” he said. “In order to live like Aiden, you need to accept everyone, choose to shine, make the difference, lead the way and be the inspiration…Live like Aiden.”
Editor’s note: Springfield native John Legend, an internationally acclaimed performer, took to social media Sept. 12 to address backlash against Haitian immigrants promoted by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate, U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Middletown. His statement is below.
My name is John Legend, and I was born as John. R Stevens from a place called Springfield, Ohio. Springfield, Ohio — you may have heard of Springfield, Ohio, this week.
In fact, if you watch the debate, we were discussed by our presidential candidates, including a very special, interesting man named Donald J. Trump.
Now, Springfield has had a large influx of Haitian immigrants who come to our city.
Now, our city had been shrinking for decades. We didn’t have enough jobs. We didn’t have enough opportunity so people left and went somewhere else.
So, when I was there, we had upwards of 75,000 people and in the last five years we were down to like 60,000 people.
But of late, during the Biden administration, there have been more jobs that opened up. More manufacturing jobs, more plants, factories that needed employees and were ready to hire people.
So, we had a lot of job opportunities, and we didn’t have enough people in our town of 60,000 people to fill those jobs.
And during the same time, there has been upheaval and turmoil in Haiti. The federal government granted visas and immigration status to a certain number of Haitian immigrants so they could come to our country legally.
Our demand in Springfield for additional labor met up with the supply of additional Haitian immigrants and here we are.
We had about 15,000 or so immigrants move to my town of 60,000.You might say, wow, that’s a lot of people for a town that only had 60,000 before. That’s a 25% increase.
That is correct.
So you might imagine there are some challenges with integrating a new population.
New language, new culture, new dietary preferences. All kinds of reasons why there might be growing pains.
Making sure there are enough services to accommodate the new, larger population that might need bilingual service providers, etc. etc.
So, there are plenty of reasons why this might be a challenge for my hometown.
But the bottom line is these people came to Springfield because there were jobs for them and they were willing to work.
They wanted to live the American dream, just like your German ancestors, your Irish ancestors, your Italian ancestors, your Jewish ancestors. Your Jamaican ancestors, your Polish ancestors – all these ancestors who moved to this country.
Maybe not speaking the language that everyone else spoke.
Maybe not eating the same foods.
Maybe having to adjust.
Maybe having to integrate.
But all coming because they saw opportunity for themselves and their families in the American dream.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive in Flagler County, Florida. In this brilliant article, he describes vouchers as welfare for the rich, a new kind of state socialism. He points out that vouchers are destroying public schools.
I want to acknowledge that I cribbed the article from the blog of the Network for Public Education, which you should subscribe to. It’s free, and it’s curated by the great Peter Greene. If you have a passion for public schools, sign up.
Tristam writes:
It would be absurd, I think we can all agree, if Paul Renner, our esteemed Speaker of the House and Flagler’s chief pork slabber, were to champion a bill entitling every citizen to take out $2,000 from their local policing budgets so they can have their own private security and call it “Police Choice.” After all, don’t we all pay taxes? Shouldn’t we have a choice how that money is spent? Don’t we free Floridians know best? Sheriff Rick Staly would be the first to tell Renner he’s out of his mind.
It would be absurd, I think we can all agree, if Renner, claiming that taxpayers shouldn’t have their park choices limited to Holland and Ralph Carter Park, were to champion a bill entitling every household to take out $1,000 from the parks and rec budget so they could help subsidize their Disney and Universal experiences and call it “Park Choice.” Even Renner’s chamber of commerce courtesans would tell him he’s out of his mind.
But not too many people told Renner he was out of his mind when he did exactly that to public schools: he championed a bill entitling every child in Florida to $8,000 a year to spend on private education, at the public school system’s expense, and called it “school choice.” The few who did were themselves told they’re out of their mind.
“School choice” is an orchestrated demolition of public schools and the social contract. The focus-group euphemism masks the thieving of tax dollars to subsidize private schools, transforming what was once an aspiration of fringe Christian and anti-government militants into state doctrine. “I hope to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have public schools,” the televangelist and founder of the Moral Majority Jerry Falwell said in a 1979 sermon. “The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be.” Falwell lived long enough to see Jeb Bush’s Florida reopen that door. Renner swung the wrecking ball.
Flagler County schools are losing close to $11 million this year to “choice,” siphoned out so 1,250 students can get their $8,000 either for private school or home school. True, not every one of these students was attending Flagler schools before, so it’s not a net loss of 1,250 students. But very few of these students were either qualifying or getting taxpayer subsidies before. Exactly 136 did in Flagler just four years ago, costing the district less than $1 million. Now anyone qualifies, including millionaire families, and every dollar going to them is a dollar diverted from public education.
That figure of 1,250 students is for the first full year of this “choice” being in effect. Coming years will only accelerate the drain on public schools, because if you have children you’d be out of your mind not to take the $8,000-per-child handout, especially since most of you aren’t paying anywhere near $8,000 in school taxes each year. The rest of us, and even more so businesses and renters, are subsidizing the swindle.
Advocates of the swindle have come up with a couple of defenses: first, that they’re taxpayers who should choose where their money is spent–the untenable argument that would then support “police choice” and “park choice,” and if you push that logic far enough, “war choice,” as in: you may spend my money on the Ukraine war but not the genocide of Palestinians. But in our social contract how our taxes are spent is not an a-la-carte option, though Boomer narcissists who can’t see past the hedge of their gated community think it should be.
Second, the advocates claim the dollars “follow the child,” as if public money going to private subsidies were new money that doesn’t affect public school budgets. It’s excellent propaganda. But it’s a double-barreled lie–double-barreled, because not only is every student lost to the public schools a loss of $8,000, but every student who was never enrolled in public school but is now getting the $8,000 compounds that loss, since these are public dollars that would have otherwise been allocated to public schools.
Incidentally, we don’t say that people receiving food stamps are on “food choice.” We don’t say that people getting Temporary Assistance for Needy Families are on “poverty choice.” When people get free money from the government, we call it welfare. Ditching the ordurous school-choice euphemism and applying the language’s proper definition–school welfare–exposes the state’s fabrications.
Facts do the rest. The welfare kings and queens this time are much richer than those on food stamps. As the Miami Herald reported Sunday, “Last school year, the average income of families who provided income data and received scholarships for a family of four was $86,000.” (To be eligible for food choice this year a family of four can’t have a household income above $62,400.)
According to Step Up for Students, the state’s arm administering school welfare, 82 percent of handouts went to students attending religious schools–madrassas–like one in Palm Coast that boasts of “raising champions for Christ” and still sports a crusader for a mascot, which is no less offensive to a few hundred million people than if it flew the Confederate or Nazi flags. Our tax dollars are subsidizing that kind of bigotry.
More perniciously: When Bush started the welfare-to-school wagon he limited it to the disabled and the needy. Minorities benefited disproportionately. It was a form of segregation in reverse, like affirmative action. Renner’s scheme, like so much under Gov. Ron DeSantis, revives pre-Brown v. Board of Education segregation. By eliminating eligibility barriers, wealthier families use the subsidy as a bridge to very expensive public schools whose tuition keeps the riff raff out, even with $8,000 subsidies. A family might’ve afforded a $9,000 school but couldn’t afford a $15,000 school. So clever schools adjust their tuition just so as a barrier to undesirables and to make extra profit, thus cashing in twice over: in dollars and in whitening their own “choice” of who gets in. Et voilà. Jerry Falwell’s jolly jowly ideal realized.
Finally, to make sure the dagger cuts deeply and fatally, the state makes it mandatory for school districts to advertise school welfare on their websites. Districts like Flagler must make it as easy as possible for parents to apply for the money and get out of the district, while the state provides a detailed list of private schools to choose from, including, of course, every madrassa under the sky. State and districts could not be shouting louder: Public schools suck. Here’s $8,000. $16,000. $24,000. Now leave.
As students continue to be bribed out, public schools will be left with less money, all the responsibilities for higher standards, more challenging students, crumbling buildings and, revoltingly, school board members and superintendents in full Stockholm Syndrome mode. You hear them in board meetings not only talking about school welfare but praising it, pandering to it, the way the condemned suck up to their executioner.
There are exceptions. Our own Colleen Conklin for years has been sounding the alerts about the swindle, starting with the charter schemes. She thankfully kept a few of those out of the district, back when local school boards had a say. They no longer do. And Conklin is leaving in November. Our remaining board members love the school welfare swindle and are probably trying to figure out how to cash in with their own kids without looking like public school traitors.
But as Jerry Falwell implied, it’s a matter of time before those school board members are surplus property, like public school buildings, like buses, for that matter like teachers, counselors, paraprofessionals, bus drivers and administrators, all of whom are already treated like disposable obstructions in the way of school welfare and the cult known as “parental rights.”
It’s one of the great ironies of our time that Trump—a completely irreligious man—is serving the interests of the most evangelical Christians. Ban abortion? Done. End LGBT rights? Certainly. Ban contraception? Soon. Crush unions? Soon. Eliminate any climate regulations? On the way. Defund public schools? Yes. Send public money to religious schools with no accountability? Yes.
“Project 2025” is nothing short of a 900-page blueprint for guiding Donald Trump’s second term of office if he’s re-elected.
After the Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025 in April last year, when Trump was seeking the Republican nomination, he had no problem with it.
But now that the nation is turning its attention to the general election, Trump doesn’t want Project 2025 to draw attention. Its extremism is likely to turn off independents and moderates.
So Trump is now claiming he has “no idea who is behind” Project 2025.
This is another in a long line of Trump lies…
Trump has said he’d seek vengeance against those who have prosecuted him for his illegal acts. Project 2025 calls for the prosecution of district attorneys Trump doesn’t like, and the takeover of law enforcement in blue cities and states.
Project 2025 is, in short, the plan to implement what Donald Trump has said he wants to do if he’s re-elected.
Trump may want to distance himself from Project 2025 in order to come off less bonkers to independents and moderates, but he can’t escape it. The document embodies everything he stands for.
Diane Ravitch's blog 