You’ll notice that’s from the Wall St. Journal. It comes on the heels of a scathing editorial board editorial condemning Trump.
Here’s an excerpt and a gift link to the whole article. Oh my:
City Manager Bryan Heck fielded an unusual question at City Hall on the morning of Sept. 9, from a staff member of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The staffer called to ask if there was any truth to bizarre rumors about Haitian immigrants and pets in Springfield.
“He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” recalled Heck. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”
By then, Vance had already posted about the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X. Yet he kept the post up, and repeated an even more insistent version of the claim the next morning.
That night, former President Donald Trump stood on a Philadelphia debate stage and shot the rumor into the stratosphere. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said to 67 million viewers. “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 this country.”
There’s more, a lot more. The tensions in the town had been mounting for a while, with the white residents obviously agitated by the arrival of Black foreigners who made them mad with their black and foreign ways. An old story. But then the white supremacists came to town to really stir up trouble. Read the whole thing.
You have to see this one anecdote to really understand the grotesque dishonesty of JD Vance. It’s been clear from the beginning that there was no pet-eating going on and that the local racists had just worked themselves up into a frenzy.
Vance, meanwhile, has continued to defend his claims.
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.
This actually made me feel a little bit better. Yes, it’s probable that this woman freaked out in a racist fury that had been ginned up in her neighborhood. But in the end she was able to admit she was wrong and actually apologized to the neighbors she had unfairly targeted. She is a much better person than Donald Trump and JD Vance who have never in their lives apologized for anything.
It’s a small thing but it suggests that some of them aren’t so far down the rabbit hole they’ll never be able to climb back out.
Update:
Vance is really pushing the Nazi propaganda with this one: