Donald Trump’s politics of chaos and division are sucking America into a dark vortex, just seven weeks before an Election Day that could propel him back to the profound, and perilous, powers of the presidency.
Trump is at his most dangerous when he’s in a bind. Months after president Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 race, the MAGA authoritarian has still not found a political answer to the candidacy of Kamala Harris. And polls show him taking on water in the wake of a calamitous second debate performance.
The moderation Trump that affected for his nominating convention in Milwaukee has been revealed as just an act, as he has reverted to more familiar, ugly political instincts. With Harris energizing and re-uniting her party’s base, and in particular voters of color, Trump no longer sees political profit in trying to peel off disaffected Democrats. He is, instead, seeking to energize politically disengaged bigots, a shift that finds Trump fishing for support in the foulest waters of the far-right. That includes by making common cause with literal neo-Nazis, who are reveling in his demonization of recent Haitian arrivals in Ohio.
We’re now a week into Trump, and his soulless sidekick J.D. Vance, hyping a racist lie about Haitian immigrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio, stealing and consuming their neighbors’ pets as food. Vance, an Ohio senator, injected the rancid falsehood into the national conversation on Sept. 9 with a post on X, citing alleged “chaos” caused by the Caribbean arrivals and baselessly asserting that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”
In typical fashion, Trump turbocharged the bigotry a day later at the debate proclaiming, falsely: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats.”
With his myth of canine consumption, Trump is no longer dog whistling. His hate is a fog horn. “You’re talking about Haitian immigrants. You’re talking about Black immigrants. If this is not bigotry and racism, I don’t know what is,” Delia Ramirez, a Democratic Congress member from Illinois who is also married to an undocumented immigrant, tells Rolling Stone. She calls Trump’s rhetoric “disgusting” and “mind boggling.”
Trump and Vance’s lies have launched an armada of racist memes — encouraged directly by Vance, who called the hateful keyboard warriors “patriots.”
This imagery has been spread with glee by Trump’s old stand-back-and-stand-by comrades, the Proud Boys, as well as by notorious far-right propagandists. The former president’s son Don Jr. piled on with comments about Haitian immigrants so extreme that even The New York Times forthrightly described them as “racist.”
The toxic rhetoric has led to real-life trouble in the town of Springfield. As detailed by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine on Monday, the community has been beset by dozens of bomb threats. These have forced the evacuation of public schools and caused local colleges to suspend classes or move to online learning. The situation is so extreme that DeWine has called in state troopers to keep students safe. And a cultural festival celebrating the diversity of Springfield was also shut down — giving new meaning to the term “cancel culture.”
DeWine has called Trump and Vance’s claims “garbage.” The Republican mayor of Springfield has also spoken out against Trump, insisting that his community is “hurting” and needs “help, not hate.” President Joe Biden has also stood up for decency, denouncing his predecessor’s lies as “simply wrong,” adding, “This has to stop, what he’s doing. It has to stop.”
From Vance, the behavior has been particularly shocking. The Ohio senator admitted from the beginning that he was trafficking in hearsay: “It’s possible, of course,” he wrote on X, “that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.” But that didn’t stop members of the far-right media ecosystem from trying to prove the lie. The conservative activist Christopher Rufo offered up a $5,000 bounty on X for “anyone who can provide my team with hard, verifiable evidence that Haitian migrants are eating cats” in Springfield. He later surfaced what he alleged was a video from the nearby city of Dayton of “African migrants” barbecuing cats — a claim that was re-promoted by Vance. The police in chief in Dayton quickly denounced the “outlandish” claim as baseless, insisting “there is no evidence to even remotely suggest that any group, including our immigrant community, is engaged in eating pets.”
Trump has declined to denounce the bomb threats in Springfield, while doubling down on his claim that the town has been “taken over by illegal migrants.” (In truth, most of the Haitian arrivals have temporary legal status, due to the political upheaval in the Caribbean nation.) And Vance gave away the game during a weekend interview, revealing that he knows he’s lying — and doesn’t care. “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” he said. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
As Trump raised the national temperature to the boiling point, the anti-government Libertarian Party of New Hampshire wrote a post on X early Sunday morning reading: “Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero.” (The post was soon deleted.)
That same day, Trump himself emerged, again, as a target of extremist hate. While golfing at one of his Florida clubs Sunday, Trump was reportedly in grave danger, with an armed, would-be assassin hiding in the bushes. The suspect, who never fired a shot, is reportedly a former Trump supporter. (The gunman who nicked Trump’s ear in Pennsylvania was also a Republican.)
Bringing the day full circle, billionaire Trump backer Elon Musk then posted, and subsequently deleted, a message on X asking why “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” with a thinking emoji. Musk later claimed he’d been joking. (The Secret Service has said it’s “aware” of the incident.)
Trump is a proud foe of gun safety regulations — recently bragging to the National Rifle Association that “during my four years, nothing happened!” He has also called on Americans to “get over” school shootings, while Vance recently described them as a “fact of life.” The pair, however, immediately changed their tune when Trump found himself again in danger from guns.
Trump, absurdly, called on Democrats to dial down their political rhetoric, while in the same breath continuing to bash the president and vice president as an existential threat to the nation. Trump told Fox News of his would-be attacker: “He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it.” He added: “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, while … they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”
Vance, who is helping terrorize his own constituents in Springfield, insisted it was dangerous for political opponents to label Trump a “fascist” — even though Trump used that same term against Harris earlier this month. Vance also had the nerve to invoke the same Bible that calls on believers to welcome the stranger. “At this moment in time, in 2024, with all the violence and all the negative political rhetoric,” Vance said, “we need to remember above and beyond that we must love our neighbors, that we must treat other people as we hope to be treated.”
To paraphrase another passage from the Bible, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are sowing the wind — with hate, bigotry and division. It’s up to voters to ensure American values, and our democracy, can withstand the whirlwind that’s coming.
From Rolling Stone US
