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Donald Trump spent much of Tuesday night lying. This is hardly news, since he fibs so compulsively that reporters barely cover it any more. But one particularly bizarre whopper about Haitian immigrants in Ohio killing and eating pets dominated the headlines.

“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,” Trump babbled during the debate, thrown off by Harris’s transparent attempt to bait him with a dig at his crowd size. “And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”

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Trump’s comments were so outrageous that moderator David Muir jumped in with a fact-check, and the whole exchange between Muir and Trump is worth reading. (The video is embedded below the transcript — pay attention to Harris’s facial expressions while Trump goes off the deep end.)

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 —

TRUMP: Well, I’ve seen people on television.

MUIR: Let me just say here this …

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.

MUIR: I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking it from the city manager.

TRUMP: But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.

MUIR: Again, the Springfield city manager says there’s no evidence of that.

TRUMP: We’ll find out.

Even conservatives immediately realized this was very bad for their orange hero.

“YOU STUPID MF’ers JUST GOT TRUMP TO REPEAT YOUR LIE ABOUT THE PETS. CONGRATS ON SETTING THE NEWS STORIES TOMORROW BY LYING SO TRUMP PICKS IT UP AND SAYS STUPID SHIT,” tweeted commentator Erick Erickson, recognizing immediately the damage Trump’s handlers had done by letting him run with this hoax.

The story was thoroughly debunked even before the debate. But examining how it got laundered from the fringes of the internet to Trump’s lips perfectly illustrates the hollowness at the center of the Trump movement, and indeed in modern conservatism itself.

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According to the Springfield News-Sun, the racist meme started with a post to a Facebook group for residents of the Ohio town. The poster claimed that a neighbor’s daughter’s friend had discovered her cat butchered near a home lived in by Haitians, and further that the poster had “been told” that pet dogs as well as wild geese and ducks had been killed as well.

But local police never received any reports of pets being killed. The Federalist did manage to dig up a police report that accused four Haitians of illegal goose hunting, but that’s hardly the stuff that rightwing memes are made of. If you want to foment racial hatred against minorities and immigrants, you can’t just accuse them of participating in the Real American™ hobby of hunting. So instead the wingnutosphere cooked up a ridiculous lie about a plague of brown-skinned invaders devouring family pets, then went pedal to the metal with it.

Charlie Kirk, Kremlin-funded Benny Johnson, and even Elon Musk all tweeted about it on Monday. But things really got out of hand when Trump’s vice presidential candidate JD Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, joined the fray.

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“Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio,” he tweeted on Monday, shamelessly trying to blame Vice President Harris for the nonexistent problem. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

All day Monday and Tuesday, as Trump “prepped” for the debate, the weirdos who populate his social media feed vomited out meme after meme of Trump protecting cats and ducks — most of them clearly generated using Elon Musk’s AI, known as Grok.

It was unbelievably racist — imagine the prompt you have to feed an LLM to generate such an image.

And it was pervasive at every level of the Republican establishment.

This is what the former president’s media diet looks like 365 days a year. His Truth Social feed contains dozens of links a day to wildly inaccurate stories, along with slavish coverage from Fox, Newsmax, and the lesser outlets that make up the rightwing ecosystem. That’s why he claimed during the debate without a trace of irony that his “very fine people” quote about Nazis in Charlottesville had been debunked because “Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Jesse — all of these people, they covered it.” To him, that is what real news looks like.

And in this airless void of sycophants, Trump routinely reposts AI-generated images of himself as a superhero. Or of Harris cheering the Russian hammer and sickle. Or of Taylor Swift endorsing him.

None of this strikes the former president as bizarre or inappropriate for someone who aspires to lead the country, so it was perhaps inevitable that he’d post his own entry to the genre.

And because the former president has become so “red pilled” and demented that he can no longer speak in ways that are intelligible to normal people, it was inevitable that it would come out of his mouth on the debate stage, revealing to millions of Americans just how completely out of touch with reality he is.

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Vance, who did more than anyone to make this racist hoax a thing, was unapologetic.

“It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false,” he tweeted Tuesday. “Do you know what’s confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.”

That is false in every respect. Approximately 15,000 Haitian immigrants have moved into Springfield in the past few years, most of them legal residents under a since-halted Temporary Protected Status granted to migrants from war-torn countries. They have work permits and have been a boon to local factories, which were desperate for reliable employees.

As Reuters reports, the influx of new residents has indeed stressed social services. But there has been no concomitant uptick in crime rates, and the child who died was not “murdered,” but was accidentally killed when his school bus was struck by a car driven by a Haitian migrant.

“I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone,” the boy’s father Nathan Clark said tearfully at a recent county meeting. “They can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants, the border crisis and even untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members. However, they are not allowed nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio.”

That is of no moment to Vance, though. The terminally online politician, foisted on the campaign by the candidate’s meme-addled sons, tweeted that his office had received calls from Ohio residents complaining about Haitian immigrants eating pets and wild animals. He failed to explain why these residents would report their supposedly missing pets to a US senator and not local law enforcement.

In a post-debate interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins (watch the video below), Vance suggested that the media forced him to lie by ignoring the “carnage” wrought by families moving to Ohio — a state which is desperate to stem the tide of depopulation which cost it a congressional seat in the last census.

I think it’s interesting, Kaitlan, that the media didn’t care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats. And that speaks to the media’s failure to care about what’s going on in these communities. If we have to meme about it to get the media to care, we’re going to keep on doing it because the media should care about what’s going on.

In the rightwing bubble Trump and his acolytes inhabit — don’t call it a safe space! — racist lies are good and even patriotic. It doesn’t matter if they conscript dead children as unwilling pawns in a meme war, or if they incite pogroms against ethnic minorities — unlike, say, puerile jokes about the vice presidential candidate’s amorous activities with furniture or even the “Tampon Tim” smear of Governor Walz.

After the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, and the Sutherland Springs church shooting, and the Emanuel AME church shooting, and the mass shooting at the Walmart in El Paso and hundreds of other attacks on minorities, Vance and Trump insist that it’s appropriate to amplify lies in pursuit of a greater “truth.”

“Don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots,” Vance tweeted Tuesday. “Keep the cat memes flowing.”

And if it makes them seem deranged and out of touch, or even gets some people killed, they do not care. All they care about is winning. But fortunately, America is not an incel chatroom, so these filthy lies are hurting Trump more than they’re helping. Normies are laughing at him, not with him.

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