Trump Team: ‘We’ll Take The Hit’ on Cat Eating to Keep Immigration in the News

The ex-president’s team, led by JD Vance, would rather talk about migration than abortion. And Springfield allows them to.

Succulent. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

DONALD TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN IS NOT displeased that they’ve been widely condemned for spreading the urban legend of Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.

If the national media is talking about immigration, they reason, they’re winning.

The mastermind of the cynical, xenophobic strategy, Trump running mate JD Vance, acknowledged in Sunday show interviews that he platformed the unsubstantiated pet-eating rumors to force a conversation about the downsides of Vice President Kamala Harris’s immigration policies.

“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,” Vance told Dana Bash on CNN’s State of the Union, “because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”

When Bash noted that Vance had admitted to “creating the story,” the Ohio Republican insisted he was basing his statements on “firsthand accounts from my constituents.” But then he betrayed the real purpose of his remarks: He wanted the media to focus on immigration.

“I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’s policies. Her policies did that,” he said, eliding that the Haitians are legally there. “But yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about the story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris’s policies.”

The exchange between Vance and Bash, repeated in less tense fashion in interviews with NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s Face the Nation, underscored the high-wire act Vance is performing as Trump’s chief surrogate. The senator, like the former president, has gone to exceptional lengths to keep the issue of immigration at the forefront of the campaign conversation. He has directly engaged reporters and influencers over the topic on X even as he has retreated from his initial insistence that there were “reports” of Haitians eating domestic pets in Springfield. The 20,000 figure he’s repeated appears exaggerated (the governor has cited 15,000 and the reality could be considerably lower that). Bash suggested the rhetoric from Trump and Vance incited bomb threats and risked violence, but Vance called the insinuation “disgusting” and refused to tone down his approach, delighting conservatives on social media. 

And there is talk now within the campaign about Trump visiting Springfield (in early 2023, Vance persuaded the ex-president to visit East Palestine, Ohio after a train derailment there).

Privately, Trump aides think it’s a net plus. The longer the discussion is about migrants, the less it is about tougher topics for them.

“We talk about abortion, we lose. We talk about immigration, we win,” said one Trump adviser.

But what about spreading an incendiary story for which there is no evidence?

“We’ll take the hit to prove the bigger point,” the adviser said.

A new ABC/Ipsos national survey released Sunday showed that immigration is Trump’s strongest issue, giving him a 10 percentage point lead. But immigration is overall the sixth-most important issue to voters. The economy and inflation are the top two, and Trump leads Harris on both metrics by 7 percentage points. Her top issue is abortion, where she has a 14-point lead over Trump.

Trump has struggled to find solid footing on abortion, taking weeks to come to a stated position on a Florida initiative that would enshrine a right to the procedure in the state’s constitution (he opposes the measure). While immigration has been friendlier terrain, he has also, at times, struggled to push the campaign’s preferred messaging on that front, too.

In last Tuesday’s debate, Trump blurted out a reference to the Haitian pet-eating smear without sticking to prior plans to set it up by emphasizing the context of mass migration in Springfield. The result was a back-and-forth with ABC debate moderator David Muir, who interjected that the city manager said there were “no credible reports” of pet eating.

Still, Trump’s operation believes that immigration is a particularly potent issue for working-class white men in the Rust Belt, whom Vance was chosen by Trump to help attract to the ticket. In prior campaigns, Trump turned off some Hispanic voters—a crucial voting bloc—over the way he discussed immigration, but there’s relatively little risk of that in disparaging Haitians. Haitian-American leaders have called the Trump-Vance attacks racist and xenophobic. Bash, during the CNN interview, noted that the migrants were legally in the United States because they received Temporary Protected Status, an immigration designation allowing them to live and work in the country.

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THE QUESTION FACING THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN, however, is whether the pet-eating story becomes centered on immigration or on the GOP ticket whipping up fear with exaggerations and fabrications. Trump already has poor credibility ratings, with Harris leading him by 17 points in who is perceived as more honest and trustworthy, according to the ABC poll. Campaign advisers have admitted that if the race becomes a referendum on personality, Harris might have the edge.

Even immigration hardliners like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) expressed reservations about all the talk of cats and dogs. On Sunday morning, she amplified an X post from her boyfriend, conservative TV personality Brian Glenn, who warned, “Don’t get distracted about ‘cats, dogs and geese’ right now. The real consequences of a broken border is the inevitable terror attack that will happen on US soil. Meanwhile, the ‘animal angle’ dominates the mass media talking points.”

Since Tuesday’s debate, Springfield has faced bomb threats and reports of terrified migrants. No one has verified a story of dog or cat eating, and the Springfield woman who initially spread the rumor on social media recanted and apologized. 

On Sunday, fellow Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine called the story “garbage on the internet.” DeWine told ABC’s This Week that the Haitians who have moved to Springfield came for legal work and are seen by companies there as “very good workers. They’re very happy to have them there, and frankly, that’s helped the economy. Now, are there problems connected? Well, sure. When you go from a population of 58,000 and add 15,000 people onto that, you’re going to have some challenges and some problems. And we’re addressing those.”

But Vance believes that the full cost of that scale of migration is both a powerful political issue and one that hasn’t been properly addressed by the press. While he has repeatedly discussed rising housing costs and the spread of communicable diseases, he has also maintained that the pet-eating story is not “baseless.” He has cited constituent calls and at least one case in which someone called 911 in Springfield to report that four migrants appeared to have taken geese from a local park pond. This weekend, Vance highlighted a post on X by conservative activist Chris Rufo, in which a man from nearby Dayton, Ohio allegedly filmed migrants from Africa barbecuing cats.

Dayton is not Springfield. Haiti is not in Africa. And it was not clear from the footage if cats were being grilled (they might have been chickens).

Whether fair or fowl, Vance said he’ll defer to the concerns of locals.

“My attitude is, listen to my constituents,” Vance said on CNN. “Sometimes they’re going to say things that people don’t like, but they’re saying things that people don’t like because their town has been overwhelmed, and it’s my job to try to fight for them and to protect them. Kamala Harris opened the border, and now these people are suffering. That’s what I’m focused on.”