Even Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who early on gave a bunch of oxygen to the fiery and fictitious story about Haitian immigrants eating family pets in Springfield, Ohio, admitted this weekend that he didn’t much care about the veracity of the stories he tells.
Vance told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that he’s willing to “create stories” to redirect the focus of American voters to where the GOP wants it to be — and if migrants eating cats serves that purpose, so be it. Truth is just a casualty in a bigger messaging war, Vance asserted.
The story, which rose to greater prominence when GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump also relayed it in his debate last week with Vice President Kamala Harris, has been widely debunked.
Even the Republican Governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, repudiated the Trump/Vance claim, saying the Haitian community is being wrongly accused by a story that was “garbage.”
“They came to Springfield to work,” DeWine said of the Haitians in Ohio, defending an immigrant community that has come under siege since the MAGA attack.
But the story — for all the trouble it has caused the Haitians, who’ve received bomb threats in the aftermath — has done what Vance intended.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, one of Harris’s top surrogates on various media outlets, describes the GOP messaging as a formula meant to obscure the Trump campaign’s lack of plans for America’s future.
.@PeteButtigieg: The Trump campaign wants to talk about anything but their actual record and agenda. Trump and Vance cannot afford for this to be about how Trump eliminated the right to choose. They don't want to be talking about the particulars of their health care plan because… pic.twitter.com/MqX95lfk7h
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 15, 2024
If the Republicans can prioritize outrage and fear over an alleged lack of planning and dearth of solutions, they’ve succeeded, Buttigieg says.
And for that GOP strategy to work — and this is why the “Haitians eating pets” story is valuable to them — they need to misdirect voters by making bold narrative claims, whatever they’re relationship to the truth. Or as Buttigieg says of the GOP’s misdirection efforts, “the crazier, the better.”
At The Bulwark, the political pundit Jonathan V. Last explains in a little more detail what Buttigieg means with his “crazier, better” assessment of Republican messaging. Last writes:
Trump leaned into the Haitian-dog/cat-eating story in order to yank the focus away from Harris.
And here is the part you must understand: People seem to think that the Springfield story is bad for Trump because it is predicated on a lie.
This is incorrect.
The reason it’s incorrect, Last explains and Buttigieg knows, is because that sustains the controversy, allowing conspiracy theorists to keep it afloat while others must spend more time denying it.
While that is happening, other narratives are shelved, which — in Buttigieg’s take — is an advantage for the GOP because it deprioritizes the substantive policy discussions he thinks give Democrats an advantage.
