Why Trump’s lies about Haitians are different

As I’ve been thinking about Donald Trump and JD Vance’s reckless lies about Haitians eating cats in Ohio, I keep coming back to one question: What makes this different from all the other things they’ve said about immigrants?

Trump blaming crime on immigrants is, after all, the foundation of his political identity: His 2016 campaign launched by calling Mexican migrants “rapists.” During his presidency, he referred to Haiti as a “shithole country” from which America should not be admitting migrants. Just last year, he warned about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Yet something about the way he and Vance are talking about Springfield, Ohio feels like an escalation above even this vicious baseline. A major part of that feeling comes from the truly vicious antecedents of their rhetoric, which parallels Nazi propaganda about Jews in some eerily specific ways. And the reasons behind their willingness to “go there” say a lot about the deeper identity of the American right at this moment.

In a recent piece about Springfield, my colleague Eric Levitz pointed out that the specificity of the charges here makes them more dangerous. “Trump and his running mate are fomenting hatred for a discrete group of 15,000 people in one location. This dramatically increases the risk that their campaign of dehumanization will lead to acts of violence,” he writes, noting evidence of just that happening.

I do think that’s a key part of it. But another part is the lurid fascism of the charges themselves.

The idea that Haitians in Springfield are abducting people’s pets and eating them is not just a normal lie, the way that Trump has long accused migrants of selling drugs and committing street crimes. The idea of barbecuing a neighbor’s beloved pet is such a violation, so alien in nature, that it renders the alleged targets outside the scope of what we recognize as human behavior. It is an attack on Haitians not only as individuals, but as an entire group. It is a kind of dehumanization that has historically led to deadly violence against the targeted group — often by design.

Two New York Times columnists, Lydia Polgreen and Jamelle Bouie, have labeled the animal eating rhetoric a “blood libel” for this reason.

The term originates in medieval Europe, specifically to describe the lie that Jews were abducting Christian children and using their blood to bake matzah (an unleavened bread we eat during the Passover holiday). The calumny, which persisted through the Nazi era, was designed explicitly to cast Jews beyond the pale of acceptable society — to link Judaism as a religion and identity to barbarism and brutality. It was, as Bouie notes, frequently employed to whip up violence against the Jewish community.

You don’t need to be a historian to see the obvious connections between accusing Jews of eating children and Haitians of eating pets. And since the Haitian Revolution, Americans have often treated Haitians as the embodiment of the terrifying racial “other” in the same way that Europeans displaced their fears and resentments onto Jews. The crank presidential candidate Marianne Williamson helpfully made the subtext the text in a tweet, saying that Democrats dismiss Trump’s lies at their peril because “Haitian voodoo is in fact real.”

The same is true with another Vance lie about Springfield: that Haitians are responsible for a surge in communicable diseases, including HIV/AIDS. I say it’s a lie because there’s no public evidence supporting it, and authorities on the ground contradict it.

“A common myth that I’ve heard is that we’ve seen all of our communicable diseases skyrocket and go through the roof. And really, when you look at the data, that’s not supported,” Chris Coon, a county health commissioner, told the local ABC affiliate.

Once again, this lie has a deeply troubling history. Immigrants have long been falsely accused of bringing disease to keep them out; Nazis did the same to Jews.

Specifically, Nazi propaganda would regularly accuse Jews of spreading typhus, a lice-borne disease that killed millions in early 20th century Europe. Much like HIV, typhus was a stigmatized ailment stereotypically associated with the moral defectiveness or dirtiness of the afflicted. Nazi doctors wrote pseudo-scientific papers accusing Jews of spreading typhus due to our alleged “low cultural level” and “uncleanliness,” part of the justification for cramming Jews in Polish ghettos before shipping my ancestors and their co-religionists to death camps.

In the past, attention to these kinds of glaringly obvious Nazi parallels might have seemed like enough to shame the Trump campaign into at least toning down its rhetoric. But now, those normative guardrails no longer hold.

On the right today, there is a pervasive sense that any allegation of fascism, authoritarianism, or racism is a bad-faith smear designed to delegitimize conservative policies and politicians. It is a tactic used by American defenders of Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, but one most often used to excuse bad behavior at home. It can be used even to whitewash the flirtations with open fascism that are common among young rightists nowadays, like the inclusion of a Nazi symbol in a video pushed out by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s primary campaign.

I’m sure it’s frustrating to be constantly accused of backing a fascist for president when you genuinely don’t see yourself in that light. But at the same time, it gives the green light to ignore an awful lot of extremely dangerous behavior.

In January, during a Trump campaign stop, a supporter yelled “12 years of Trump!” The former president said, “That’s very interesting,” before turning it into a joke.

“Don’t say that too … loud, they’ll start saying, ‘He wants more, he’s a fascist!’” he added. “You know, they love to call me a fascist.”

Indeed.