The formal term for what the Trump Cult has visited upon the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio is “blood libel.” Although foreigners and outsiders have doubtless been blamed for everything from droughts and floods to outbreaks of disease throughout human history, conspiracists have traditionally blamed Jews.
Historians generally trace the term to the year 1144 in Norwich, England, when the corpse of a 12-year-old child was found. As part of a campaign to establish the dead boy as a martyr and the church where he was buried as a (profitable) pilgrimage site, an enterprising monk wrote a series of tracts blaming local Jews for his murder.
Supposedly, Jews needed the blood of innocent Christian children to leaven their Passover matzohs. Corrupt government authorities bribed by Jewish money were alleged to have covered up the crime.
And so it has gone for centuries: a totally imaginary slander kept alive by bigots and crackpots from Russia to Southern California.
“You are not forgotten, Simon of Trent,” wrote a gunman who shot up a synagogue near San Diego in 2019, referencing a slain toddler allegedly martyred in 1475. “The horror that you and countless children have endured at the hands of the Jews will never be forgiven.”
Events in Ohio, however, demonstrate that antisemitism is far from the only form of racist scapegoating in America today. The Trump Cult has gone downright medieval on undocumented immigrants. Donald Trump himself calls them “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of (white) Americans. During his catastrophically bad debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, the former president charged Haitian immigrants in Springfield with unspeakable crimes.
“In Springfield, they are eating the dogs,” Trump said as the split screen broadcast showed Harris looking on incredulously. “They’re eating the cats,” Trump continued, repeating an internet conspiracy theory that local police call totally unsubstantiated. They attribute the rumors to a Facebook post citing its source as a “neighbor’s daughter’s friend.”
The author has herself admitted that she has no idea if it’s true, and regrets posting it online.
Challenged by debate moderator David Muir, Trump doubled down. “But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.”
Would it shock you to learn that no such firsthand accounts exist? Not even on Fox News, presumably because nobody in Ohio can be found who’s willing to endorse so crazy a story even for the sake of the orange messiah. It would turn their lives upside down.
For most Americans, kidnapping and cooking a family pet would be a more shocking crime than, well, pretty much anything I can imagine. That’s what makes it a blood libel: a false accusation that seeks to render its targets subhuman. Beneath contempt.
It follows that anybody who would endorse it deserves nothing but scorn. For all the predictable whining of his supporters about how terribly unfair it was of ABC moderators to correct this grotesque lie, the simple truth is that Trump hurt himself.
“You stupid mf’ers just got Trump to repeat your lie about the pets,” right-wing talk radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X. “Congrats on setting the news stories tomorrow by lying so Trump picks it up.”
Yeah, well, nobody made him do it. The combination of Trump’s own ignorance, credulousness and bigotry caused him serious political harm.
So, it’s only fitting that the worst vice-presidential candidate in recent American history not only doubled down on the libel, but went on national TV and bragged about it.
Seriously, what is wrong with JD Vance? The reason he endorsed the anti-Haitian scare stories, he said, wasn’t that they are true, he admitted to CNN’s Dana Bash, but to correct news media bias.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” Vance said, “then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”
The normally unflappable Bash emphasized that Vance had just admitted the whole pet-eating business was a made-up story.
The candidate didn’t deny it.
“I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it,” he insisted.
Meanwhile, the kinds of MAGA cranks who appear to see Trump as semi-divine and incapable of error sprang into action. The small city of Springfield was besieged by bomb threats and warnings of impending violence that led to school, hospital and university closings. Predictions of mayhem caused panic among the Haitian community.
They are legal immigrants actively recruited to the community to fill factory jobs that had gone begging, as local authorities, business leaders and Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine emphasized. It’s all nonsense, a classic blood libel blaming the Haitians for the panic some benighted Ohioans feel at their Black faces and Creole-accented voices. To Trumpers, poor deluded fools, that makes them frightening and evil.
Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President.”
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