Let them eat pets: Why we shouldn’t laugh too hard at Trump’s prejudice

Social media is frequently awful, but sometimes you thank the gods for it. How else would we cope with the outlandishness of Donald Trump, who this week claimed that Haitians are eating the cats and dogs of Ohio?

The claim, made during his presidential candidate debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, was a fresh serve of the inadvertent comedy Trump has been dishing up ever since he descended the golden elevator of Trump Tower into our collective consciousness.

The first meeting of the two candidates got fiery quickly.Credit: AP

He has recommended drinking bleach to stave off COVID. He looked directly at a solar eclipse. He once asked a seven-year-old who had contacted the North American Aerospace Defense Command to track the movements of Santa Claus if she “still” believed in the big red feller “because at seven, it’s marginal, right?” Oh, and he coined the term “covfefe”.

Each one of these moments spawned a thousand internet memes, and Trump’s debate claim about pet imperilment was no different. Trump made this bizarre assertion in response to, well, something that was completely unrelated, but it was part of an attack on the Biden/Harris administration for “what they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country”.

He said this influx of migrants was destroying towns, and he singled out Springfield, Ohio (which shares a name with the fictional small-town setting for The Simpsons).

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people who came in. They’re eating the cats,” Trump said. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what is happening in our country and it’s a shame.”

A split screen showed Harris’ face, wrought into a perfect expression of the incredulous hilarity we all felt. Moderator David Muir immediately responded with a fact-check indicating he had anticipated Trump repeating this disinformation, which is the result of a “conspiracy theory [that] appears to have bubbled up from racist rhetoric circulating online about the Haitian community in Springfield”, according to The Independent.

Muir said ABC News had spoken to the City Manager of Springfield, who said “there have been no credible reports” of “pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community”. Speaking over the top of Muir, Trump cried that “people are telling me … they’re saying, ‘My dog was used for food!’”

The internet was pretty much invented to share memes of cats and dogs (Grumpy Cat might well be the web’s greatest celebrity), so it kicked into gear to do what it does best – mock Trump’s madness.

Cats wearing MAGA hats, memes of Trump as a Rambo-style commando with kittens on his shoulders, Simpsons-themed memes featuring Santa’s Little Helper and Snowball II (the cartoon family’s pet dog and cat); a thousand TikTok dances to the backing track of Trump’s comments mashed up and put to beats.

One simply cannot wait to see what Saturday Night Live does with it.

There is only one problem with the collective trauma-response, valid though it is, to make fun of Trump’s absurd claim: it shrouds how fundamentally racist and terrifying it was.

On the global stage, Trump is promulgating the falsehood that one group of migrants is so savage and uncivilised that it eats pet animals. It is simple vilification, and another rhetorical attempt to dehumanise black and brown immigrants.

The only creatures that prey upon pets are other animals. And equating immigrants to animals is a rhetorical tactic straight from the fascist playbook. The Nazis famously compared the Jews of Europe to disease-carrying rats. They also deported Jews en masse, which is what Trump plans to do with the undocumented immigrants who prop up the US economy.

Think that’s overblown? In April, Trump told a Michigan crowd that illegal immigrants were “animals” and “not human”.

As Kamala Harris pointed out in the debate, Trump has a long résumé of prejudice, stretching all the way back to his time as a landlord in Queens, New York, in the 1970s, when he and his father were sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination against black prospective tenants. Trump has always denied any discrimination in the family’s rental policies.

Project 2025, the document written by dozens of former Trump administration officials, which forms the “wish list” for the next Republican presidency, calls for “finality” in dealing with inmates on death row in the US. In other respects, the document has a very fascist-friendly focus on female fertility and what it calls “a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”.

It should be noted that Trump has disavowed Project 2025 and says he has “nothing to do with it”. It should also be noted Trump is a voracious liar. Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, who, of all of Trump’s associates, takes the prize for the utter venality of his cynicism, went on television to further spread the racist lie about pets.

Speaking on CNN after the debate, Vance said “city officials have not said it’s not true, they have said they don’t have all the evidence” – a subtle but effective rewording of what the quoted official actually said, which was there was “no evidence” of the pet claims.

Vance pressed the falsehood, saying “we have had a number of constituents on the ground … both first-hand and second-hand reports, saying this stuff is happening”. He then turned the attack on journalists, saying they should be “on the ground” investigating these claims.

See what he did there? He spread the false claim while not quite endorsing its truth. But by implying the non-truth has not been properly treated by journalists, he further bolstered it.

Trump is funny, and the internet thanks him for it. But while we are laughing, we shouldn’t forget to parse his words. Because even when he’s lying, there is a strong chance he means what he says.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.