On Tuesday, around 9:30 p.m., tens of millions of viewers watched Donald Trump spread a baseless, racist rumor online.
“In Springfield, they’re eating dogs,” the former president said, referring to an Ohio city that is dealing with an influx of Haitian immigrants. “They’re eating cats. They’re eating … the pets of the people who live there. And that’s what’s happening in our country, and it’s a disgrace.”
The extraordinary moment — the release of a chain-email statement during a prime-time presidential debate — likely intrigued most of the 67.1 million people who tuned in to watch Trump’s showdown with Vice President Kamala Harris. But the rumor, which has been criticized for perpetuating racist tropes, was already thriving in right-wing corners of the internet and was being amplified by Trump insiders, including his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio.
No one involved in Trump’s debate preparations or in a position to speak on behalf of his campaign has agreed to discuss the strategy on the record or answer questions about it. How this topic went from fringe obsession to soundbite on a debate stage.
“Suffice it to say, he was aware of it. He decided to talk about it,” Trump senior adviser Tim Murtaugh told NBC News. “It’s a major issue now. Without it, we probably wouldn’t be talking about immigration.”
Others close to Trump have expressed concern about the execution.
“Immigration needs to be talked about because Harris failed as a border official,” said one Trump adviser, who, like others, spoke candidly on condition of anonymity. “Was it addressed in the best way? Probably not. But it’s not something to avoid.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally from South Carolina, questioned the former president’s direction.
“I don’t know about cats and dogs,” Graham said in an interview Thursday. “But there are many young women who have been raped and murdered by people who were illegally detained here, and we let them go. That’s what I would talk about. That’s what should be the face of a broken immigration system, not cats and dogs.”
If the fallout has been a mix of bewilderment and outrage, the foundations of the moment are rooted in grievances that have long defined and animated Trump and his supporters — and in the platforms where those grievances flourish.
Trump, who launched his first presidential campaign with a speech broadly characterizing Mexican immigrants as dangerous criminals, has kept immigration and border security issues at the heart of his third White House bid.
Meanwhile, the right-wing social media ecosystem that grew up around his 2016 campaign has calcified into an additive and disruptive force: Trump now has his own social media network, Truth Social, and his ally Elon Musk controls X, formerly Twitter. Vance in particular has reveled in fighting culture wars and other right-wing causes online, often adopting a trollish posture on X while acting as an information filter between the fringe and the mainstream.
Vance and others close to Trump have argued that even if the allegations were false, they served a purpose in putting Springfield’s story in the spotlight.
“The media didn’t care about the carnage that these policies were causing until we made a meme about cats, and that shows the media’s inability to care about what’s happening in these communities,” Vance told CNN after Tuesday’s debate. “If we have to make a meme about it to get the media to care, we’re going to keep doing it, because the media could, should, care about what’s happening.”
The problem in Springfield, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) from Columbus in southwest Ohio, involves thousands of Haitian immigrants who have settled in the city in recent years, many of them legally under federal programs after fleeing violence and political unrest. Residents and political leaders, including Vance, have for months raised economic and public safety concerns, saying an influx of as many as 20,000 immigrants to a city that had a population of 59,000 in 2020 has strained resources.
More recent are allegations that pets were kidnapped, slaughtered and eaten.
Former President Donald Trump spoke to Telemundo Arizona in an exclusive interview ahead of his rally on Thursday.
Blood Tribe, a domestic neo-Nazi group, was one of the first to spread the rumor in August, posting about it on Gab and Telegram, social media platforms popular with extremists. Although the group’s leader has claimed Trump was complacent about the allegations, Blood Tribe’s reach is unknown; its accounts on those sites have fewer than 1,000 followers.
Some Blood Tribe members also have a few real-world events planned, such as a small march on August 10 in Springfield to protest Haitian immigration and an appearance at a city commission meeting later in the month.
The rumor quickly spread across major social media platforms, including Facebook and X. NewsGuard, a company that monitors misinformation, traced its origins to an undated post from a private Facebook group that was shared in a screenshot posted to X on September 5.
“Remember when my hometown of Springfield, Ohio was all over the national news for Haitians?” the user wrote. “Did I say all the ducks were disappearing from our parks? Well, now they’re your pets.”
Around that time, other social media posts about the rumor surfaced and went viral, some of them based in part on comments from residents at the public hearings. On Sept. 6, there were 1,100 posts on X mentioning Haitians, migrants or immigrants eating pets, cats, dogs and geese, according to PeakMetrics, a research firm. The next day, there were 9,100, a 720% increase.
The number of messages increased again on Monday, to 47,000, when Vance advanced the rumor about X.
“A few months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants who are straining social services and causing chaos throughout Springfield, Ohio,” Vance wrote, referring to remarks he made at a Senate hearing. “Reports are now coming in that people have had their pets taken and eaten by people who should not be in this country.”
Vance, as he noted in his message, had been raising the issue for months, but in less provocative terms.
“Go to Springfield now, go to Clark County, Ohio, and ask the people there if they got rich with 20,000 newcomers in four years,” he said in early July, before Trump picked him as his running mate, at NatCon, a right-wing nationalist conference. “Housing is booming. People, middle-class people in Springfield who have lived there for generations, sometimes can’t afford housing.”
Shortly after Vance’s post Monday, Springfield police officials told the Springfield News-Sun — and later NBC News and other national media outlets — that they had received no credible reports of such incidents. Vance posted another message the next day, writing that his office had received reports that “domestic animals or local wildlife” had been “taken by Haitian migrants.”
“It is of course possible that all these rumors turn out to be false,” he added.
But by this point, Trump was fully on board with them. At 5:19 p.m. Tuesday, less than four hours before his debate with Harris, Trump posted a meme on Truth Social showing cats armed for war and wearing MAGA hats. Fifteen minutes later, he shared a second meme depicting himself surrounded by cats and ducks.
Then the debate began. When asked by moderator David Muir of ABC News about his opposition to a bipartisan border bill, a distracted Trump first insisted on responding to a dig from Harris about people leaving his campaign rallies early. His meandering response eventually turned to Springfield, where, he said, “they eat dogs … and cats.”
The unease and disapproval among Trump’s fellow Republicans was soon palpable.
“I want to be clear on this. This is a very minor issue that is happening in the United States,” Rep. Byron Donalds, a Trump loyalist from Florida, told NBC News when asked about the pet remark in the chat room following the debate.
In their closing remarks, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump ended Tuesday’s debate with different messages about America’s future.
Those looking for a culprit have floated several suspects. Laura Loomer, a far-right political activist and conspiracy theorist who had posted about the rumor, traveled with Trump to attend the debate Tuesday.
“Why do you want to talk to me? I don’t work for President Trump,” Loomer responded when contacted by NBC News.
Loomer and Trump did not speak during the flight, a source familiar with the matter said. A Trump adviser also noted that Loomer “is not part of our team.”
“The president is the most cultured man in America and he knows everything that’s going on,” the aide added.
The rumor about Springfield “reached his office. He was made aware of what these residents were saying.”
Others focused their suspicions on Vance, given the way he had brought the issue into the spotlight.
“It’s all JD,” said a source connected to the campaign.
Another source close to the Trump campaign said Trump and Vance did not discuss the Springfield issue before the debate.
“I don’t know what he was thinking,” another Trump ally said of his choice to bring up the Springfield rumor unprompted.
The fault, according to this person, lies solely with Trump.
“We’re not preparing Donald Trump,” the ally added. “We can make suggestions.”
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