I spent a week in Springfield, Ohio way back in 1992, when it was reputed to be a swing-voting city in a swing state. I wrote that “it was built by the calloused hands of the working man – a place where cigarettes are ‘smokes,’ where the men who belly up to the lunch counter are called ‘babycakes,’ where the dress code is a flannel shirt and dungarees, where most everyone speaks with the twang brought north from Kentucky by their forebears.”
And in that bygone era, none of Ohio’s Republican leaders were racist whackos; none would ever have even imagined waging war against their own constituents, wreaking havoc in their own communities. How quaint they all seem now, when contrasted with the likes of veep aspirant J. D. Vance, MAGA’s demon spawn.
Vance’s guest gig yesterday morning on CNN was a master class in mendacity – insisting yet again without a shred of a proof (because none exists) that Haitian migrants in Springfield are eating people’s pets; that he heard about the pet thing “first hand” from a few people (Republican Gov. Mike DeWine dismisses Vance’s pet thing as “a piece of garbage”); that the Haitians are living there illegally (DeWine says “they’re here legally”); and that “there are 911 calls” about Haitians eating geese from “the local park pond” (the county sheriff and the Ohio Department of Resources reviewed nearly a year of 911 calls and found no such evidence).
Vance also insisted that he bears no responsibility for the resulting bomb threats, school cancellations, and attacks on Haitians’ cars and property. Springfield’s mayor disagrees. He says that Vance and Trump “need to know they are hurting our city. It was their words that did it…Any political leader that takes the national stage and has the national spotlight needs to understand the gravity of the words” they use.
Speaking of words, Vance himself supplied the most revealing quote yesterday:
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the sufferings of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Permit me to translate: “We’ll say and do whatever it takes – even whipping up some domestic terrorism – if we think it can help us win.”
Racism, xenophobia, and cruelty have always been core staples of the MAGA agenda, but right now Vance and his partner are amping them up in a desperate attempt to distract attention from their latest slide in the polls. The calculus, depraved as it may be, is that if people focus disproportionately on their batshittery du jour, perhaps people will pay less attention to what happened on debate night, when Kamala Harris put the old hog on a slab and carved him into little pieces.
And if people hear enough about Haitian migrants – thanks to the story Vance has “created” – then maybe that’ll remind them of the immigration issue writ large. For MAGAts, that issue is their comfort zone. If they can leverage that issue to close the gap with Harris, then what do they care if Haitians and Springfield, Ohio suffer collateral damage?
As one Trump adviser told a reporter, “We talk about abortion, we lose. We talk about immigration, we win.” And when asked about the morality of spreading incendiary lies, the adviser said: “We’ll take the hit to prove the bigger point.”
Cynical MAGAts couldn’t care less what white employers in Springfield are saying – for instance, Jaime McGregor, owner of McGregor Metals, where 10 percent of the workforce is Haitian: “I wish I had 30 more. Our Haitian associates come to work every day, stay focused on their tasks, and consistently meet their targets. They are here to work, and their dedication is truly remarkable in our community.”
They couldn’t care less that Springfield’s Haitians are helping to bolster a city that’s been teetering economically ever since I reported a story there in 1992. They couldn’t care less that the person who originally posted the pet-eating lie on Facebook has now apologized. They couldn’t care less that yet another Vance lie – that Haitians are causing “a massive rise in communicable diseases – has been trashed by the county’s health commissioner. (The Nazis said that Jews spread communicable diseases just like rats.)
MAGAts don’t care about any of that. They’re hooked on J.D. Vance’s blood-and-soil nationalism, his demonization of The Other, and if “creating stories” can feed their hatred – and propel them to the ballot box – then all the better.
Hence the big question in this pivotal election: Are there more of us than there are of them?
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Bonus exchange, from Vance’s CNN interview:
He groused to Dana Bash that she went easier on Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, in her recent interview with the Democratic nominees. He said that Bash never interrupted them, whereas she kept interrupting him.
Her reply: “If Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were making unsubstantiated claims that had racist undertones about people eating dogs and cats…I would’ve had similar interactions with them.”