Prepare to be shocked: At around the time J.D. Vance started dissembling about Haitians eating people’s house pets, a Vance campaign staffer privately spoke with the city manager of Springfield, Ohio, where thousands of Haitians have settled. The Wall Street Journal reports that the official informed Vance’s staffer that online rumors of pet eating in the city were flatly false. But Vance then amplified the claim. Donald Trump followed suit, adding—because nobody out-embellishes Trump—that along with cats, Haitians are also consuming Springfield’s dogs.
They knew it was all a lie. But they kicked off this whole campaign of hate and demagoguery anyway.
These revelations should prompt a reconsideration of one of this campaign’s ugliest moments: Vance’s defense of the pet-eating fabrication on CNN last Sunday. “If I have to create stories” to get the media to cover the impact of immigration, he said, “then that’s what I’m going to do.”
This move is really a form of what’s been called “sanewashing”—it repackages one of MAGA’s racist lies as merely an effort to prompt a good-faith policy debate. And it has been widely analyzed as damage control, as an attempt to put positive spin on a lie after getting caught out for it. But if Vance went into all this knowingly, then it’s time for more scrutiny of the underlying position he is self-consciously articulating here—that lying in this manner is acceptable to force discussion of a supposedly overlooked public problem—on its own terms, as its own act of grotesque public misconduct.
If it is OK to level such a despicable, dehumanizing smear at a vulnerable minority population to corral media attention in this fashion, then what sort of lying and propaganda about an exposed, assailable, encircled out group would not be justified? Does Vance’s code of political ethics have any limiting principle that you can discern?
Vance is now denying that he admitted anything untoward in that CNN interview. At a rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday, he slammed the media as “dishonest” for reading his CNN quote about “creating stories” as synonymous with fabricating them. In Vance’s new telling, he really meant he had created a story in the media; that is, he merely made immigration newsworthy, and didn’t manufacture anything.
This tidy little claim is wrecked by the new reporting demonstrating that his campaign knew in advance that the “created” story was indeed a fabrication. But it’s worth digging more deeply into Vance’s broader insistence on the need to “create stories” for the nakedly instrumental purpose of redirecting the public debate.
For instance, take Vance’s most basic assertion—that the media wasn’t covering the Haitian influx into Springfield before the pet-eating claim took off. This itself is nonsense. There were already national media stories analyzing it in depth, including ones that credited Vance himself with drawing attention to it in other, less dubious ways. What Vance really objected to is that these stories portrayed the situation as nuanced—as a development with mixed but largely good effects—rather than as a purely negative one.
What’s more, Vance’s dishonesty about Springfield goes well beyond the pet-eating scam and strays into other really dangerous territory. Vance has repeatedly cited a need to draw attention to other problems supposedly inflicted by Haitians, again and again claiming that “communicable diseases” are “on the rise” and have “skyrocketed.”
You might describe this as the art of the “secondary lie.” Even as the pet-eating ruse sucked up all the attention, MAGA figures have advanced other claims along with it that have passed into the discourse with little scrutiny. It’s a trick that MAGA propaganda often employs.
But it’s very hard to square Vance’s claims of “skyrocketing” diseases with official health data from Clark County, home to Springfield. That data shows that reportable communicable diseases in the county—excluding Covid-19, which dwarfs all others and surged during the pandemic for many other reasons—actually have declined in a broad sense. Despite a rise in 2022 that was the exception, they were actually lower in 2023 than they were in 2021 (when the Haitian influx gained steam), which in turn was lower than 2020 (before their arrivals really got going). The overall trend from 2020 through the end of 2023 is downward, not upward.
“If you look at all reportable diseases as a whole, they’re actually going down,” Chris Cook, the health commissioner of Clark County, told me.
Vance has also specifically suggested that cases of tuberculosis and HIV are rising or even soaring. But according to the county’s data, there was one case of T.B. in 2021, three cases in 2022, and four cases in 2023. OK, that sort of constitutes “rising.” But it’s a tiny handful of cases out of a county population of 135,000.
What about HIV? Well, in 2022—the latest year of finalized data—there were around nine cases of new HIV diagnoses per 100,000 people in Clark County. That is up from five cases in 2020, but that nine cases is barely higher than the current rate across all of Ohio, which had seven new cases per 100,000 people in 2022. And if you look at the numbers of people living with HIV as a condition—as opposed to new cases of it—there are fewer per 100,000 in Clark County than there are statewide, Cook points out.
Every case of T.B. and HIV is serious. But there is no plausible way to describe any of that in Vance’s hyperbolic terms. Indeed, Cook describes those diseases as getting only a “slight bump” and suggests that singling out individual diseases is not particularly illuminating to begin with.
“As a measure of total health of a population,” Cook told me, “individual diseases” are less informative than “trends of groups of diseases.” And those trends are down. It’s hard to see how anyone could seriously cast all this as a severe blight caused by Haitians.
At bottom, Vance’s whole purpose of running with the grotesque pet-eating lie has not been to draw attention to the story of Springfield, but to rewrite it. He wants to transform the Haitian influx into a symbol of immigration that’s uniformly understood (as in the Trump-MAGA worldview) as a massive and disorienting alien invasion responsible for unleashing all manner of debilitating social and societal ills. This is what Vance means when he says the pet-eating ruse was necessary to highlight the “suffering of the American people” inflicted by current immigration policies, an absurd construction that reveals more about MAGA’s own fear and loathing of immigration than it does about anything else.
Springfield simply does not tell that larger story. Yes, of course there are difficult challenges associated with this specific influx and with immigration more broadly. But Springfield’s own leaders see the arrivals as manageable, and they’ve clearly been a positive for the city. Immigration has been helping revitalize other, similar Rust Belt communities in postindustrial population decline. Haitians assimilate well into U.S. society as a rule. And Vance has zero standing to lecture anyone about the broader handling of immigration, having joined with Trump to cynically kill the most comprehensive border and asylum management bill Congress produced in many years.
In a way, it’s useful that Vance described his zeal to “create stories” so candidly. Because we can now scrutinize this as its own act of public misconduct, one that telegraphs what a Trump-Vance presidency would really look like. Imagine this fondness for fabricating stories about immigrants supercharged by the federal bureaucracy and the White House press operation, and you get an inkling of what could be coming. The Springfield pet-eating lie is best seen as a cautionary tale—an extremely harrowing one.
