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Largely lost in the ongoing furor over Donald Trump’s bogus claims about Ohio’s Haitian immigrants is the fact that the former president is aligning himself, once again, with the views of neo-Nazis. That alone should set off alarm bells, but in the cult of personality that surrounds Trump in the Republican Party, it hasn’t.
It was neo-Nazis who first lit the fuse this summer sparking the racist wildfire of pet-eating immigrants. Members of a Nazi-loving group called Blood Tribe, founded by a former Marine, began spreading the lie on far-right platforms like Gab, they marched on the city of Springfield carrying swastika flags and rifles to vilify Haitians, and one member confronted the city council with a “word of warning” before he was thrown out of the meeting.
This might have remained the vile bigotry of extremists had it not been for the Trump reelection campaign.
Bomb threats terrorizing Springfield, Ohio
First, his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and then Trump himself seized on the lie and gave it oxygen, with the Republican presidential nominee declaring at this month’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that the immigrants in Springfield are “eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats.”
Like the neo-Nazis at Blood Tribe, Trump and Vance are fueling a lie that serves their ends: trafficking in racist, xenophobic hatred and provoking fears from white America.
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Everyone from the city manager in Springfield to the local police to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, has debunked the claim of pet-eating Haitians. What started as another laughable, preposterous moment from Trump – Harris scoffed in disbelief as he said it at the presidential debate on Sept. 10, and comical left-wing cat memes sprouted up – soon became a real danger.
Bomb threats began pouring into Springfield, forcing the city to shut down schools and facilities, and Haitian immigrants in Ohio and beyond have been living in fear of violence ever since, even as Trump and Vance have doubled down on their claims, repeating them on the campaign trail.
The neo-Nazis have been thrilled by the response from Trump. One Blood Tribe member wrote on Gab: “The president is talking about it now. This is what real power looks like.”
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine finally calls out Trump and Vance
It’s not the first time, of course, that Trump has planted his flag on the same side as neo-Nazis and white supremacists with his hateful rhetoric.
As president, he infamously said there were “very fine people on both sides” at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Trump has continued to defend that remark, citing a flawed and baffling account from fact-checkers at the normally reliable Snopes.
He told the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group, to “stand back and stand by” in a 2020 presidential debate.
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After leaving the White House, Trump dined at Mar-a-Lago with Nick Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist and antisemitic Holocaust denier
Trump has declared repeatedly in his reelection campaign that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and that his opponents are “vermin,” dehumanizing language echoing that of Hitler and his modern-day neo-Nazi followers. And he shared a video on social media that talked of a “unified reich.”
In modern American politics, it would have been disqualifying for any presidential candidate to amplify neo-Nazi rhetoric or align himself with such hateful, racist messaging. But Trump famously thrives on shattering political norms, and Republicans, fearful of his reaction, have been reluctant to condemn him in the bogus dog-eating imbroglio in Ohio or other similar episodes.
Gov. DeWine, for one, has repeatedly called for an end to the false and “hurtful” claims about Haitian immigrants in his state, but he dodged questions for more than a week about Trump’s responsibility for fueling them and refused to condemn the Republican standard-bearer for it.
“I’m not here to place blame,” DeWine told CNN last Monday.
Ten days after the debate, the Ohio governor finally mustered the fortitude to call out the falsehoods spewed by Trump and Vance against the Haitians in his state. In a column that ran Friday in The New York Times, DeWine wrote of the men at the top of the Republican ticket: “I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield. This rhetoric hurts the city and its people.”
Other leading Republicans, though, have stayed silent, while the neo-Nazis cheered.
Eric Lichtblau, an author and investigative reporter in Washington who has won two Pulitzer Prizes in journalism in writing about national security and law enforcement affairs, is working on a book about hate crimes.
