Underlying 2024’s most outrageous political lie was a truth — some might even argue a confession — voiced by an accomplice:
To get media attention, then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance acknowledged, sometimes “I have to create stories.”
And so, with a brazen disregard for facts, Donald Trump and his running mate repeatedly peddled a created story that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants were eating pet dogs and cats.
With this claim, amplified before 67 million television viewers in his debate against Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump took his anti-migrant, the U.S. border-is-out-of-control campaign agenda to a new level.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump said Sept. 10. “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”
City and county officials said repeatedly that it was not happening.
