Bluesky

With the election just a month and a half away, Donald Trump’s political rhetoric is becoming even more degraded. The Republican presidential nominee has spent the past two weeks peddling a debunked rumor, spread by his running mate, about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs.

Has Trump suddenly joined the ranks of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA? Hardly. After all, he recently enthusiastically accepted the endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—whose increasingly bizarre résumé includes beheading a whale carcass, dumping a dead bear in Central Park, and, according to Vanity Fair, eating dogs (an allegation he has denied).

Perhaps Trump’s children or his wife have urged him to pay more attention to animal rights? Again, not likely. In June 2020, Vanity Fair ran a long article about Donald Trump Jr.’s lavish big game hunting trips, which cost the American taxpayer tens of thousands of dollars in Secret Service protections. In one notorious example, his sheep-hunting expedition to Mongolia resulted in taxpayers’ footing a security bill of more than $76,000. Eight years earlier, in 2012, Eric and Don Jr. journeyed to Africa to bag elephants, crocodiles, buffalo, and leopards. They gleefully posed for pictures with a dead leopard draped over them. Donald Jr. was also photographed holding a dead elephant’s tail. And he sat for a photo, holding his hunting rifle aloft and wearing a belt of cartridges, next to a dead buffalo that, presumably, he had just bagged. During that same period, Ivanka Trump was hawking clothes she had designed, complete with rabbit-fur pompoms. PETA detailed how some of these rabbits were skinned alive in slaughterhouses in China before being turned into baubles for the rich and famous. And both Ivanka and Melania have been photographed over the years wearing lavish fur coats.

The Trump children kill for sport and for pleasure rather than out of necessity, yet that doesn’t seem to have triggered their father’s outrage or disgust. That is because Trump’s outrage, much like the rumor about cat- or dog-eating in Springfield, is entirely manufactured. It has nothing to do with a genuine concern for animals—or, for that matter, pet owners in Springfield—and everything to do with whipping up anti-immigrant hysteria. Tapping into xenophobia and racism is, Trump seems to believe, his easiest, and perhaps his only, pathway back to power.

But, despite the plastic nature of Trump’s concern for Springfield’s four-legged residents, in the wake of Trump’s foul oratory, the Haitian community has been bombarded with threats, and schools in Springfield have faced warnings of bomb attacks. The situation has gotten so out of control that the Republican governor of Ohio, hoping to head off the threats, has stationed state police in city schools and bomb-sniffing dogs have been deployed throughout the city. Trump’s language has been as irresponsible as was Elon Musk’s last month, when the tycoon’s X platform amplified rumors in the UK that three young girls stabbed to death in northern England had been the victims of an undocumented immigrant asylum-seeker, and Musk himself posted, “Civil war is inevitable.” Following that rumor-fest, far-right mobs in dozens of cities attempted to burn down hotels housing the asylum-seekers.

How utterly appalling that, in an era in which school shootings in the United States have become commonplace, the ex-president would light a fuse that could result in conflagrations against immigrant children in public schools in Ohio. How else to think of this vile man as anything other than an arsonist, a man determined to burn down everything and everyone that stands in his way?

Meanwhile, for the second time this summer, Trump faced an assassination attempt. This time around, no bullet nicked his ear, and the Secret Service successfully deflected the threat, in the form of a gunman lurking in the bushes on the periphery of Trump’s Florida golf course, before anyone was hurt.

Has Trump had a come-to-Jesus moment regarding the inadvisability of letting pretty much anyone purchase high-velocity, semiautomatic weaponry, or a realization that amping up audiences into paroxysms of rage does profound damage to the idea of a civil, peaceful, political arena? Not at all. Instead, he has accused Biden and Harris of creating the conditions in which people feel free to take potshots at him, and has promoted deep-fake images of Harris in a Soviet uniform. He has also promised to visit Springfield in the coming weeks, an event that, I am sure, will only further inflame passions and further endanger local immigrants.

With the former president and Vice President Harris locked in a close race, it’s no wonder that so many people around the world look at America and see a fiasco in the making. Trump is showing a willingness to stoop to new lows even for him. And, in so doing, he is putting lives at risk in Springfield and far beyond.