Pet issues: What a fake story about eating cats reveals

In what may be the first “fake news” story that has gained any purchase since President Joe Biden exited the 2024 race, rumors swirled online this week that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were capturing and eating pets.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” declared Donald Trump during Tuesday night’s debate in Philadelphia. “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Unfortunately for Trump, the story seems to be totally baseless — at least, according to Springfield city leaders contacted by the media (a point that was made by debate moderator David Muir).

But that hasn’t stopped Trump’s campaign from spending the better part of a week pushing the now-debunked rumor. The story was amplified by Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who tweeted on Monday, “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

Elon Musk, the owner of X, advanced the narrative by tweeting a meme, as did podcaster (and sometimes U.S. Senator) Ted Cruz (R-Texas). And even before Tuesday’s debate, a Trump campaign account went so far as to pledge that “President Trump will deport migrants who eat pets.”

On one hand, this can be seen as merely the latest example of the paranoid style of today’s New Right, a movement that began with Trump pushing the “birther” conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in America.

In recent days, we have seen Tucker Carlson feature a historian who called Winston Churchill the “real villain” of World War II, as well as the Department of Justice alleging in an indictment that prominent MAGA influencers were paid to push pro-Russian propaganda.

In this context, we should not be surprised by the “weird” and conspiratorial allegations that are being lodged. Indeed, the only thing that surprised me about the “migrants eating dogs and cats” story is that it blew up in early September instead of late October.

Still, timing aside, you have to give the purveyors of the narrative some credit for picking what might actually be the most compelling victims: pets.

Perhaps this confirms the notion that many Americans are choosing pets over parenthood, but dogs and cats may now be the third rail of American politics. I’ve seen politicians survive numerous scandals, but anything associated with animals — particularly the cute ones — seems to have (no pun intended) legs.

All this to say, animals move the needle.

Who could forget the story of Mitt Romney putting his dog Seamus on the roof of his car — in a carrier. The dog apparently loved it, at least according to the Romneys.

The rest of us were not so enamored. Romney might seem like a nice guy today, and the story might even sound a bit quant in light of the Trump era. But at the time, this anecdote served a devastating blow to Romney’s 2012 campaign, sparking all sorts of jokes and attacks.

Obama’s top strategist David Axelrod tweeted a picture of Obama holding his dog, with the words, “How loving owners transport their dogs.”

This meme might have lasted forever were it not for what happened next. My then-Daily Caller colleague Jim Treacher received a tip that in his memoir Obama had recounted eating a dog as a child in Indonesia. That helped diffuse the Seamus story.

But a dozen years later, the dogs had their day, once again. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem might have been selected as Trump’s 2024 running mate had she not revealed a story about taking her dog Cricket out by a gravel pit and shooting her. (Noem writes that the dog was “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”)

Noem has been embroiled in multiple scandals, including allegations that she had an affair with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, but none of that mattered. Her big mistake was talking about shooting Cricket. As Politico noted after the story dropped, “Kristi Noem’s VP chances appear as dead as the dog she killed.”

With Noem in the dog house, Trump selected Vance to be his running mate. And once again, something a politician volunteered about animals caused controversy. In this case, it was his disparagement of “childless cat ladies.”

Perhaps realizing the point of this column (don’t mess with pets), Vance sought to clarify that he was only attacking cat ladies, insisting, “I’ve got nothing against cats.”

Having been on the wrong side of the “pet” issue, Team Trump may hope that this (apparently apocryphal) story about Haitian migrants eating Fido will lead to a media feeding frenzy. The only question is whether it will work. In other words, will the dogs eat the dog food?

With the election now less than two months out, Trump and his minions are grasping at straws (or, in this case, paws) to generate negative buzz about their opponents.

Americans are suckers for our pets, and so Team MAGA will likely keep pushing this story for as long as they can get away with it. Say what you want about humans, we can take the slings and arrows. But dogs and cats are a no-go zone.

Matt K. Lewis is a columnist, podcaster and author of the books “Too Dumb to Fail” and “Filthy Rich Politicians.”