Why Trump’s Racism Against Haitians is Even Worse Than You Think
Keeping up with the Trump campaign’s daily insanity is a tough job. It’s like standing in the middle of the Nile River as the water rushes by, trying to catch all of it with a Dixie Cup. And I’m not good at capturing things with a Dixie Cup, for which I owe my urologist a profound apology. I would give him that apology, if he were still still returning my calls.
This is particularly difficult as a writer. Writing takes time. You must learn a new fact, absorb it, reflect on it and come up with something worthwhile to say. By the time you’ve done all of this in response to a Trump outrage, you are already 4 or 5 WTFs behind. That’s why I fear that my long-form trilogy “Trump Just Called All Mexicans ‘Rapists’” might be dated by the time it appears on your kindle.
Trump’s (and his TOTALLY normal and TOTALLY charming running mate’s) recent fabrications that illegal Haitian immigrants have invaded Springfield, Ohio and started eating local pets are only three days old. Yet his subsequent behavior has rendered them antiquated and almost quaint.
For example, if I wanted to stay completely current, I’d talk about how Trump JUST SAID that if he loses the election, we should blame the Jews. And I only say that’s the most current outrage because I haven’t looked at my phone for about 85 seconds.
But at the risk of being the guy who plays The Moody Blues at the Class of 2025 prom, I do think that there is one point about Pet-Gate that bears making. And it goes to how racist this debunked allegation truely is.
Sure, trying to demonize an entire community of black people as being primitive and dangerous because they are eating your orange tabby is obviously and mortifyingly racist. We all know that. But there is an even more sinister intent, and an even broader form of racism involved in the defense JD Vance gave for continuing to spread this slanderous lie.
If you can remember that far back, you will recall that Vance said a number of crazy things. First, he acknowledged that the story was false but said he’d continue telling it because he needed to “create stories” to get the media to talk about what the campaign wanted them to talk about. Then he said that although the “illegal immigrants” from Haiti were actually legal, he didn’t like the program that made them legal, so he was going to continue to call them illegal. This seems reasonable, to someone with a severe head injury.
But then he said something else. He said that maybe the story wasn’t false after all. He claimed that his senate office had received about 10 calls from people talking about Haitians eating pets and that “two of them” had been verified. The press then checked and it turns out that the two cases Vance mentioned of Haitians eating pets didn’t actually involve either Haitians or the eating of pets. Otherwise, Vance was spot on!
But let’s put the inaccuracy of Vance’s claim aside. Let’s examin what Vance was actually saying by pretending just for a moment that there WERE two actually, true cases of Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. That still wouldn’t support what the campaign has been saying and what Trump specifically said in his debate with Harris.
Trump said “they” (the Haitians) are eating cats and dogs. He didn’t say “two crazy people ate pets”. He specifically laid the blame for the feline mastication at the foot of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield. This was not a couple of individual transgressions. This was one, large group transgression
So the question then becomes, how many Haitians eating pets are required for it to be fair that this is something Haitians, as a group, do?
This is extremely important because every group of people has members who do bad things. For example, Jeffrey Dahmer ate people. Lots of them. He was a white male. Can we then say about white males “They are eating their neighbors!”?
In the last 50 years, there have been over a hundred known serial killers, the vast majority of them white males. Can we safely and fairly say that if a bunch of white males move into your neighborhood, there’s going to be a lot of serial killing going on?
Obviously, the answer to these questions is no. Very few white males are serial killers. In percentages, the number is almost negligible. I imagine JD Vance and Donald Trump would agree with that.
In Springfield, there are over 20,000 Haitian immigrants. Let’s pretend that two of them, the number JD Vance himself used, ate a pet. That would be 0.01% of Haitians who ate pets. Yet both Trump and Vance are comfortable attributing that trait to “they”, in other words, this is something that Haitians do.
This leads us an even larger and more racist paradigm than we originally thought. (You can’t say they’re underachievers!) Haitians not only eat pets, but they are so subhuman that there is no threshold of bad behavior that we have to meet before we can condemn the whole lot of them. They are so lacking in individuality and individual worth, that if we can attribute negative traits to the smallest percentage of them, we can attribute those traits to all of them. Putting the specifics of pet eating aside, this is a standard we would never accept for our own race.
This is a subtle but important point. But it’s not too subtle for Trump and Vance. They are the masters and connoisseurs of racism. We’d expect nothing less from them.
