Amid fallout from Donald J. Trump’s debunked claim about immigrants from Haiti stealing and eating people’s pets in a small Ohio city, the former president’s oldest son weighed in with his own aspersions on Haitians.
On Thursday, Donald Trump Jr. suggested that Haitian immigrants were less intelligent than people from other countries, and claimed that there was demographic evidence to back this up. He provided none.
“You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average I.Q. — if you import the third world into your country, you’re going to become the third world,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Charlie Kirk on Real America’s Voice, a conservative broadcasting network. “That’s just basic. It’s not racist. It’s just fact.”
Claims inherently linking race, nationality and intelligence have long played a role in scientific racism, which uses pseudoscience to try to justify false claims of racial inferiority or superiority. And intelligence quotient testing, a commonly used measure of intelligence, has long been criticized as unreliable.
Mr. Trump has emerged as a key campaign surrogate for his father. A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Both Trumps have recently advanced the debunked claim that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio. On their social media accounts, they have each posted memes of cats and dogs, nodding at the false claims and implicitly reminding people of the Trump campaign’s hard-line immigration stance.
At the presidential debate on Tuesday, the former president repeated these claims to the tens of millions watching, giving them their widest platform yet. His assertion drew an incredulous look from his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs — the people that came in,” he said, referring to Haitian migrants. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
In the aftermath of the debate, there were a number of bomb threats in Springfield, closing its City Hall, schools and a motor vehicles office.
Mr. Trump’s fixation on Springfield drew a heated rebuke on Friday from President Biden, who noted that Haitian immigrants were “under attack in our country right now” and who appeared to denounce Mr. Trump without naming him.
“It’s simply wrong,” Mr. Biden said. “There’s no place in America. This has to stop, what he’s doing. It has to stop.”
The National Haitian American Elected Officials Network, a nonpartisan group for Haitian American politicians, rejected Mr. Trump’s comments about Haitians and intelligence.
“That is so sad,” said Mary Estimé-Irvin, the group’s chairwoman. “The campaign is desperate.”
In a statement, the group added that many Haitian Americans will “vote overwhelmingly as one bloc to send a loud message to this racist-political nonsense.”
The Haitian population of Springfield has grown significantly in recent years. During the last census, in 2020, a little more than 58,000 people lived in the city; since the pandemic, between 12,000 and 20,000 Haitian immigrants have arrived, according to estimates by city officials. Most Haitians in Springfield and elsewhere in the United States are in the country legally, many having received temporary protected status from the Biden administration under a program started by President George W. Bush for citizens of countries in turmoil.
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