It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen during a presidential debate, and I’m exactly the kind of nerd who has watched every general election debate since he was 11 years old.
A few minutes into the contest, Kamala Harris interrupted her remarks to mock Donald Trump’s rallies. She invited viewers to attend one made fun of Trump’s meandering and self-absorbed speeches and then said, “People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
She was baiting him, and he fell for it. He responded with a barrage of conspiracy theories and misinformation that culminated in a bizarre rant about immigrants and pets in Ohio. “In Springfield,” Trump said, “They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
In that moment, Trump amplified a truly strange claim that had spread through the online right over the days before. It’s hard to trace the origin of a rumor, but it blew up with a Sept. 6 post from a prominent right-wing account called End Wokeness, which claimed that “Springfield is a small town in Ohio. 4 years ago, they had 60k residents. Under Harris and Biden, 20,000 Haitian immigrants were shipped to the town. Now ducks and pets are disappearing.”
The next day, a Malaysian MAGA influencer named Ian Miles Cheong posted about a disturbing incident in Ohio in which an American-born woman from Canton, Ohio, Allexis Telia Ferrell, is being prosecuted for killing and eating a cat. (She is pleading not guilty.)
Cheong falsely speculated that she was Haitian, and MAGA ran with it. Benny Johnson, a MAGA influencer with 2.7 million followers on X (Johnson has been identified as one of the right-wing personalities who — perhaps unwittingly — received substantial payments from Russia), posted that “THOUSANDS of Haitian Migrants TERRORIZE Ohio, EAT Family Pets, Cats, Dogs & Ducks.” Another MAGA influencer, a person who goes by the online name Catturd, posted, “Unless you want your pets eaten, you better vote for Trump.” Catturd has 2.9 million followers.
It’s hard to describe the sheer weirdness of the discourse, which has also included investigations of whether Haitian immigrants are killing wild ducks or geese — something very different from stealing and killing a person’s pet — and featured a series of memes featuring heroic images of Trump protecting frightened kittens.
JD Vance also jumped on the claim, with possibly the most destructive message. His role in the campaign is to try to apply Yale Law School polish to many of MAGA’s most demented conspiracies. He posted that he’s heard from constituents in Ohio who are worried about Haitian migrants abducting pets, but then he said, “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”
And how did he suggest that his followers respond? By continuing to spread baseless claims. “Don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots,” he wrote on X. “Keep the cat memes flowing.”
We’ve seen this play out many times before. In fact, one of the defining characteristics of the Trump era is the former president’s willingness to believe (or at least profess to believe) virtually anything negative about his opponents — no matter how outlandish — and then repeat and amplify those claims until they permeate the Republican Party.
But I’m actually less interested in debunking each individual hoax than in answering some questions. Why is MAGA still so gullible? Why didn’t Republicans learn anything from 2020, when they fell for some of the strangest conspiracy theories I’ve ever heard about?
Who can forget that Fox News attempted to substantiate Trump’s election fraud claims by relying on a memo written by a woman who claimed to experience something like “time-travel in a semiconscious state” and said that the wind told her she was a ghost?
In the days after Jan. 6, 2021, I argued that years of extreme right-wing rhetoric had made millions of ordinary voters vulnerable to the wildest of ideas. If you watch right-wing television — or if you listen to right-wing radio — you will hear the most vicious insults against Democrats and the media over and over. It’s a constant drumbeat of inflammatory rhetoric: “They” hate America. “They” hate Christians. “They” will destroy our country.
And few populations have been more thoroughly demonized during the age of Trump than immigrants. From the opening speech of his first campaign (when he said immigrants are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”), Trump has been painting a lurid and terrifying picture of the immigrant threat.
Hear this long enough, and it seeps into your bones. You begin to develop a level of antipathy and distrust so profound that you are capable of believing just about anything about your opponents. After all, if Democrats are “demoncrats,” what won’t they do to attain power? If the immigrant community is full of rapists and drug dealers, how hard is it to imagine that they might kill and eat cats and dogs, never mind ducks?
Another way of putting it is that animosity fuels gullibility. If you like or respect someone, you’re immediately skeptical of negative claims, and the more outlandish the claim, the more skeptical you’ll be. But if you loathe a person or a population, in a perverse way you become more receptive to the worst stories. After all, they’re the ones that vindicate your hatred the most.
But as our conspiracy crisis continues, I’m realizing that explaining gullibility primarily through the lens of animosity is incomplete. After all, the data shows that both sides have roughly equivalent (and extremely negative) views of each other. The vulnerability to misinformation doesn’t just run one way. There were moments, for example, during the Russia investigation when Trump’s opponents were all too willing to believe the most lurid (and incredible) claims against Trump.
The problem, then, isn’t just with right-wing villainization, it’s with who the right elevates as its champions. Every movement elevates heroes and leaders, but in the age of Trump, the right’s heroes are created almost entirely through pugilism and confrontation, not through inspiration or elevation.
It’s easy to roll your eyes at the idea that politics should be elevated (or when people start talking about elevation and inspiration), but this is the consequence when inspiration isn’t even an option. The first rule of the right is simple: You must fight. In their minds, McCain didn’t fight, so he lost. Romney didn’t fight, so he lost. Trump fought, so he won.
And if your chief combatant is also a gullible conspiracy theorist, then it orients the entire community toward the most lurid of tales.
Of course the friend/enemy distinction is older than politics, but the twist here is that right-wing media doesn’t just elevate the wrong heroes — by making the mainstream media an enemy every bit as loathed as its partisan political opponents — it also walls itself off from accountability. In a recent poll, The Associated Press found that Republicans trust “Donald Trump and his campaign” more than any media or government source to provide accurate information about the presidential election.
In this world, the conspiracy theorists are both the fact-finders and the fact-checkers, and there is no restraint on the reach of their lies.
A real-world example helps explain the dynamic. A few days ago, several people I know shared a viral social media post from a Newsmax host named David Harris Jr. that included a video that purported to show a line of Somali illegal immigrants waiting to get driver’s licenses (and potentially to register to vote) in Florida. Harris claimed the video came from a “friend.”
There was ample reason to be skeptical, beginning with the fact that the video was shot in Florida, where illegal immigrants are prohibited from obtaining driver’s licenses, and it was left entirely unexplained how Harris’s “friend” knew the immigration status of the people in the line.
Almost immediately, both local media and Florida officials debunked the video. Christina Pushaw, a spokesperson for Gov. Ron DeSantis, posted, “The people waiting for driver licenses & IDs in the video are black AMERICANS. Not Somalians or any type of illegal aliens!”
But MAGA scorns the mainstream media, and it is skeptical of DeSantis after he challenged Trump. In the friend/enemy world of the right, the allegation came from a friend, all the debunking came from enemies, and why would anyone believe those terrible people?
To make matters worse, when you talk to people who are deeply embedded in MAGA America, you know that the friend/enemy distinction isn’t just relevant to how they view public figures, it also applies to personal relationships. MAGA is a very tightly knit community, which gives its members an immense amount of purpose, joy and fellowship, but that community is conditioned on unwavering support for Trump.
Share skepticism of any MAGA claim — especially if the source of skepticism is the mainstream media or the government — and you risk that connection. You will pay a social cost.
There’s another cost to MAGA conspiracies. By constantly sidetracking real national issues, they distract us from dealing with genuine problems. There is a serious conversation to be had about the level of immigration that’s appropriate and whether any given community can properly absorb a new influx of people and in what numbers. There is a need for serious people to make serious arguments about immigration policy and asylum reform.
Instead, the right wants Catturd, because Catturd fights.
How many times can a friend lie to you and remain a friend? Ordinary Republicans should be offended at the way their own media has treated them. They should be outraged at the lack of respect for their independence and intelligence. But for now, they hate or fear their enemies so much that they will not properly vet their friends, and when your friend in chief is Donald Trump, then you will be led astray.
Some other things I did
Last week, my friend and colleague Ross Douthat invited me on “Matter of Opinion” to discuss my support, as a pro-life conservative, for Kamala Harris. I truly enjoyed the conversation. My opening statement began like this:
So I wrote in 2016, and I wrote in 2020, and you know, by all expectations, if Trump was going to run again after 2020, I would write in again. But then two big things happened that, to me, changed the stakes and also in some important ways changed some of the issues.
Those two things are really summed up in two dates, Jan. 6, 2021, and Feb. 24, 2022. Jan. 6, of course, everyone remembers; this is the attack on the Capitol by a Trump-supporting mob that was the capstone of — as we both watched with horror — a monthslong campaign to try to overturn an American election, fueled by just the most comically ridiculous lies and vicious conspiracy theories.
And so that was a jolting event. And then when Russia attacked Ukraine, that was a world historic event. And on both Jan. 6 and Feb. 24, what I saw was it wasn’t just that I was against Trump — I was very much against Trump on Jan. 6 — and I was very much against Trump’s base line hostility to Ukraine that he had before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it also changed the issue set.
My Sunday column tried to answer the question: If Trump loses, does MAGA have a future? My answer is no:
I’m under no illusions that defeating Trump would resurrect Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party — or John McCain’s or Mitt Romney’s. I’m also under no illusions about the fate of Never Trumpers in a post-Trump G.O.P. Many of us are seen as traitors and won’t be welcomed back into the fold, even if the Republicans finally do turn the page on Trump.
But the personal drama of the small band of Never Trump Republicans is meaningless compared with the national necessity of a healthy Republican Party. A two-party democracy is inherently fragile if one party is fundamentally broken. If Trump loses, MAGA will fade. It will not go away, of course. Reactionary populism is a permanent fixture of American politics, but don’t believe MAGA’s hype. Its national success depends on one man.
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