Shake it off

If Donald Trump loses the presidential election, it’s likely that the two biggest reasons why will be a couple of enormous unforced errors:

(1) Agreeing to debate Joe Biden a full three months before the earliest previous presidential debate, thereby creating an opportunity that otherwise would never have arisen for Biden to be forced out and replaced with Harris.

(2) Picking JD Vance as his running mate.

The conventional wisdom is that VP candidates almost never make any real difference, but Vance is going above and beyond in turning Trump’s selection of him into the electoral equivalent of mailing yourself a letter bomb.

The immigrants are eating our pets thing was Vance’s bright idea, and the single biggest disaster in Trump’s disastrous debate performance. It was also poetic justice:

The conservative movement was built on the premise that the main organs of knowledge — journalism, academia, science — are hopelessly and even consciously biased toward liberalism. In response to this belief, the right constructed its own bubble in which only a claim originating from within the movement can be taken as true. Julian Sanchez once called this “epistemic closure,” meaning that its beliefs were not open to correction from outside sources.

The lie that migrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, is a classic example of that method in operation. The story originated from white-supremacist sites online, which relentlessly promote the idea that non-white immigrants are dirty and dangerous. It quickly worked its way from the far right into mainstream conservative channels. Republicans seemed to think the idea gave them a potent meme.

J.D. Vance, an important bridge between the GOP and elements of the radical right that have been activated by Trump, played a key role. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” Vance tweeted.

When reporters discovered the story was baseless — the closest thing to a factual basis for it appears to be a woman in a different city, Canton, who is not Haitian, arrested for killing a cat — Vance pivoted in a revealing fashion. “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false,” he conceded. But then he insisted other facts about immigration were true. (“That local schools have struggled to keep up with newcomers who don’t know English. That rents have risen so fast that many Springfield families can’t afford to put a roof over their head.”) And so, he urged his “fellow patriots” to continue spreading the lie about pet murder:

In short, don't let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots.

Keep the cat memes flowing.— JD Vance (@JDVance) September 10, 2024

This was a familiar sentiment on the right, a smug indifference to truth. The libs would whine, and they would win.

In the immediate term, that is what seemed to happen. The wild tale spread and was gleefully repeated by fellow Republicans in Congress. Inevitably, it found its way into Trump’s media diet. And while Trump’s debate handlers surely did not instruct him to talk about pets being abducted and consumed, they couldn’t dislodge it from his addled mind.

Then we have this nugget:

Says Peter Thiel’s pool boy and Donald Trump’s poorly housebroken lap dog.

I was kicking around the pet eating thing with Farley and Rick Perlstein earlier today, and I remembered there’s a long tradition of nativist panic about the weird smelly possibly poisonous foods that foreigners eat. For example there’s a famously nativist 1890 SCOTUS immigration case that talks about how “imported pauper labor” (the case is talking about Chinese labor in the west although it doesn’t say. so explicitly) subsists on “the coarsest foods,” while living in “hovels” barely fit for human habitation. And there’s a bunch of literature from the early-mid 20th century in which WASP writers react with a combination of fascination and revulsion to the bizarre exotica that Italians use in their cooking, namely garlic. (Stories about Joe DiMaggio’s immigrant roots ALWAYS mentioned garlic, in the way one might now discuss a spice from Arrakis.)

The pet eating stuff is an extension of this sort of thing, although Perlstein believes, no doubt correctly, that this is the kind of story GOP elites wouldn’t have touched themselves pre-Trump.