‘My Dog Was Eaten’: Donald Trump’s Claims About Immigrants Aren’t Just Wrong, They’re Racist

Let’s not mince words: in today’s America, you’re either a defender of democracy, or a drooling sycophant itching to lick the jackboots of a bigoted tyrant. You either believe in the ideals of justice and equality that birthed this nation, or you’re enthralled by dog-whistling demagogues peddling white grievance politics and fever dreams of immigrant invasions.

So watching Kamala Harris forced to share a stage with the bloviating bile-spewer that is Donald Trump felt like a cruel joke. While Harris aimed for a substantive policy discussion, Trump characteristically treated the stage like Wrestlemania, shooting off fiery taunts, tall tales, and schoolyard insults with the unrestrained glee of a man unleashed from the burdens of dignity or truth. But without a braying audience to whip into a frenzy, Trump’s antics fell jarringly flat. As he spun a fantasia of cannibal Haitian cults feasting on Fido, there was no crowd roar to drown out the absurdity — just the sound of a man arguing with the voices in his head.

“They’re eating dogs, they’re eating cats,” he frothed, spittle flying. “This is what’s happening in our country!”  The old bigot who held the nation’s highest office is now parroting deranged Neo-Nazi urban legends he probably found on the same online cesspools where mouth-breathers debate whether the earth is flat or run by satanic childless cat ladies. Watching him flounder in the unblinking eye of the camera, a husk of a man, devoid of relevance or dignity, you almost felt pity. Almost.

Of course, the Springfield PD, who probably know a little more about the local Haitian community than the trolls on Stormfront, summarily debunked this ludicrous slander. This is how racist demagoguery has always worked, from Know-Nothings to the Klan to the modern right-wing mediasphere. The specter of the animalistic, unassimilable Other has been invoked against every immigrant group throughout our history. Irish Catholics were subhuman Papist infiltrators. Chinese migrants were rat-eating, opium-addicted “coolies” threatening white labor. Propaganda in the leadup to WWI depicted Germans as “the Hun” — a Grendel-like barbarian at the gates of civilization. Trump is simply the latest flim-flam artist to drag this ugly tradition from the fevered swamps of the American id onto center stage.

Even so, proposing that your fellow human beings are cannibalistic ghouls should earn you no place on any debate stage outside of an abandoned asylum. Haitian immigrants are not Halloween decorations for the GOP’s perpetual haunted house of white fright. But at a time when Republican leaders are openly threatening to jail journalists and jail their political opponents, it’s tragically unsurprising to see these deplorable hysteria hustlers go mask-off with the most lurid and depraved propaganda imaginable. Winter is coming, and we’ll need every ember of our humanity to make it through the bomb cyclones of bullshit ahead.