Hello and happy Saturday. We try to be very upfront with you here at The Dispatch. You’ve heard our spiel about factual reporting and informed commentary analysis, and as much as we hate to make mistakes, we’ll admit when we were wrong. I don’t have a factual error to correct, but I did make a mistake last week, and I want to address it. The subheading of my newsletter asked, “Could 2024 get any weirder?” I should not have tempted fate.
A week ago, I called attention to the fact that Tucker Carlson interviewed a self-described historian who claimed that Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II, and that the Justice Department had issued an indictment against two Russians for illegally funding a U.S.-based right-wing media company, which paid some of its contributors up to $100,000 each for YouTube videos, some of which could be described as pro-Russian propaganda.
In hindsight, that seems tame in comparison to watching senators tweet memes suggesting that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating pets. To (once again, I’m pretty sure) paraphrase the Talking Heads, “How did we get here?”
In short, misinformation. A rumor on a community Facebook page for Springfield, Ohio, went viral. A right-wing provocateur promoted a video of a woman being arrested for killing and eating a cat “in Ohio” with no other context (the incident happened more than 150 miles away, and the accused is a U.S. citizen).
As we noted in a Dispatch Fact Check we published Tuesday, the city confirmed that police had received no reports about pets being stolen or eaten, or of other rumored serious criminal activity. (Law enforcement investigated but could find no evidence that geese were being taken from a local park, in a report that emerged after we published our piece.)
The facts didn’t stop the virality of the claims, which worked their way up to the Republican presidential nominee. As his prime-time debate with Kamala Harris approached, we wondered: Would Trump stay on message? Or would he go there? Moments after Harris needled the former president by saying that people left his rallies early, moderator David Muir asked Trump to address another charge she leveled, that he had pressured Republican senators to kill a bipartisan deal to address the border crisis so he could campaign on the issue. He criticized President Joe Biden’s border policies, and then said:
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating— they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
So yes, he went there.
Given Trump’s history, maybe it’s not that surprising that he publicly aired conspiracy-theory nonsense at the debate. But—to keep with the weirdness theme—he has also been spending time with a well-known conspiracy theorist.
If you are unfamiliar with Laura Loomer, well, she’s a little hard to explain. She’s described herself as a “proud Islamophobe,” she handcuffed herself to the door of Twitter’s New York offices in response to being banned from the platform in 2018, and she considers herself “pro-white nationalism.” To put things in perspective, she’s drawn criticism from Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said, “I have concerns about her rhetoric and her hateful tone.”
Loomer accompanied Trump to the debate on Tuesday and also traveled with him to New York, where he took part in ceremonies commemorating the anniversary of 9/11. (She has also spread conspiracy theories related to the terrorist attacks.)
It has Nick wondering whether associating with Loomer is another sign of Trump’s “degrading impulse control” or something worse: “Perhaps it’s a calculated choice, a signal by Trump that his second term is all about letting the inmates run the asylum.”
Loomer is not his only data point: Nick notes that Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, has gone all-in on the Haitian-cat-eating conspiracy theories and will make an appearance with Tucker Carlson a week from now in Pennsylvania.
Vance supposedly represents … the thinking man’s MAGA, a more cerebral America-First-er who prefers kitchen-table issues to demagoguery.
In reality, it turns out he’s a sewer rat, the same gutter Know-Nothing populist trash that you’ll find among the worst elements of Trump’s movement.
Jonah has a related but slightly different take on the growing conspiracy-mindedness of the Trump campaign. Loomer is certainly a problem, he writes in the Friday G-File but she’s just a symptom.
The bigger issue isn’t that Trump has a tolerance for crazy people, it’s that he makes once-sane people crazy. Of course, he attracts the fringy and freakish folks. But all powerful people attract crazies. The difference is that he doesn’t hold it against them; he encourages it, so long as part of your crazy portfolio is the belief that he’s never in error and can bake 12-minute brownies in six minutes.
It’s tempting to eye-roll the escalation of weirdness on the right. We’ve been through QAnon and Pizzagate, pandemic denialism, and Stop the Steal. But the consequences are real. Bomb threats caused evacuations and school closures in Springfield the past few days, including one at a medical center Saturday morning as I was finishing up my newsletter. If we’re seeing these kinds of threats now— with almost two months to go before November 5—in response to unfounded rumors, I fear what we might see in November depending on how the election turns out.
Thanks for reading and have a good weekend.
Kevin’s Wanderland newsletter derives its name in part from his journeys around the United States to report on life outside of Washington. But, despite the headline, we did not send him to a dying lake in California. He uses the lake as a metaphor for the current state of the GOP: “The GOP has become the Salton Sea of political parties: As the good stuff evaporates, the toxins left behind get more and more concentrated.” He imagines what an opposition party might look like if Kamala Harris wins in November, and he’s not optimistic. “If they start complaining about debt again after spending a decade drinking off the top shelf in the devil’s whorehouse with Donald Trump, then Americans are just going to laugh their asses off. If they start talking about projecting American strength in the world, many American friends abroad—Volodymyr Zelensky, for example—are going to stand there as human proof of Republican unseriousness.” (Speaking of traveling … Kevin did journey to Springfield, Ohio, this past week. I’ve had a sneak peek at his newsletter for Monday, and you will not want to miss it.)
Zaid Jilani, the son of two Pakistani Muslims, grew up in the South and brings his unique perspective to the stories out of Springfield. He writes about how he was fortunate not to experience much overt racism during his childhood, and he has a pretty sympathetic take on immigration skeptics: “Most people are anxious when the world is changing around them,” he writes. “I can’t imagine what it’s like being an older established person who grew up never meeting someone from another country and seeing your community start to look entirely different.” But he’s concerned about the growing vitriol toward immigrants as conspiracy theorists spread false rumors. “Debates about immigration, assimilation, and the way American communities are changed by foreign-born newcomers are fair. What happened over the past few days, however, was not.”
In normal times, a presidential debate would be the biggest story of the week. But here we are. Tuesday’s ABC News debate did have a big audience, at least, and the 67 million viewers who tuned in saw Kamala Harris knock Trump off his game early in the debate. After she mocked his rally crowds, as I noted above, he became defensive and undisciplined while she “confidently prosecuted her case against reelecting Trump,” we wrote in Dispatch Politics. The team noted that Trump missed his chance to make the case that Harris couldn’t be trusted to handle the border crisis because he was defending his campaign events as “the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.” When she said that world leaders laughed at Trump, he “responded by touting his support from Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán.” How bad was it for Trump? He showed up in the post-debate spin room, where “candidates themselves tend to show up only after underwhelming debate performances, in a bid to reset media coverage.”
And here’s the best of the rest.
- Scott Lincicome has written about tariffs repeatedly in Capitolism, but enough people are listening. So this week he compiled a long list of myths about their benefits and debunks them one by one. We made this one free, so please share with your friends.
- Charlotte reported from Tel Aviv on the enormous demonstrations that broke out after Hamas killed six hostages in Gaza, writing that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is stuck in a hard place between his citizens demanding a hostage deal and hardliners in his coalition who want to continue the war against Hamas.
- We marked the 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks this week, and Dan Vallone writes that it was the first of three generational crises that have shaken our society this century, and that in all cases we failed to confront our sense of fear.
- In Techne (🔒), Will Rineheart uses the example of San Francisco to criticize the “vetocracy” that hampers our ability to add housing and infrastructure. He lists projects—including a Habitat for Humanity development—that have been delayed or canceled because just about anyone can take advantage of overly liberal community input measures to oppose new building for any reason.
- On the pods: Jamie welcomes Politico’s politics bureau chief Jonathan Martin to The Dispatch Podcast for a discussion on the state of the Republican Party and what it will take to move past Donald Trump. On Advisory Opinions, Sarah and David discuss parental responsibility and the limits of legal liability in response to the arrest of the father of the suspect in the recent school shooting in Georgia. On The Remnant, AEI foreign policy guru Danielle Pletka joins Jonah to discuss Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk, and the two also criticize the pro-terrorist element of the left as Israel prosecutes its war against Hamas.
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