The Springfield Effect
6 min read
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
To say that Donald Trump is reckless with his public comments is about as big an understatement as you could make. But this week, we are watching the real-world effects of that recklessness play out with alarming speed.
Consider the timeline. On Monday, Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, mentioned on X the claim—for which there is no verifiable evidence—that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “abducting” and eating pets. Vance was promoting a racist theory that had been circulating in certain corners of the internet in recent days, a manifestation of the anti-Haitian sentiment that has bubbled up in Springfield after roughly 15,000 Haitian migrants arrived in the town over the past few years. MAGA supporters quickly kicked into action, sharing cat memes referencing the pet-eating theory.
On Tuesday, Vance posted on X that his senatorial office in Ohio had “received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield who’ve said their neighbors’ pets or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants.” Vance acknowledged in his post that these rumors may “turn out to be false” but went on to say: “Do you know what’s confirmed? That a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.” And he egged on the internet trolls in a subsequent post: “Keep the cat memes flowing.”
Vance was referring to an 11-year-old who was killed when a Haitian driver crashed into a school bus last year. (The driver has since been convicted of involuntary manslaughter.) On Tuesday, the boy’s father spoke out against the politicization of his son’s death. “My son, Aiden Clark, was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti,” Nathan Clark said in remarks before Springfield’s city commission. “I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would ever say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone.”
In 2020, the population of Springfield, Ohio, was nearly 60,000. The town had been losing residents because of declining job opportunities, but a recent manufacturing boom has brought in an influx of immigrants, who are mostly Haitian, as Miriam Jordan of The New York Times hasreported. Most of these immigrants are in the U.S. legally; local authorities and employers say that Haitian immigrants have boosted what was once a declining local economy, but such a mass arrival of migrants has also strained government resources.
Trump’s decision to bring up Springfield at the debate—in his now-infamous and bizarre “eating the pets” non sequitur—may have been his attempt to redirect attention to immigration, which he sees as a winning topic for his campaign. But it was also a reminder of his penchant for spreading conspiracy theories and his habit of fueling the fire of racism and hate in America. The days that followed revealed how a rambling Trump comment—with the help of Vance and the pair’s social-media faithful—can generate actual threats of violence.
Yesterday, Springfield’s mayor, Rob Rue, reported that the city had received multiple bomb threats via email, consisting of “hateful language towards immigrants and Haitians”; the threats prompted the evacuation of Springfield City Hall, two schools, and a local Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles facility. Today, a second wave of threats led to the evacuation of multiple city buildings and two elementary schools. Rue told The New York Times that “it’s frustrating when national politicians, on the national stage, mischaracterize what is actually going on and misrepresent our community.” According to the New York–based The Haitian Times, as well as The New York Times,someHaitian residents in Springfield say they are being intimidated and fear for their safety.
Spokespeople for the Trump-Vance campaign have condemned the bomb threats. But Trump has not altered his rhetoric as a result: At a campaign event in Tucson yesterday, Trump repeated the pet-abduction claim, and at a press conference in California this morning, he repeated his promise to deport immigrants from several American cities, including Springfield, en masse.
In less than a week, cat memes and absurd posts have escalated into bomb threats and school evacuations. Writing on Tuesday about the MAGA-world cat content, my colleague Ali Breland noted, “This kind of posting almost never stays online. It’s all fun and games, until it isn’t.” The memes don’t stay online, because they’re made and amplified by people who take action in the real world—Donald Trump and J. D. Vance among them.
Related:
- What was Trump even talking about?
- The worst cat memes you’ve ever seen
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- Trump’s new Big Lie
- Microsoft’s hypocrisy on AI
- The Taylor Swift way to defuse a troll
Today’s News
- Trump said that he does not plan to sell any shares of his social-media company, Truth Social, when a restriction on his ability to sell ends next week.
- The World Health Organization announced that about 560,000 Gazan children under 10 have received the first of two doses of the polio vaccine, after Israeli attacks destroyed Gaza’s water and sanitation systems and caused the disease to spread.
- Amid growing tensions over Ukraine’s potential use of long-range Western missiles, Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday that Ukraine’s use of those weapons would mean that NATO is “at war” with Russia.
Dispatches
- Atlantic Intelligence: A new Atlantic investigation into Microsoft’s two-faced approach to marketing AI exposes the tension between “the supposed promise of a technology and its actual uses in the here and now,” Damon Beres writes.
- The Books Briefing: The promise of alternate universes is so appealing because they explore the allure of living a totally new life, Emma Sarappo writes.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
Nicole Kidman’s Perpetual Trick
By Sophie Gilbert
In both the recent Netflix movie A Family Affair—a bewildering romance with Zac Efron—and in the upcoming Babygirl, [Nicole Kidman] plays an older woman drawn into a sexual relationship with a younger man. In most of these roles, she leans into cliché only to invert it. Her performances parse what visual storytelling insinuates about women, allowing her to embody a specific kind of artifice before smashing it up in front of our eyes.
Notice this Kidman bait and switch once, in fact, and you’ll start seeing it everywhere.
Read the full article.
More From The Atlantic
- A new front in the meme wars
- Keep your Notes app under lock and key.
- How U.S. Steel got rolled
- Trump has not been “sane-washed.”
- Has Trump gone soft on China?
- OpenAI’s big reset
Culture Break
Examine. Why is TV full of late-career Hollywood guys on trips eating food? Just take a look at recent shows featuring Stanley Tucci, Eugene Levy, Conan O’Brien, and more, James Parker writes.
Read. “Suddenly,” a poem by Peter Gizzi:
“then suddenly / you find yourself / in something’s / abject glory”
Play our daily crossword.
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
