The moment Donald Trump uttered the words at the debate on Tuesday night I knew I’d be off to Springfield.
And so here I am, with a dispatch from a once unremarkable small American town that’s now utterly remarkable, if you believe the claim.
“They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump had said.
First stop – the park to find the dog walkers. The first man I met, with his dog, was called Bruce.
“I’ve heard about it…” he told me when I asked if he could verify the Trump claim. “…but I haven’t seen anything really.”
“You’re not worried about your dog?” I asked. “No.”
“You should ask them…” he then said, pointing to a man in a municipal vehicle.
He didn’t want to be filmed but was happy to chat. He said how the duck and geese numbers had fallen. Maybe they were being eaten he said, or maybe they were just migrating elsewhere.
“What about the pets?” I asked him. And that’s when I got the first hint of how conspiracies are seeded.
“I’ve never seen nothing going on with the dogs and cats, except what I’ve seen on TikTok with the Springfield police arresting a lady for eating a cat. She was from Haiti wasn’t she,” he said.
The video he’d seen has been doing the rounds for the past week in the conspiracy incubator that is social media.
It is police bodycam footage of a woman being arrested a few weeks ago for allegedly killing and eating a cat.
But she isn’t a Haitian migrant. She was born in America. And the incident didn’t happen in Springfield either. The local police have confirmed all these facts to be true.
Across Springfield we have not found anyone who has seen pet-eating immigrants.
Driving the streets and talking to the residents I can confirm that the dogs seem safe; the cats are roaming loose.
The instinct then maybe to laugh at the peak-Trump nonsense. Indeed, the Haitians of Springfield can see the funny side too.
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“The Haitians don’t eat cat and dog. No. It’s not the culture to eat that,” Viteo Lawway, 24, told me, with a laugh.
But within this cat and dog story there are some actual truths. There are huge challenges over immigration in America and they are acute in Springfield.
Viteo Lawway is one of 15,000 to have arrived here in Springfield from war-torn, gang-run Haiti since 2020. The pressures on services and society are obvious.
Springfield is a small place with an existing population of under 60,000.
“How did you feel when you heard Donald Trump’s words?” I asked Casey Rollins the executive director of the St Vincent de Paul centre which helps newly arrived migrants.
“I was physically ill. Still am. I can’t even react. I can’t even repeat it. It’s just unfathomable to me, but that’s what happens when hysteria is spread, you know, and all kinds of fictional narratives and it’s really doing harm to our world.”
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We looked at another view from another Springfield resident that’s gone viral online.
The woman in the video, who appears to be addressing a community group, is heard saying: “I feel like we have been invaded by some sort of pest.
“I am angry that my friends and family are packing up and moving away. I am angry that foreigners are using up the resources they were set up for the Americans who reside here.”
The clip went on to allege and amplify the pet-eating migrant story.
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“Every community, every culture has its myth and its folklore. I guess this is one,” Casey said to me in response.
The tensions in the town are clear but they are being fanned.
An accident last year between a car and a school bus in Springfield was caused by a Haitian driver. There is a particular concern that the newly-arrived Haitians do not drive well.
An 11-year-old boy died in the crash. Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has cited the tragedy but has framed it a particular way. The boy, Vance said on X last week, was “murdered by migrants”.
A Trump campaign social media page weighed in too: “REMEMBER: 11-year-old Aiden Clark was killed on his way to school by a Haitian migrant that Kamala Harris let into the country in Springfield, Ohio.”
The boy’s father has hit back.
Nathan Clark told a city commission meeting this week that he wished for “the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone”.
He continued: “My son Aiden Clark was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by a migrant from Haiti. This tragedy is felt all over this community, the state and even the nation. But don’t spin this towards hate.”
Baseless, evidence-free, racist conspiracies usually stay deep down rabbit holes where they belong.
But Donald Trump inhabits these rabbit holes. He is led down them by people in his inner circle, like Laura Loomer, a known conspiracy theorist who regularly travels in Mr Trump’s entourage.
Rumours which would usually only exist in small echo chambers precisely because there is no evidence no support them, suddenly get massively amplified when Donald Trump mentions them.
This is a country where too often people no longer believe their own l neighbours, their own instinct or their own eyes. And that applies to both sides in this divided country. That’s the problem.
Its Black Mirror type stuff – a conspiracy about cats and dogs. Fantasy world stuff but with real world consequences.