Public resources in Springfield, Ohio, were strained long before former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets derailed the presidential debate. Now, after days of vile disinformation from Senator JD Vance and other prominent Republicans, dozens of bomb threats, an immigration town hall that attracted thousands, and the possibility of a Trump visit to town, local and state services have been stretched to their limits. Even as officials hope the major waves of national attention are behind them, they’re preparing for more of the same.
On Thursday, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue announced that he has signed an emergency proclamation granting himself the power to bypass the usual contract procurement and bidding procedures, letting him quickly enter into agreements with vendors related to “public safety concerns.” The proclamation—which originated with Rue’s office, not the city council—will remain in place until further notice, according to the Springfield News-Sun. Flanked by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and regional and state officials, Rue told reporters that the emergency powers were a precaution that would also allow the city to recoup security costs from the state. “It is not an indication of immediate danger, but allows us to efficiently and effectively protect our public safety,” he said.
Dozens of buildings across Springfield—including schools, businesses, and city hall—have been targeted by bomb threats over the past week. Although every threat has turned out to be false, each has required significant time and resources—including federal bomb-detection dogs—to investigate. DeWine has deployed three dozen state police officers to conduct daily sweeps of every school building in the district; those officers will remain on hand, he says, until school officials call them off.
If Trump cancels his visit, “it would convey a significant message of peace to the city of Springfield concerning immigration.”
The national storm bearing down on the small western Ohio city has disrupted almost every aspect of daily life. Threats of violence have forced college classes online and city buildings to close. An annual cultural diversity festival was canceled. And while DeWine started off the news conference by focusing on how to address some of the impacts associated with the recent influx of 15,000 Haitian immigrants to the community—for example, adding another mobile health clinic and allocating millions of state dollars to increase the availability of vaccinations and primary medical care—it quickly devolved into a discussion about bomb threats and Trump.
Springfield’s mayor, who is a Republican, has been speaking outfor months about how the surge in immigrants has strained schools, hospitals, and city resources. But on Thursday, Rue honed in on the toll that national attention has taken on the city’s public safety system. For example, later that day, former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was planning to hold an immigration town hall that ultimately attracted thousands of would-be attendees, forcing the city to close off the street. Rue reiterated his hope that Trump, who has announced he will travel to Springfield in “the next two weeks,” will reconsider. “A visit from the former president will undoubtedly place additional demands on our safety infrastructure,” Rue said. “Should he choose to change his plans, it would convey a significant message of peace to the city of Springfield concerning immigration.”
Meanwhile, Rue and DeWine pointed to signs that life in Springfield is returning to normal. The stream of bomb threats has become a trickle. Children are returning to school in greater numbers each day. In not-so-subtle terms, DeWine told reporters that what Springfield needs most in its quest for normalcy is for the national media to go away.
“We will return, in the not too distant future, to a point where you all are going to be writing and talking about, reporting on the nightly news about something else,” DeWine said. “And as soon as that happens, I think you’re going to see the temperature go down.”
At the center of the two biggest controversies of JD Vance’s short political career have been cats. The first came from his attacks against the “childless cat ladies” on the left. More recently, the Republican vice presidential candidate has been spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets.
One possible conclusion to draw from these missives is that he is an angry man who spends too much time on the internet. Another is that he is a liar. But there is much more to what Vance is doing than mere trolling.
Vance’s cat rhetoric is a purposeful attempt to simplify Great Replacement hysteria—hoping to convince voters that their fears of a migrant invasion and childless women are an existential threat. The controversies derive from two fixations: the number of children American women are having and the rate at which foreigners are coming to the United States. Vance wants a United States where the birth rate is high and the immigration rate is low.
In championing low immigration, mass deportation, and an increase in fertility, Vance is aligning himself with white nationalists who were once shunned by the Republican establishment. These days, he is spending less time openly espousing his ideas than he used to on podcasts. Instead, Vance—as he has explained is part of his project—is finding uncomplicated ways to get his points across (whether they are factual or not). “I do think that political rhetoric is fundamentally [about] dealing with people at their particular level,” he said earlier this year. “I think you get too deep into the theory, you actually miss a lot of the truth.” On Sunday, he went further, telling CNN’s Dana Bash during an exchange about Springfield, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Lying about Haitian immigrants eating cats and attacking childless cat ladies is a perfect example of this plan. Vance thinks he can sell what critics have called “blood and soil nationalism”—invoking the Nazi slogan—with dumb memes.
Vance has not hidden his influences for this theory of change. “I read this book when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan,” Vance said during a 2021 podcast appearance. “And that was a really influential book for me.” Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Republican presidential candidate, was not subtle about his white nationalism in the Death of the West. When it came to immigration, he accused Mexican Americans of waging a “reconquista” of land they’d lost to the United States. He spoke of declining birth rates in extreme terms—claiming that “Western women” were committing an “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” by having too many abortions.
It is not hard to trace the line between Buchanan’s fears and Vance’s anxieties about “childless cat ladies.” The subtitle of Buchanan’s book cuts to the heart of Vance’s current preoccupations: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.
Buchanan’s worldview was rooted in a paleoconservatism that rejected the view that America is an idea and instead saw America as a people. In doing so, he embraced a framework that justified exclusion and a permanent white majority.
Vance has been emphasizing the claim that Americans are a “people” for much of this year. During a speech to the hard-right group American Moment earlier this year, Vance made a point of bringing up “this thing that increasingly bothers me, which is the concept that American is an idea.” Vance made the same point about Americans as a people in July at the National Conservatism Conference in which he railed about the influx of Haitian migrants in Springfield. But the clearest explanation of this obsession, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, came during the Republican National Convention:
America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.
Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.
Vance went on to talk about the cemetery plot in Kentucky that he hopes that he; his wife, Usha, the child of Indian immigrants; and, eventually, their kids will be buried in. (Her family came on “our terms” in this formulation.)
“There will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky,” Vance said. “Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”
Vance was born in Ohio. It was his grandparents who came to the state in search of economic opportunity in the 1940s. His kids would likely be buried in the family plot in Kentucky sometime around 2100—roughly 160 years after any of their paternal ancestors lived there. But for Vance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He believes his blood is connected to that soil. That is what it means for him for America to be a people.
Behind the silly memes of Donald Trump running with cats is a much darker story. Vance sees a rapid demographic shift that is being forced upon the American “people” through immigration and childless women. Vance is determined to stop it. If he has to talk about cats along the way, he will.
At the center of the two biggest controversies of JD Vance’s short political career have been cats. The first came from his attacks against the “childless cat ladies” on the left. More recently, the Republican vice presidential candidate has been spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets.
One possible conclusion to draw from these missives is that he is an angry man who spends too much time on the internet. Another is that he is a liar. But there is much more to what Vance is doing than mere trolling.
Vance’s cat rhetoric is a purposeful attempt to simplify Great Replacement hysteria—hoping to convince voters that their fears of a migrant invasion and childless women are an existential threat. The controversies derive from two fixations: the number of children American women are having and the rate at which foreigners are coming to the United States. Vance wants a United States where the birth rate is high and the immigration rate is low.
In championing low immigration, mass deportation, and an increase in fertility, Vance is aligning himself with white nationalists who were once shunned by the Republican establishment. These days, he is spending less time openly espousing his ideas than he used to on podcasts. Instead, Vance—as he has explained is part of his project—is finding uncomplicated ways to get his points across (whether they are factual or not). “I do think that political rhetoric is fundamentally [about] dealing with people at their particular level,” he said earlier this year. “I think you get too deep into the theory, you actually miss a lot of the truth.” On Sunday, he went further, telling CNN’s Dana Bash during an exchange about Springfield, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Lying about Haitian immigrants eating cats and attacking childless cat ladies is a perfect example of this plan. Vance thinks he can sell what critics have called “blood and soil nationalism”—invoking the Nazi slogan—with dumb memes.
Vance has not hidden his influences for this theory of change. “I read this book when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan,” Vance said during a 2021 podcast appearance. “And that was a really influential book for me.” Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Republican presidential candidate, was not subtle about his white nationalism in the Death of the West. When it came to immigration, he accused Mexican Americans of waging a “reconquista” of land they’d lost to the United States. He spoke of declining birth rates in extreme terms—claiming that “Western women” were committing an “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” by having too many abortions.
It is not hard to trace the line between Buchanan’s fears and Vance’s anxieties about “childless cat ladies.” The subtitle of Buchanan’s book cuts to the heart of Vance’s current preoccupations: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.
Buchanan’s worldview was rooted in a paleoconservatism that rejected the view that America is an idea and instead saw America as a people. In doing so, he embraced a framework that justified exclusion and a permanent white majority.
Vance has been emphasizing the claim that Americans are a “people” for much of this year. During a speech to the hard-right group American Moment earlier this year, Vance made a point of bringing up “this thing that increasingly bothers me, which is the concept that American is an idea.” Vance made the same point about Americans as a people in July at the National Conservatism Conference in which he railed about the influx of Haitian migrants in Springfield. But the clearest explanation of this obsession, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, came during the Republican National Convention:
America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.
Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.
Vance went on to talk about the cemetery plot in Kentucky that he hopes that he; his wife, Usha, the child of Indian immigrants; and, eventually, their kids will be buried in. (Her family came on “our terms” in this formulation.)
“There will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky,” Vance said. “Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”
Vance was born in Ohio. It was his grandparents who came to the state in search of economic opportunity in the 1940s. His kids would likely be buried in the family plot in Kentucky sometime around 2100—roughly 160 years after any of their paternal ancestors lived there. But for Vance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He believes his blood is connected to that soil. That is what it means for him for America to be a people.
Behind the silly memes of Donald Trump running with cats is a much darker story. Vance sees a rapid demographic shift that is being forced upon the American “people” through immigration and childless women. Vance is determined to stop it. If he has to talk about cats along the way, he will.
This story was originally published by the Guardianand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
A hulking steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, is the city’s economic heartbeat as well as a keystone origin story of JD Vance, the hometown senator now running to be Donald Trump’s vice-president.
Its future, however, may hinge upon $500 million in funding from landmark climate legislation that Vance has called a “scam” and is a Trump target for demolition.
In March, Joe Biden’s administration announced the US’s largest ever grant to produce greener steel, enabling the Cleveland-Cliffs facility in Middletown to build one of the largest hydrogen fuel furnaces in the world, cutting emissions by a million tons a year by ditching the coal that accelerates the climate crisis and befouls the air for nearby locals.
In a blue-collar urban area north of Cincinnati that has long pinned its fortunes upon the vicissitudes of the US steel industry, the investment’s promise of a revitalized plant with 170 new jobs and 1,200 temporary construction positions was met with jubilation among residents and unions.
“It felt like a miracle, an answered prayer that we weren’t going to be left to die on the vine,” said Michael Bailey, who is now a pastor in Middletown but worked at the plant, then owned by Armco, for 30 years.
“America needs “a leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s green new scam and fights to bring back our great American factories,” Vance said.
“It hit the news and you could almost hear everybody screaming, ‘Yay yay yay!’” said Heather Gibson, owner of the Triple Moon cafe in central Middletown. “It showed commitment for the long term. It was just so exciting.”
This funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the $370 billion bill to turbocharge clean energy signed by Biden after narrowly passing Congress via Democratic votes in 2022, has been far less thrilling to Vance, however, despite his deep personal ties to the Cleveland-Cliffs plant.
The steel mill, dating back to 1899 and now employing about 2,500 people, is foundational to Middletown, helping churn out the first generations of cars and then wartime tanks. Vance’s late grandfather, whom he called Papaw, was a union worker at the plant, making it the family’s “economic savior—the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class,” Vance wrote in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
But although it grew into a prosperous All-American city built on steel and paper production, Middletown became a place “hemorrhaging jobs and hope” as industries decamped offshore in the 1980s, Vance wrote. He sees little salvation in the IRA even as, by one estimate, it has already spurred $10 billion in investment and nearly 14,000 new jobs in Ohio.
When campaigning for the Senate in 2022, Vance said Biden’s sweeping climate bill is “dumb, does nothing for the environment and will make us all poorer,” and more recently as vice-presidential candidate called the IRA a “green energy scam that’s actually shipped a lot more manufacturing jobs to China.”
America needs “a leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s green new scam and fights to bring back our great American factories,” Vance said at the Republican convention in July. “We need President Donald J. Trump.”
Republicans in Congress have repeatedly attempted to gut the IRA, with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint authored by many former Trump officials, demanding its repeal should Republicans regain the White House.
Such plans have major implications for Vance’s hometown. The Middletown plant’s $500 million grant from the Department of Energy, still not formally handed over, could be halted if Trump prevails in November. The former president recently vowed to “terminate Kamala Harris’s green new scam and rescind all of the unspent funds.”
“The soot covers everything, covers the car, I have to Clorox my windows…It gives you an instant headache.”
Some longtime Middletown residents are bemused by such opposition. “How can you think that saving the lives of people is the wrong thing to do?” said Adrienne Shearer, a small business adviser who spent several decades helping the reinvigoration of Middletown’s downtown area, which was hollowed out by economic malaise, offshored jobs, and out-of-town malls.
“People thought the plant was in danger of leaving or closing, which would totally destroy the town,” she said. “And now people think it’s not going anywhere.”
Shearer, a political independent, said she didn’t like Vance’s book because it “trashed our community” and that he had shown no alternative vision for his home town. “Maybe people who serve with him in Washington know him, but we don’t here in Middletown,” she said.
Climate campaigners are even more scathing of Vance. “It’s no surprise that he’s now threatening to gut a $500 million investment in US manufacturing in his own hometown,” said Pete Jones, rapid response director at Climate Power. “Vance wrote a book about economic hardship in his hometown, and now he has 900 new pages from Trump’s dangerous Project 2025 agenda to make the problem worse so that Big Oil can profit.”
Local Republicans are more complimentary, even if they differ somewhat on the IRA. Mark Messer, Republican mayor of the neighboring town of Lebanon, used the vast bill’s clean energy tax credits to offset the cost of an upcoming solar array that will help slash energy costs for residents. Still, Vance is a strong running mate for Trump and has “done good for Ohio,” according to Messer.
“My focus is my constituents and doing what’s best for them—how else will this empty floodplain produce $1 million for people in our town?” Messer said. “Nothing is going do that but solar. I’m happy to use the IRA, but if I had a national role my view might be different. I mean printing money and giving it away to people won’t solve inflation, it will make it worse.”
Some Middletown voters are proud of Vance’s ascension, too. “You have to give him credit, he went to [Yale] Law School, he built his own business up in the financial industry—he’s self-made, he did it all on his own,” said Doug Pergram, a local business owner who blames Democrats for high inflation and is planning to vote for Trump and Vance, even though he thinks the steel plant investment is welcome.
This illustrates a problem for Democrats, who have struggled to translate a surge of new clean energy projects and a glut of resulting jobs into voting strength, with pollsshowing most Americans don’t know much about the IRA or don’t credit Biden or Harris for its benefits.
Ohio was once a swing state but voted for Trump—with his promises of Rust belt renewal that’s only now materializing under Biden—in the last two elections and is set to do the same again in November. Harris, meanwhile, has only fleetingly mentioned climate change and barely attempted to sell the IRA, a groundbreaking but deeply unsexy volume of rebates and tax credits, on the campaign trail.
“Democrats have not done well in patting themselves on the back, they need to be out there screaming from the rooftops, ‘This is what we’ve done,’” said Gibson, a political independent who suffers directly from the status quo by living next to the Middletown facility that processes coke coal, a particularly dirty type of coal used in steel production that will become obsolete in the mill’s new era.
“The air pollution is horrendous, so the idea of eliminating the need for coke, well, I can’t tell you how happy that makes me,” said Gibson. The site, called SunCoke, heats half a million short tons of coal a year to make coke that’s funneled to the steel plant, a process that causes a strong odor and spews debris across the neighborhood. Gibson rarely opens her windows because of this pollution.
“Last year it snowed in July, all this white stuff was falling from the sky,” Gibson said. “The soot covers everything, covers the car, I have to Clorox my windows. The smell is so bad I’ve had to end get-togethers early from my house because people get so sick. It gives you an instant headache. It burns your throat, it burns your nose. It’s just awful.”
“Somewhere in there, JD changed. He’s allowed outsiders to pimp him. This guy is embarrassing us. That’s not who we are.”
The prospect of a cleaner, more secure future for Middletown is something the Biden administration tried to stress in March, when Jennifer Granholm, the US energy secretary, appeared at the steel mill with the Cleveland-Cliffs chief executive, union leaders and workers to extol the new hydrogen furnace. The grant helps solve a knotty problem where industry is reluctant to invest in cleaner-burning hydrogen because there aren’t enough extant examples of such technology.
“Mills like this aren’t just employers, they are anchors embedded deeply in the community. We want your kids and grandkids to produce steel here in America too,” Granholm said. “Consumers are demanding cleaner, greener products all over the world. We don’t want to just make the best products in the world, we want to make sure we make the best and cleanest products in the world.”
Lourenco Goncalves, chief executive of Cleveland-Cliffs, the largest flat-rolled steel producer in North America, followed Granholm to boast that a low-emissions furnace of this size was a world first, with the technology set to be expanded to 15 other company plants in the US.
Republicans elsewhere in the US have jumped onboard similar ribbon-cutting events, despite voting against the funding that enables them, but notably absent among the dignitaries seated in front of two enormous American flags hanging in the Middletown warehouse that day was Vance, the Ohio senator who went to high school just four miles from this place. His office did not respond to questions about the plant or his plans for the future of the IRA.
Bailey, a 71-year-old who retired from the steel plant in 2002, said that as a pastor he did speak several times to Vance about ways to aid Middletown but then became alarmed by the senator’s rightward shift in comments about women, as well as his lack of support for the new steel mill funding.
“JD Vance has never mentioned anything about helping Middletown rebound,” said Bailey, who witnessed a “brutal” 2006 management lockout of workers during a union dispute after which drug addiction and homelessness soared in Middletown. “He’s used Middletown for, in my view, his own personal gain.”
“Somewhere in there, JD changed,” he added. “He’s allowed outsiders to pimp him. This guy is embarrassing us. That’s not who we are.”
In his latest round of television interviews, it appears he willnot be swayed by the mounting evidence that the racist lies he amplified about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets—which former President Trump repeated on the debate stage this week to 67 million viewers—are demonstrably false.Instead, Trump’s historically unpopular running mate doubled down on his claims in a series of interviews on CNN, NBC, and CBS—even after the reporters fact-checked him.
Let’s start with Vance’s interview on CNN’s State of the Union, which saw the most time dedicated to the topic—and featured Vance’s most combative exchange.
Host Dana Bash asked Vance why he continues amplifying the claims, given that Springfieldhas received multiple bomb threats that led to two hospitals going into lockdown Saturday, plus several schools and the city hall being evacuated since Trump mentioned the lies at the debate. As Bash also pointed out, Springfield’s own mayor told a local television station, “All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it.”
“These are your constituents,” Bash began, “so why are you putting them at risk by continuing to spread claims about Haitian immigrants, despite officials in your state saying that there’s no evidence and pleading for you to stop?”
Vance replied by insisting that he was amplifying the claims of “firsthand” accounts he heard from his constituents—even though, as Bash pointed out, they don’t appear to have any basis in reality.
On Friday, NBC News reported that the Springfield resident who first shared the false claims on Facebook about migrants eating pets—which she allegedly heard through the grapevine of her neighbor’s daughter’s friend—said she had no firsthand knowledge of any incident and regretted that her post sparked a national rumor, adding, “I feel for the Haitian community.” And as Bash noted, the Clark County Sheriff’s Office examined 11 months of 911 calls and found only one, on Aug. 26, that alleged four Haitians were carrying geese within the city of Springfield, according to a report in the Springfield News-Sun. The sheriff’s office directed the call to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, whose officials were not able to substantiate the claim—but that did not stop Donald Trump Jr. from posting audio of the 911 call to X this week.
But Vance, ultimately, did not seem to be interested in confronting these inconvenient facts. Instead, he called Bash’s implication that his words led to the threats in Springfield “disgusting” and said her question was “more appropriate for a democratic propagandist than it is for an American journalist,” leaving Bash visibly shocked. “We can criticize violence,” Vance added later in the interview. “We can also still talk about the problems that are happening in Springfield, and we should be able to do both those things simultaneously.”
When Bash once again gave him an opportunity to acknowledge the rumors about migrants eating pets were unfounded, he did not save himself. “The evidence,” he told Bash, “is the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened.”
Things didn’t go much better for Vance on NBC or CBS. He made the same argument—that he believed the accounts he heard from unspecified constituents over fact-checks from officials and the media—to Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. When she asked why he couldn’t make his argument about immigration without amplifying these lies, he referenced yet anotherdebunked rumor about migrants eating pets in the Ohio city of Dayton, about 30 miles southwest of Springfield.
WATCH: Local officials in Springfield, Ohio, say there’s no evidence of the claims @JDVance has made about Haitian immigrants.
On CBS the same morning, Vance told Margaret Brennan, host of Face the Nation, that while he condemned violence and the threats that have been phoned into Springfield, he did not believe the claims were “false rumors,” adding, “Everybody who has dealt with a large influx of migration knows that sometimes there are cultural practices that seem very far out there to a lot of Americans…the American media is more interested in fact checking innocent people who are begging for relief than they are in investigating some of these claims.” (Again: Multiple officials have confirmed there is no evidence to support these claims,including the state’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.)
Predictably, Vance and his cronies on the right used the interviewers’ fact-checking of him as evidence of their alleged biases. Donald Trump Jr. lauded him in a post on X for “embarrassing the Fake News.”
As my colleague Noah Lanard pointed out, Springfield is dealing with real challenges as it seeks to accommodate roughly 15,000 Haitian immigrants in a town of 60,000 people: Rent has gotten more expensive, in part due to landlords reducing the number of affordable housing units in the town, and schools are in need of more funding to support their growing numbers. And now, thanks to Vance and others involved in amplifying the falsehoods, there are new issues to worry about in Springfield: Schools and hospitals getting bomb threats, and Haitians are living in fear. But if Vance’s trio of Sunday interviews were any indication, none of this, apparently, is enough to stop him.
On Monday morning, a friend texted Vilès Dorsainvil to ask if he’d seen the claims circulating on social media. Dorsainvil, the leader of Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center, had not. He quickly saw that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) had posted that “reports now show” that Springfield residents were having their “pets abducted and eaten” by “Haitian illegal immigrants.”
“It was so painful,” Dorsainvil explained. “I had to leave my job because I was so perturbed that I could not concentrate.” He took the week off from working as a bilingual specialist who processes applications for government assistance to support his community and focus on his mental health.
City officials quickly made clear there is no evidence to support the lies Vance and many other top Republicans, including Donald Trump, are spreading. Vance didn’t care. As he wrote on Tuesday, “Keep the cat memes flowing.” (Vance’s Senate office did not respond to a request for comment that asked for any evidence that would support his recent claims.)
These aren’t harmless memes. The prototypical example looks like what would happen if someone typed “Black people in a third world country chasing Donald Trump holding a cat” into an AI-powered image generator.
In recent months, Vance has been the key figure in making Springfield a national target for the far right. “I blame JD Vance for it. Our city leaders reached out to JD Vance, our senator, asking for help,” Carl Ruby, the senior pastor at Central Christian in Springfield, said about a request for federal assistance Vance drew attention to this summer. “Instead, he brought it up at a Senate hearing and referenced it as a crisis and began amplifying these lies.” In doing so, Vance has put his own constituents at risk. Bomb threats have now led to multiple Springfield schools being evacuated.
The initial gut reaction many people are having to this racist smear campaign is the correct one: It’s vile. Nor is it new. The first ad of his political career in 2022 (titled “Are you a racist?”) opened with Vance asking “Do you hate Mexicans?”He went to to attack the media for calling “us” racist for wanting to build the wall and to invoke the Great Replacement theory—claiming in the ad that “Democrat voters” were “pouring into this country” from across the southern border.
Vance’s lies about Springfield are the latest iteration of what could be mistaken for only cynical race-baiting. The reality is that they reflect much deeper-seated biases about who the country belongs to. As Vance stressed in his Republican National Convention speech, “America is not just an idea” but a “people with a shared history and a common future.” He went on, “When we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” His rhetoric about Springfield should leave little doubt about who he means by we.
Springfield is about an hour northeast of where Vance grew up in Middletown, and shares many similarities to the economically depressed hometown Vance described in Hillbilly Elegy. If anything, the decline in Springfield was more severe. Middletown’s population has remained relatively steady since 1970, while in Springfield it dropped from more than 80,000 in 1970 to fewer than 60,000 in 2020.
That has changed in recent years as a result of an influx of what local officials and community leaders estimate to be about 15,000 Haitian immigrants. Ruby explained that the large majority of Haitians in Springfield have some form of legal authorization to live in the United States such as Temporary Protected Status. Many work for Topre America, a Japanese auto parts manufacturer. Others have found jobs at a Dole food processing plant and countless local businesses. Their success in finding jobs and opening businesses of their own has led other Haitian immigrants to come to Springfield through word of mouth.
Ruby has lived in Springfield for about 40 years. “Our county is projected to lose about 25,000 people between now and 2050,” Ruby told me on Tuesday. “Having an influx of immigrants, from my perspective, is a wonderful thing.”
In another world, Vance might view Haitian migrants seeking opportunity sympathetically. Hillbilly Elegy is, in many ways, a memoir of domestic migration. It chronicles how the so-called hillbilly highway brought his grandparents out of Appalachia in the 1940s. Vance is intimately acquainted with both the promise and perils that can flow from a family’s decision to leave home.
One difference is that Haitians in Springfield appear to be doing much better than the relatives and community members Vance put in the pillory in Hillbilly Elegy. Local employers, Ruby said, view them as hard workers who, unlike some other residents, can be counted on to pass drug tests. Ruby added that many Haitians in Springfield were professionals back home and are now significantly underemployed. Contrary to what Vance’s fearmongering suggests, there has been no increase in property or violent crime in Springfield, according to local data.
Vance’s demonization of the Haitian community comes despite the fact that he spent much of his brief career as a venture capitalist whose stated mission was to create jobs in places like Springfield. Politico reported during his Senate run that his venture firmwas “part of a group of at least 46 investors who together invested in three companies that created a total of about 750 jobs in the state of Ohio between 2019 and 2022.” The economic growth happening today in Springfield is more impressive.
The difference is that it is being propelled to a large degree by immigrants. Vance appears to oppose it for the same reasons he obsesses over native-born American womens’ declining fertility, while also calling for mass deportations. “You would never be able to get him to answer why it is that he simultaneously thinks ‘our people’ need to have more babies to reverse the decline in fertility and also we need to remove so-called illegal aliens…to increase American workers’ labor market power,” the University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant argued on a recent podcast. “Those two positions are only reconcilable through racism.”
Vance has spoken about his affinity for a 2002 screed by Patrick Buchanan that decries the “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” caused by “Western women” having too many abortions. As Vance explained in a 2021 podcast appearance, “I read this book, when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West [How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization] by Patrick Buchanan. And that was a really influential book for me.”
It is also true that roughly 15,000 Haitians quickly arriving in a city of less than 60,000 has caused challenges. Ruby said the Rocking Horse Community Health Center has been “absolutely overwhelmed” and needs more resources to help deal with the influx. Rent prices have increased—partly due to landlords taking affordable housing units and converting them to market rate ones. The New York Times has reported that school officials are worried about whether they’ll have enough funding to support students in the coming years.
Mayor Rob Rue and other political leaders in the city have pleaded for extra federal assistance. Last month, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who represents Springfield, said he was working to secure more federal funding to help the city. “This obviously has not risen to a crisis level but it is probably a burdensome level where we have to make sure that this community receives the support they need so they’re not isolated,” Turner explained at the time.
Dorsainvil,who has lived in Springfield for four years, says he and fellow Haitians initially received a largely positive response from the community. He traced the beginning of a more intense backlash from some Springfield residents to an August 2023 accident in which a Haitian driver without a valid license collided with a school bus. The crash killed Aiden Clark, an 11-year-old boy, and injured at least 20 children.
The tragedy led some residents to rail against Haitian immigrants at community meetings. Clark’s parents have been adamantly opposed their son’s death being used to demonize people. “We do not want our son’s name to be associated with the hate that’s being spewed at these meetings,” Nathan and Danielle Clark wrote in a statement read at a community meeting last October. “Please do not mix up the values of our family with the uninformed majority that vocalize their hate. Aiden embraced different cultures and would insist you do the same.”
It was only after Vance started talking about Springfield that the city attracted significant national attention, according to Dorsainvil and Ruby. In July, Vance brought up Springfield’s Haitian community during a hearing with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. “In my conversations with folks in Springfield, it’s not just housing,” Vance said. “It’s also hospital services, it’s school services. There are a whole host of ways in which this immigration problem, I think, is having very real human consequences.” One day later, Vance brought up Springfield in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference.
Vance’s remarks appear to have gotten the attention of producers at Fox News. Within days, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and City Manager Bryan Heckappeared on the channel for what proved to be a typically sensationalistic segment. Rue and Heck’s main ask was similar to one that has been made by mayors across the country: They wanted federal aid to support a rapid increase in the city’s immigrant population. “I feel like they were kind of blindsided,” said Ruby. “It made them look anti-immigrant, when, in fact, I think they’ve worked really hard to try to manage the situation.” (Rue told the New York Times this week that, “It’s frustrating when national politicians, on the national stage, mischaracterize what is actually going on and misrepresent our community.”)
Springfield alsobegan to attract more attention from the extreme right. On August 10, a dozen neo-Nazis affiliated with the group Blood Tribe marched through Springfield carrying Swastika flags. On August 27, one of those Nazis, Drake Berentz, spoke at a Springfield community meeting before being ejected for threatening rhetoric. (Berentz falsely identified himself as Nathaniel Higgers, a fake name meant to evoke the racist slur it resembles.)
Still, nothing compared to what has happened in the past week. Last Friday, the right-wing X account End Wokeness, which has 2.9 million followers, shared a post in which someone claimed that the friend of his neighbor’s daughter had said that Haitian residents of Springfield had killed her cat and hung it from a tree branch. The rumor quickly went viral.
Still, the claim mostly lived on social media before Vance took it up.
When I spoke to Ruby on Tuesday, he told me his big fear was that Springfield would come up in the presidential debate that night. “Springfield is a powder keg right now,” Ruby added. He feared what might happen if there were another tragedy like the one that killed Aiden Clark.
Just before the debate, Nathan Clark spoke at a Springfield City Commission meeting. “Using Aidan as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose,” Clark said. “And speaking of morally bankrupt, politicians—Bernie Moreno, Chip Roy, JD Vance, and Donald Trump—they have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain. This needs to stop now.”
Nathan Clark — the father of 11-year-old Aiden Clark, who was killed in a car accident in Springfield, Ohio — tells JD Vance and Donald Trump to stop using his son’s name and the city of Springfield to demonize Haitian immigrants. “This needs to stop now!” pic.twitter.com/3J8FtZ82Ts
That did not stop Trump from bringing up Springfield and the claims about pets being eaten during the debate. Vance defended Trump’s decision to do so afterwards. The result is that some Haitian families in Springfield are reportedly now keeping their kids home from school out of fear for their safety. On Thursday morning, Springfield city hall was evacuated following a bomb threat, as was a local elementary school.
On Friday morning, Springfield received newbomb threats targeting city commissioners and multiple schools.A middle school was closed and three schools were evacuated.
Two hours later, Vance posted about Springfield again. Americans, he wrote, should be talking about Springfield “every single day.”
In his latest round of television interviews, it appears he willnot be swayed by the mounting evidence that the racist lies he amplified about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets—which former President Trump repeated on the debate stage this week to 67 million viewers—are demonstrably false.Instead, Trump’s historically unpopular running mate doubled down on his claims in a series of interviews on CNN, NBC, and CBS—even after the reporters fact-checked him.
Let’s start with Vance’s interview on CNN’s State of the Union, which saw the most time dedicated to the topic—and featured Vance’s most combative exchange.
Host Dana Bash asked Vance why he continues amplifying the claims, given that Springfieldhas received multiple bomb threats that led to two hospitals going into lockdown Saturday, plus several schools and the city hall being evacuated since Trump mentioned the lies at the debate. As Bash also pointed out, Springfield’s own mayor told a local television station, “All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it.”
“These are your constituents,” Bash began, “so why are you putting them at risk by continuing to spread claims about Haitian immigrants, despite officials in your state saying that there’s no evidence and pleading for you to stop?”
Vance replied by insisting that he was amplifying the claims of “firsthand” accounts he heard from his constituents—even though, as Bash pointed out, they don’t appear to have any basis in reality.
On Friday, NBC News reported that the Springfield resident who first shared the false claims on Facebook about migrants eating pets—which she allegedly heard through the grapevine of her neighbor’s daughter’s friend—said she had no firsthand knowledge of any incident and regretted that her post sparked a national rumor, adding, “I feel for the Haitian community.” And as Bash noted, the Clark County Sheriff’s Office examined 11 months of 911 calls and found only one, on Aug. 26, that alleged four Haitians were carrying geese within the city of Springfield, according to a report in the Springfield News-Sun. The sheriff’s office directed the call to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, whose officials were not able to substantiate the claim—but that did not stop Donald Trump Jr. from posting audio of the 911 call to X this week.
But Vance, ultimately, did not seem to be interested in confronting these inconvenient facts. Instead, he called Bash’s implication that his words led to the threats in Springfield “disgusting” and said her question was “more appropriate for a democratic propagandist than it is for an American journalist,” leaving Bash visibly shocked. “We can criticize violence,” Vance added later in the interview. “We can also still talk about the problems that are happening in Springfield, and we should be able to do both those things simultaneously.”
When Bash once again gave him an opportunity to acknowledge the rumors about migrants eating pets were unfounded, he did not save himself. “The evidence,” he told Bash, “is the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened.”
Things didn’t go much better for Vance on NBC or CBS. He made the same argument—that he believed the accounts he heard from unspecified constituents over fact-checks from officials and the media—to Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. When she asked why he couldn’t make his argument about immigration without amplifying these lies, he referenced yet anotherdebunked rumor about migrants eating pets in the Ohio city of Dayton, about 30 miles southwest of Springfield.
WATCH: Local officials in Springfield, Ohio, say there’s no evidence of the claims @JDVance has made about Haitian immigrants.
On CBS the same morning, Vance told Margaret Brennan, host of Face the Nation, that while he condemned violence and the threats that have been phoned into Springfield, he did not believe the claims were “false rumors,” adding, “Everybody who has dealt with a large influx of migration knows that sometimes there are cultural practices that seem very far out there to a lot of Americans…the American media is more interested in fact checking innocent people who are begging for relief than they are in investigating some of these claims.” (Again: Multiple officials have confirmed there is no evidence to support these claims,including the state’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.)
Predictably, Vance and his cronies on the right used the interviewers’ fact-checking of him as evidence of their alleged biases. Donald Trump Jr. lauded him in a post on X for “embarrassing the Fake News.”
As my colleague Noah Lanard pointed out, Springfield is dealing with real challenges as it seeks to accommodate roughly 15,000 Haitian immigrants in a town of 60,000 people: Rent has gotten more expensive, in part due to landlords reducing the number of affordable housing units in the town, and schools are in need of more funding to support their growing numbers. And now, thanks to Vance and others involved in amplifying the falsehoods, there are new issues to worry about in Springfield: Schools and hospitals getting bomb threats, and Haitians are living in fear. But if Vance’s trio of Sunday interviews were any indication, none of this, apparently, is enough to stop him.
On Monday morning, a friend texted Vilès Dorsainvil to ask if he’d seen the claims circulating on social media. Dorsainvil, the leader of Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center, had not. He quickly saw that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) had posted that “reports now show” that Springfield residents were having their “pets abducted and eaten” by “Haitian illegal immigrants.”
“It was so painful,” Dorsainvil explained. “I had to leave my job because I was so perturbed that I could not concentrate.” He took the week off from working as a bilingual specialist who processes applications for government assistance to support his community and focus on his mental health.
City officials quickly made clear there is no evidence to support the lies Vance and many other top Republicans, including Donald Trump, are spreading. Vance didn’t care. As he wrote on Tuesday, “Keep the cat memes flowing.” (Vance’s Senate office did not respond to a request for comment that asked for any evidence that would support his recent claims.)
These aren’t harmless memes. The prototypical example looks like what would happen if someone typed “Black people in a third world country chasing Donald Trump holding a cat” into an AI-powered image generator.
In recent months, Vance has been the key figure in making Springfield a national target for the far right. “I blame JD Vance for it. Our city leaders reached out to JD Vance, our senator, asking for help,” Carl Ruby, the senior pastor at Central Christian in Springfield, said about a request for federal assistance Vance drew attention to this summer. “Instead, he brought it up at a Senate hearing and referenced it as a crisis and began amplifying these lies.” In doing so, Vance has put his own constituents at risk. Bomb threats have now led to multiple Springfield schools being evacuated.
The initial gut reaction many people are having to this racist smear campaign is the correct one: It’s vile. Nor is it new. The first ad of his political career in 2022 (titled “Are you a racist?”) opened with Vance asking “Do you hate Mexicans?”He went to to attack the media for calling “us” racist for wanting to build the wall and to invoke the Great Replacement theory—claiming in the ad that “Democrat voters” were “pouring into this country” from across the southern border.
Vance’s lies about Springfield are the latest iteration of what could be mistaken for only cynical race-baiting. The reality is that they reflect much deeper-seated biases about who the country belongs to. As Vance stressed in his Republican National Convention speech, “America is not just an idea” but a “people with a shared history and a common future.” He went on, “When we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” His rhetoric about Springfield should leave little doubt about who he means by we.
Springfield is about an hour northeast of where Vance grew up in Middletown, and shares many similarities to the economically depressed hometown Vance described in Hillbilly Elegy. If anything, the decline in Springfield was more severe. Middletown’s population has remained relatively steady since 1970, while in Springfield it dropped from more than 80,000 in 1970 to fewer than 60,000 in 2020.
That has changed in recent years as a result of an influx of what local officials and community leaders estimate to be about 15,000 Haitian immigrants. Ruby explained that the large majority of Haitians in Springfield have some form of legal authorization to live in the United States such as Temporary Protected Status. Many work for Topre America, a Japanese auto parts manufacturer. Others have found jobs at a Dole food processing plant and countless local businesses. Their success in finding jobs and opening businesses of their own has led other Haitian immigrants to come to Springfield through word of mouth.
Ruby has lived in Springfield for about 40 years. “Our county is projected to lose about 25,000 people between now and 2050,” Ruby told me on Tuesday. “Having an influx of immigrants, from my perspective, is a wonderful thing.”
In another world, Vance might view Haitian migrants seeking opportunity sympathetically. Hillbilly Elegy is, in many ways, a memoir of domestic migration. It chronicles how the so-called hillbilly highway brought his grandparents out of Appalachia in the 1940s. Vance is intimately acquainted with both the promise and perils that can flow from a family’s decision to leave home.
One difference is that Haitians in Springfield appear to be doing much better than the relatives and community members Vance put in the pillory in Hillbilly Elegy. Local employers, Ruby said, view them as hard workers who, unlike some other residents, can be counted on to pass drug tests. Ruby added that many Haitians in Springfield were professionals back home and are now significantly underemployed. Contrary to what Vance’s fearmongering suggests, there has been no increase in property or violent crime in Springfield, according to local data.
Vance’s demonization of the Haitian community comes despite the fact that he spent much of his brief career as a venture capitalist whose stated mission was to create jobs in places like Springfield. Politico reported during his Senate run that his venture firmwas “part of a group of at least 46 investors who together invested in three companies that created a total of about 750 jobs in the state of Ohio between 2019 and 2022.” The economic growth happening today in Springfield is more impressive.
The difference is that it is being propelled to a large degree by immigrants. Vance appears to oppose it for the same reasons he obsesses over native-born American womens’ declining fertility, while also calling for mass deportations. “You would never be able to get him to answer why it is that he simultaneously thinks ‘our people’ need to have more babies to reverse the decline in fertility and also we need to remove so-called illegal aliens…to increase American workers’ labor market power,” the University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant argued on a recent podcast. “Those two positions are only reconcilable through racism.”
Vance has spoken about his affinity for a 2002 screed by Patrick Buchanan that decries the “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” caused by “Western women” having too many abortions. As Vance explained in a 2021 podcast appearance, “I read this book, when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West [How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization] by Patrick Buchanan. And that was a really influential book for me.”
It is also true that roughly 15,000 Haitians quickly arriving in a city of less than 60,000 has caused challenges. Ruby said the Rocking Horse Community Health Center has been “absolutely overwhelmed” and needs more resources to help deal with the influx. Rent prices have increased—partly due to landlords taking affordable housing units and converting them to market rate ones. The New York Times has reported that school officials are worried about whether they’ll have enough funding to support students in the coming years.
Mayor Rob Rue and other political leaders in the city have pleaded for extra federal assistance. Last month, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who represents Springfield, said he was working to secure more federal funding to help the city. “This obviously has not risen to a crisis level but it is probably a burdensome level where we have to make sure that this community receives the support they need so they’re not isolated,” Turner explained at the time.
Dorsainvil,who has lived in Springfield for four years, says he and fellow Haitians initially received a largely positive response from the community. He traced the beginning of a more intense backlash from some Springfield residents to an August 2023 accident in which a Haitian driver without a valid license collided with a school bus. The crash killed Aiden Clark, an 11-year-old boy, and injured at least 20 children.
The tragedy led some residents to rail against Haitian immigrants at community meetings. Clark’s parents have been adamantly opposed their son’s death being used to demonize people. “We do not want our son’s name to be associated with the hate that’s being spewed at these meetings,” Nathan and Danielle Clark wrote in a statement read at a community meeting last October. “Please do not mix up the values of our family with the uninformed majority that vocalize their hate. Aiden embraced different cultures and would insist you do the same.”
It was only after Vance started talking about Springfield that the city attracted significant national attention, according to Dorsainvil and Ruby. In July, Vance brought up Springfield’s Haitian community during a hearing with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. “In my conversations with folks in Springfield, it’s not just housing,” Vance said. “It’s also hospital services, it’s school services. There are a whole host of ways in which this immigration problem, I think, is having very real human consequences.” One day later, Vance brought up Springfield in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference.
Vance’s remarks appear to have gotten the attention of producers at Fox News. Within days, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and City Manager Bryan Heckappeared on the channel for what proved to be a typically sensationalistic segment. Rue and Heck’s main ask was similar to one that has been made by mayors across the country: They wanted federal aid to support a rapid increase in the city’s immigrant population. “I feel like they were kind of blindsided,” said Ruby. “It made them look anti-immigrant, when, in fact, I think they’ve worked really hard to try to manage the situation.” (Rue told the New York Times this week that, “It’s frustrating when national politicians, on the national stage, mischaracterize what is actually going on and misrepresent our community.”)
Springfield alsobegan to attract more attention from the extreme right. On August 10, a dozen neo-Nazis affiliated with the group Blood Tribe marched through Springfield carrying Swastika flags. On August 27, one of those Nazis, Drake Berentz, spoke at a Springfield community meeting before being ejected for threatening rhetoric. (Berentz falsely identified himself as Nathaniel Higgers, a fake name meant to evoke the racist slur it resembles.)
Still, nothing compared to what has happened in the past week. Last Friday, the right-wing X account End Wokeness, which has 2.9 million followers, shared a post in which someone claimed that the friend of his neighbor’s daughter had said that Haitian residents of Springfield had killed her cat and hung it from a tree branch. The rumor quickly went viral.
Still, the claim mostly lived on social media before Vance took it up.
When I spoke to Ruby on Tuesday, he told me his big fear was that Springfield would come up in the presidential debate that night. “Springfield is a powder keg right now,” Ruby added. He feared what might happen if there were another tragedy like the one that killed Aiden Clark.
Just before the debate, Nathan Clark spoke at a Springfield City Commission meeting. “Using Aidan as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose,” Clark said. “And speaking of morally bankrupt, politicians—Bernie Moreno, Chip Roy, JD Vance, and Donald Trump—they have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain. This needs to stop now.”
Nathan Clark — the father of 11-year-old Aiden Clark, who was killed in a car accident in Springfield, Ohio — tells JD Vance and Donald Trump to stop using his son’s name and the city of Springfield to demonize Haitian immigrants. “This needs to stop now!” pic.twitter.com/3J8FtZ82Ts
That did not stop Trump from bringing up Springfield and the claims about pets being eaten during the debate. Vance defended Trump’s decision to do so afterwards. The result is that some Haitian families in Springfield are reportedly now keeping their kids home from school out of fear for their safety. On Thursday morning, Springfield city hall was evacuated following a bomb threat, as was a local elementary school.
On Friday morning, Springfield received newbomb threats targeting city commissioners and multiple schools.A middle school was closed and three schools were evacuated.
Two hours later, Vance posted about Springfield again. Americans, he wrote, should be talking about Springfield “every single day.”
Bad news for the Trump campaign: Despite their candidate’s desperation to distance himself from Project 2025, connections keep emerging between Trump, his allies, and the authors of the right-wing playbook for a second Trump term.
We should not glance quickly at the poor and suggest that their problems derive entirely from their own bad decisions before moving on to other matters. Rather, we should consider the very intuitive fact that the way we grow up shapes us. It molds our attitudes, our habits, and our decisions. It sets boundaries for how we perceive possibilities in our own lives.
But other essays included in the report introduced by Vance are far more dogmatic. An essay by Jeanne Mancini, president of the anti-abortion March for Life Education and Defense Fund, states that her group’s goal is for “abortion [to] become unthinkable in the United States.” An essay by Jennifer Lahl, founder and president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, an organization that criticizes surrogacy and assisted reproductive technologies, denounces IVF and delay in general with childbearing: “The truth is that for both mother and child, pregnancy is better earlier rather than later. Assisted reproductive technology and egg freezing are not magic pills to take when you are ready for a baby.” Another essay characterizes the birth of children to unwed parents as a “tragedy.”
Republicans have been on the defensive ever since advocates have raised alarms about the Dobbs decision imperiling IVF access, which has already come to pass in Alabama, whose state Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that embryos should be considered the same as children. But given that Senate Republicans subsequently blocked a vote on a bill to protect IVF access nationwide, they have not inspired much confidence—which Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has been using to its advantage, outlining the dangers Trump could pose to IVF access in a second term.
It’s no surprise that Vance’s team has tried to downplay his role in the Heritage report. Luke Schroeder, a spokesperson for Vance, told the Times: “Senator Vance has long made clear that he supports I.V.F. and does not agree with every opinion in this seven-year-old report, which features a range of unique views from dozens of conservative thinkers.” The spokesperson also told the Times that Vance “did not have any input on the commentary” included in the report. Noah Weinrich, a spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation, told the Times that Vance “had no role in producing or approving the contents of the 2017 Index of Culture and Opportunity, outside of writing the introduction.”
Yet that does not change the fact that Vance’s involvement provides yet another piece of evidence that Trump and his team have many ties to the same people behind Project 2025; Vance also wrote the introduction to a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and architect of Project 2025, being marketed as a roadmap for conservatives to “take back” the country and various institutions within it.
“As it turns out, Donald Trump’s running mate cosigned Project 2025’s radical agenda to undermine IVF, ban abortion nationwide, and control women’s most personal health care decisions long before it even had a name,” Harris-Walz 2024 Spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. Chitika added that the Times report “confirms that Trump, Vance, and their Project 2025 allies’ plans have been in the works for nearly a decade—if they get the chance, they will rip away women’s freedoms in every corner of this country.”
On Wednesday, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) weighed in on the Trump team’s tussle with an employee at Arlington National Cemetery during a wreath-laying ceremony on Monday honoring falling American soldiers. And by “weighed in,” we mean lied and told the vice presidentto “go to hell.”
At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Vance told a crowd that he didn’t think there was actually anything notable about what hadtranspired: “The altercation at Arlington Cemetery is the media creating a story where I really don’t think that there is one,” he said, adding, “a lot of [those families] were there with [former President Trump], they invited him to be there and to support them.”
“It is amazing to me that you have, apparently somebody at Arlington Cemetery, some staff member, had a little disagreement with somebody, and the media has turned this into a national news story,” Vance continued.
The Ohio senator went further, telling Harris that she could “go to hell” for criticizing Trump’s visit to the cemetery. The choice words came despite Harris having never publicly commented on the incident, contrary to Vance’s claim that Harris “wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up” at Arlington. When asked for comment, Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, claimed that Vance had been referring to Harris’ campaign team—not the VP herself.
Also contrary to Vance’s characterization, the incident was not as simple as Vance would like you to believe. As I reported yesterday:
Trump’s staff allegedly wanted to ensure he’d be photographed honoring the troops, even though federal law “prohibits political campaign or election-related activities,” including photographers, at the cemetery, according to an Arlington National Cemetery spokesperson.
Nonetheless, Trump’s team did manage to turn the event into an opportunity for content, producing and posting a video to their TikTok account, set to somber music, that suggests the soldiers’ deaths were President Joe Biden’s fault. As of Wednesday afternoon, it had more than 6.6 million views. (The video was also posted on Trump’s Instagram page, which posted other footage from the event, too; Trump’s senior advisor Dan Scavino also shared videos on his X page.)
New details have since emerged that, if true, make the incident even more egregious.
A statement released by an Army spokesperson Thursday morning confirmed that a cemetery employee who tried to enforce a federal law that prohibits political activity at the site “was abruptly pushed aside” and that the incident had been reported to police but the employee was choosing not to press charges; The New York Timesreports that the staffer was not pressing charges because they were worried about retaliation from Trump supporters.
The Times also obtained a statement from the family of Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano—a Green Beret who reportedly died by suicide in 2020 after serving eight combat tours expressing dismay that his gravestone had been included in a picture in which Trump posed grinning with a thumbs up at the gravesite of Staff Sergeant Darin Taylor Hoover, located next to Marckesano’s. The Marckesano family, the Times reported, did not grant permission for the gravestone to be photographed or filmed by the Trump campaign; the Hoover family reportedly did.
Marckesano’s sister, Michele, told the Times: “According to our conversation with Arlington National Cemetery, the Trump campaign staffers did not adhere to the rules that were set in place for this visit,” adding, “We hope that those visiting this sacred site understand that these were real people who sacrificed for our freedom and that they are honored and respected accordingly.”
Cheung did not respond to a request for comment on the family’s statement, only saying: “As the Army has said, they consider this matter closed. President Trump was there to support the Gold Star families and honor the sacrifices their loved ones made. Where was Kamala Harris?”
On Wednesday, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) weighed in on the Trump team’s tussle with an employee at Arlington National Cemetery during a wreath-laying ceremony on Monday honoring falling American soldiers. And by “weighed in,” we mean lied and told the vice presidentto “go to hell.”
At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Vance told a crowd that he didn’t think there was actually anything notable about what hadtranspired: “The altercation at Arlington Cemetery is the media creating a story where I really don’t think that there is one,” he said, adding, “a lot of [those families] were there with [former President Trump], they invited him to be there and to support them.”
“It is amazing to me that you have, apparently somebody at Arlington Cemetery, some staff member, had a little disagreement with somebody, and the media has turned this into a national news story,” Vance continued.
The Ohio senator went further, telling Harris that she could “go to hell” for criticizing Trump’s visit to the cemetery. The choice words came despite Harris having never publicly commented on the incident, contrary to Vance’s claim that Harris “wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up” at Arlington. When asked for comment, Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, claimed that Vance had been referring to Harris’ campaign team—not the VP herself.
Also contrary to Vance’s characterization, the incident was not as simple as Vance would like you to believe. As I reported yesterday:
Trump’s staff allegedly wanted to ensure he’d be photographed honoring the troops, even though federal law “prohibits political campaign or election-related activities,” including photographers, at the cemetery, according to an Arlington National Cemetery spokesperson.
Nonetheless, Trump’s team did manage to turn the event into an opportunity for content, producing and posting a video to their TikTok account, set to somber music, that suggests the soldiers’ deaths were President Joe Biden’s fault. As of Wednesday afternoon, it had more than 6.6 million views. (The video was also posted on Trump’s Instagram page, which posted other footage from the event, too; Trump’s senior advisor Dan Scavino also shared videos on his X page.)
New details have since emerged that, if true, make the incident even more egregious.
A statement released by an Army spokesperson Thursday morning confirmed that a cemetery employee who tried to enforce a federal law that prohibits political activity at the site “was abruptly pushed aside” and that the incident had been reported to police but the employee was choosing not to press charges; The New York Timesreports that the staffer was not pressing charges because they were worried about retaliation from Trump supporters.
The Times also obtained a statement from the family of Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano—a Green Beret who reportedly died by suicide in 2020 after serving eight combat tours expressing dismay that his gravestone had been included in a picture in which Trump posed grinning with a thumbs up at the gravesite of Staff Sergeant Darin Taylor Hoover, located next to Marckesano’s. The Marckesano family, the Times reported, did not grant permission for the gravestone to be photographed or filmed by the Trump campaign; the Hoover family reportedly did.
Marckesano’s sister, Michele, told the Times: “According to our conversation with Arlington National Cemetery, the Trump campaign staffers did not adhere to the rules that were set in place for this visit,” adding, “We hope that those visiting this sacred site understand that these were real people who sacrificed for our freedom and that they are honored and respected accordingly.”
Cheung did not respond to a request for comment on the family’s statement, only saying: “As the Army has said, they consider this matter closed. President Trump was there to support the Gold Star families and honor the sacrifices their loved ones made. Where was Kamala Harris?”
Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has said a lot of wild things. But on Sunday, he made headlines for something he didn’t say.
In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Vance left the door open to renewed family separations under Trump’s promised “mass deportation” plan. Despite moderator Kristen Welker directly asking Vance three times if families would be separated in a second Trump administration, Vance failed to clearly answer. Instead, he parroted the right’s critique of Vice President Kamala Harris, falsely claiming she had been designated as “border czar.”
A federal judge assailed the policy as one of the country’s “most shameful chapters.”
“Millions upon millions of illegal immigrants that have come in just since Kamala Harris became the border czar,” Vance told Welker.
“She was put in charge of the root causes of migration,” Welker corrected Vance.
“Well the root causes of migration, Kristen, is that Kamala Harris refused to do her job as border czar,” Vance replied.
My colleague Isabela Dias has explained how that’s not true—and how “border czar” fails to accurately describe exactly what Harris was tasked with:
As vice president, Harris was tasked with attacking the “root causes” of migration from Central America to the United States. Those drivers are not only complex, but long-standing—and deeply tied to America’s Cold War politics and imperialism. Harris had the (potentially impossible) job of trying to understand, and fix, over half a century of US meddling in the region—in addition to country-specific dynamics of that meddling—that has boomeranged into a migrant crisis.
Harris was never appointed the “czar” of “the border.” Nor is she in charge of it. That is to a large extent the purview of the secretary of homeland security, which of course Republicans know all too well. They tried and failed to impeach Biden’s head of [the Department of Homeland Security] Alejandro Mayorkas on baseless allegations that he deliberately enabled “open borders.”
As Welker pressed Vance on whether a new Trump administration would separate families, one way he dodged the question was by claiming the Biden-Harris administration was already doing so.
It’s unclear what Vance was referring to, but as Welker pointed out, under the Biden administration “there are some families who have been separated…because their parents are criminals,” contrasting the situation with the “zero tolerance policy” launched by Trump’s Department of Justice in May 2018.
The controversial scheme memorably—and heartbreakingly—led to kids being held in cages and years-long disastrous ripple effects. Trump issued an executive order meant to end the policy just a month later, following massive public backlash. But families remained in legal limbo for years as a result. The policy was conclusively killed in December 2023, when a federal judge in San Diego approved a settlement to end it, writing that the separations of migration families represented “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country.”
In 2021, when the Biden administration set up a task force to reunite the families, it estimated that 3,924 kids had been separated under Trump. The average age of children separated from their parents? Nine years old, and more than a quarter of them were under 5, according to federal officials. As of last fall, roughly a thousand kids remained separated from their parents.
“Whether your administration would tear families apart and put kids in cages should not be a tough question,” wrote Kevin Munoz, a senior spokesperson for Harris-Walz 2024. “But JD Vance is ducking and dodging because he knows Donald Trump would go as far as using the military to tear children from their mother’s arms and round up migrants into mass detention camps.”
In another part of his Meet the Press appearance, Vance tried to claim that his comments denigrating “childless cat ladies” had been a critique of government policies unfriendly to families. “I think that it’s really a profound change that’s happened in our country where we’ve become anti-family,” Vance told Welker on Meet the Press, “and I would like to change that.”
Somehow, he does not see Trump’s family separation policy as part of the problem.
Update, August 25: This post now includes comment from the Harris campaign.
Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has said a lot of wild things. But on Sunday, he made headlines for something he didn’t say.
In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Vance left the door open to renewed family separations under Trump’s promised “mass deportation” plan. Despite moderator Kristen Welker directly asking Vance three times if families would be separated in a second Trump administration, Vance failed to clearly answer. Instead, he parroted the right’s critique of Vice President Kamala Harris, falsely claiming she had been designated as “border czar.”
A federal judge assailed the policy as one of the country’s “most shameful chapters.”
“Millions upon millions of illegal immigrants that have come in just since Kamala Harris became the border czar,” Vance told Welker.
“She was put in charge of the root causes of migration,” Welker corrected Vance.
“Well the root causes of migration, Kristen, is that Kamala Harris refused to do her job as border czar,” Vance replied.
My colleague Isabela Dias has explained how that’s not true—and how “border czar” fails to accurately describe exactly what Harris was tasked with:
As vice president, Harris was tasked with attacking the “root causes” of migration from Central America to the United States. Those drivers are not only complex, but long-standing—and deeply tied to America’s Cold War politics and imperialism. Harris had the (potentially impossible) job of trying to understand, and fix, over half a century of US meddling in the region—in addition to country-specific dynamics of that meddling—that has boomeranged into a migrant crisis.
Harris was never appointed the “czar” of “the border.” Nor is she in charge of it. That is to a large extent the purview of the secretary of homeland security, which of course Republicans know all too well. They tried and failed to impeach Biden’s head of [the Department of Homeland Security] Alejandro Mayorkas on baseless allegations that he deliberately enabled “open borders.”
As Welker pressed Vance on whether a new Trump administration would separate families, one way he dodged the question was by claiming the Biden-Harris administration was already doing so.
It’s unclear what Vance was referring to, but as Welker pointed out, under the Biden administration “there are some families who have been separated…because their parents are criminals,” contrasting the situation with the “zero tolerance policy” launched by Trump’s Department of Justice in May 2018.
The controversial scheme memorably—and heartbreakingly—led to kids being held in cages and years-long disastrous ripple effects. Trump issued an executive order meant to end the policy just a month later, following massive public backlash. But families remained in legal limbo for years as a result. The policy was conclusively killed in December 2023, when a federal judge in San Diego approved a settlement to end it, writing that the separations of migration families represented “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country.”
In 2021, when the Biden administration set up a task force to reunite the families, it estimated that 3,924 kids had been separated under Trump. The average age of children separated from their parents? Nine years old, and more than a quarter of them were under 5, according to federal officials. As of last fall, roughly a thousand kids remained separated from their parents.
“Whether your administration would tear families apart and put kids in cages should not be a tough question,” wrote Kevin Munoz, a senior spokesperson for Harris-Walz 2024. “But JD Vance is ducking and dodging because he knows Donald Trump would go as far as using the military to tear children from their mother’s arms and round up migrants into mass detention camps.”
In another part of his Meet the Press appearance, Vance tried to claim that his comments denigrating “childless cat ladies” had been a critique of government policies unfriendly to families. “I think that it’s really a profound change that’s happened in our country where we’ve become anti-family,” Vance told Welker on Meet the Press, “and I would like to change that.”
Somehow, he does not see Trump’s family separation policy as part of the problem.
Update, August 25: This post now includes comment from the Harris campaign.
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio)said a lot of wild things during his Sunday morning media blitz. But one of his comments has received far less attention than the others: Vance described a federal program that has distributed nearly $2 billion to mostly Black farmers who experienced discrimination as “disgraceful,” suggesting that it is racist against white people.
And now, the head of the largest group of Black farmers across the country is condemning Vance’s assertions.
“He owes us an apology,” John Boyd, Jr., founder and president of the National Black Farmers Association, told me. The remarks, Boyd added, were “disgraceful, deplorable, dumb, degrading, and disrespectful to the nation’s Black farmers, the oldest occupation in history for Black people.”
A spokesperson for Vance also did not respond to questions from Mother Jones beyond requesting that we include the senator’s full remarks, which came during an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, during which Vance was asked about the racist attacks against his wife, Usha Vance. After condemning them, he added:
I frankly think that unfortunately, a lot of people on the left have leaned into this by trying to categorize people by skin color and then give special benefits or special amounts of discrimination. The Harris Administration, for example, handed out farm benefits to people based on skin color. I think that’s disgraceful. I don’t think we should say, you get farm benefits if you’re a Black farmer, you don’t get farm benefits if you’re a white farmer. All farmers, we want to thrive, and that’s certainly the President Trump and JD Vance view of the situation.
But Vance’s assertions here are an inaccurate portrayal of the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program, the federal program established through the Inflation Reduction Act. Contrary to Vance’s claim, applicants were not limited to Black farmers; Any farmer who had experienced discrimination by the US Department of Agriculture—including based on sexual orientation or gender identity, religion, age, or disability—was eligible to apply. Last month, the USDA announced it had distributed payments to more than 43,000 people in all 50 states through the program, which Congress allocated $2.2 billion for.
While the USDA has not released data on the racial breakdown of farmers who received money through DFAP, Boyd said 85 percent of the funds went to Black farmers “because it’s obvious we were treated the worst.” The history of the government’s discrimination against Black farmers specifically is well-documented, including in Mother Jones‘ recent award-winning investigation, “40 Acres and a Lie“—done in collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity and Reveal—which documents how the federal government stole land it gave to Black farmers following the Civil War. Black farmers also faced barriers to receiving loans, credit, and support compared to white farmers.
Still, that hasn’t stopped some white people—including Vance and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)—from trying to claim federal aid to Black farmers perpetuates “reverse racism.” White farmers have also filedlawsuits against promised debt relief for Black farmers that Congress approved in 2021, claiming it discriminated against them.
Supporting the Trump-Vance ticket was now “off the table,” Boyd said in response to Vance’s remarks. Though he called Vice President Kamala Harris a “breath of fresh air,” Boyd called on Harris to commit support to Black farmers before the election—specifically, through debt relief for Black farmers. The Harris campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
In the meantime, Boyd is still waiting for an apology from Vance—but he’s not holding his breath. “We got the money,” Boyd said. DFAP, he added, was “a huge victory for Black farmers.”
Mormons would probably be psyched. The Republican Party less so.
I’m talking about what would happen if we embraced the idea, proposed by Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance—isn’t he funny?—of empowering families by giving parents of young children an extra vote for each child.
Besides being likely unconstitutional (see the unanimous 2016 Supreme Court ruling in Evenwel v. Abbott, which upheld the 14th Amendment principle of “one person, one vote”) such a policy would be difficult to implement. Who gets the extra votes if there’s an odd number of kids and/or the parents are estranged or have opposing views? Who votes on behalf of stepkids—do they count? Adoptees? How about kids living with their grandparents? Noncitizen parents? Parents with Green Cards? Could undocumented parents vote on behalf of US-born offspring? And how would you verify all of it?
To be fair, in an interview over the weekend, Vance clarified that his proposal was simply a “thought experiment.” Okay then! Let’s think it through.
Assuming this proposal were legal and workable, whom would it benefit? Certainly the Mormons, who are known for prolific procreation (in 2014, according to a Pew Research report, Mormon couples ages 40-59 had an average of 3.4 children vs. 2.2 for all Christians and 2.1 nationally—they also famously have a history of having too many spouses.) Mormons tend to be conservative and vote Republican. But only about 1.2 percent of Americans identifed as Mormons in 2022, per the Washington Post. So who else might benefit?
Predicting voter preference and its impact on a given race is complicated and involves various interrelated factors: One must consider a given group’s cohesiveness, political tendencies, and likelihood of turnout, in addition to age, education, income, and geographical concentration—for example, Michigan’s Somali diaspora, Hawaii’s large Pacific Islander population, and Mexican Americans in the Southwest.
America’s young parents are more ethnically diverse than the broader population, and most minority groups lean Democratic—but turnout wold be key.
To these factors we can now add fecundity.
To make sense of all this stuff, you’d need a pro, so I called up William H. Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and US Census expert who has researched urban populations, migration, immigration, race, aging, and political demographics. He’s also the author of the 2018 book,Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics are Remaking America.
I also poked around for useful data. The Census Bureau’s 2023 Current Population Survey breaks down, by race and income, households with children under 18. That’s useful, because income is a rough proxy for education, and families with less education tend to have more children, Frey told me.
Non-Hispanic whites are significantly under-represented among parent households with incomes of less than $75,000—which account for 38 percent of all families with young children—while Latinos are substantially over-represented. In the slightly larger and more educated middle tier, households with $75,000-$199,999 in income, Asians and non-Hispanic whites are slightly over-represented while Black and Hispanic households are slightly under-represented. In the high-income tier ($200,000-plus), non-Hispanic whites and Asians are strongly over-represented while Black and Hispanic households are strongly under-represented—but only 17 percent of all families with young kids fall into this high-income, high-education, and likely high-turnout group.
The US has 3.5 million non-Hispanic, mixed-race kids, whom Trump managed to insult by asking, of Kamala Harris, “Is she Indian or is she Black?”
Slice and dice as you will, the upshot is that America’s youth, and their parents, are more ethnically diverse than the broader population. Non-Hispanic whites are 58 percent of the population, but less than half of kids under 18 are white only. Fourteen percent of kids are Black only, echoing the Black share of the US population. Ditto Asian kids (6 percent vs. 6.5 percent). But Latinos, representing 19.5 percent of the overall population, account for more than a quarter of minor children.
As of last year, non-Hispanic white families had 35.2 million minor children, whereas Asian, Black, and Latino families—all groups that tend to vote Democratic, Frey says—had 33.4 million children combined. (There were also 3.5 million non-Hispanic mixed-race kids—whom Trump may have managed to insult by asking, of Kamala Harris, “Is she Indian or is she Black?” Because one can’t be both!)
Trump’s supporters tend to be older and whiter, whereas most voting-eligible parents of young children would fall into the 25-44 age categories, which are more ethnically diverse, as this chart Frey put together demonstrates. (Scroll over the bars for exact percentages.)
Given our Electoral College rules, geographical clustering matters for the presidential race. Ethnically diverse states such as Texas and California, as Frey points out, "are going to have a bigger share of their voting age population with children and minority children. So that can help bolster the minority vote." Also, a sizeable share of America's Black population resides in red and purple states. And again, minority voters tend to favor Democrats.
"The key issue is turnout," Frey says. "High turnout is largely old people, college educated whites. Not so much for young people. And not so much for most minorities, except in some elections, like when Obama was running." (Note: This could be one such election.)
There's also an X-factor to consider: Might the promise of extra votes serve as an incentive for parents who might not otherwise do so to get out and exercise their patriotic duty, potentially narrowing ethnic and educational turnout disparities?
Frey was too busy to help me conduct an official analysis, but his overall impression is that Vance's idea would likely benefit Democratic candidates and priorities. "The whole thing is a bit hard to execute anyway," he says with a laugh. "Who’s gonna check? They accuse everybody of voter fraud if they just do normal voting. What happens if they do this kind of thing?"
Now, new data surveying the demographic targeted by Vance—women without kids, including women who own cats—makes it abundantly clear just how wrong Trump’s VP pick was about their political priorities. The gender justice advocacy organization National Women’s Law Center Action Fund and the polling firm Morning Consult surveyed more than 1,700 registered voters nationwide on August 1 and 2 and found that women without kids—including those with cats—support policies supporting children and families as much as, if not more than, parents and voters overall.
The study, shared first with Mother Jones, also found that 62 percent of women without kids who have cats and 51 percent ofwomen without kids overall strongly agree that “supporting families and children should be a top priority for the federal government,” compared with 49 percent of parents and 47 percent of voters overall. And as for Vance’s claim that “childless cat ladies” are “miserable?” Yeah…they’re not. The survey found 32 percent of these so-called “childless cat ladies” said they are “very happy,” compared to 27 percent of voters overall.
The findings also highlight a particular irony: Most women without kids support specific pro-family policies that Vance does not. Fifty-three percent of women without kids, for example, said they believe “guaranteeing access to child care for everyone who needs it” should be a very important government priority, compared to 52 percent of parents and 51 percent of voters overall. Vance, on the other hand, has called universal daycare “class war against normal people” and suggested women’s rightful place is in the home. “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had,” Vance posted on X after the Dobbs decision in June 2022.The same dissonance appeared in support for paid family and medical leave, with the survey respondents expressing strong support for such policies, while Vance has never appeared to support them.
And more than 50 percent of both childless cat women and parents said they believe “re-expanding the Child Tax Credit to help low- and middle-income families make ends meet and to help reduce child poverty” should be a very important priority for the government, compared to 47 percent of childless women overall and 48 percent of voters overall. Vance has recently claimed he would support increasing the child tax credit to $5,000, but experts say that would be hard to enact—and Vance did not even show up for a Senate vote earlier this month on a bill that would expand the child tax credit to $2,000 per child. (Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of the bill’s co-sponsors, blasted Vance as a “phony.”)
Spokespeople for Vance—who has since tried walking back his “cat ladies” comment amid the ire it sparked, particularly among Americans who don’t have kids—did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
To experts, the findings are not surprising. “It makes sense that women without children would support policies like affordable childcare and paid family leave because they recognize that care links all of our fates,” said Jessica Calarco, professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the book Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.
Peggy Heffington, a historian based at the University of Chicago and the author of Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother, said she sees a cause for hope in the findings: “People who don’t have kids are having empathy and wanting to support people whose lives don’t look like theirs.” That’s a lesson that Vance could stand to learn.
On the morning of August 3, 2019, a 21-year-old man walked into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle. He murdered 23 people and injured 22 others. Most who died were Latino, including eight people from Mexico.
The gunman had driven to the border city from 650 miles away. In custody, he told police he’d come to kill Mexicans. Some writings he’d posted online said his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and that his mission was “defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” He cited an extremist ideology known as “The Great Replacement.”
These were not obscure ideas. The gunman wrote that he agreed with a recent mass shooter in New Zealand who had espoused them. He also knew some of these themes were being championed at the time by President Donald Trump. With help from Fox News pundits, Trump was whipping up fear and hatred of an alleged “invasion” coming across America’s southern border—the message was central to Trump’s reelection campaign in 2019, a focus of his ads and speeches warning ominously of a national demise.
At the end of the shooter’s screed posted online, he sought to validate his attack with a pseudo-clever twist, suggesting that his views predated Trump in the White House. “I know that the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric,” he wrote. Then he used Trump’s own rhetoric as supporting ammo: “The media is infamous for fake news.”
Today, Trump is running again using the same potent demagoguery he wielded during his presidency and prior campaigns. Five years to the day after the massacre in El Paso, he held a rally in Atlanta with running mate JD Vance, and, over the course of an hour, warned a half dozen times about hordes of murderous foreigners overrunning America.
“Forty or fifty million illegal aliens will invade our country during the next four years if they’re in,” Trump said of his Democratic opponents at the outset. He soon continued: “Many of them that are coming in are from prisons and jails and mental institutions, insane asylums.” He taunted media covering the rally as he referenced the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, a provocation he now uses to depict migrant “insanity” and brutality.
He went on to vow he would “stop the invasion” and expanded on the peril: “These people are so violent and vicious…These are the worst people anywhere in the world coming into our country. They’re coming in at levels that nobody’s ever seen before.”
“We’ve already seen where this goes and it can easily go there again,” one threat assessment source told me.
Audience reaction was relatively subdued as Trump recited these lines from a teleprompter, perhaps because they are such a familiar fixture of his speeches. But deep into this speech, the next escalation played differently. The danger, Trump now further alleged, came from a grand conspiracy against him, one involving migrants. He warned that his political opponents who “hate our country” are “actually trying to get them to sign up and vote.” Then came the climax: “It’s so sinister,” he said, “but they want to sign these people up to vote, and if they do that, this country is destroyed. We’d become a dumping ground for the entire world, and we’re not going to take it anymore.”
A close listener could hear echoes of Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump invoked loss of country and the danger of inaction against an election that he falsely claimed was stolen from him. Now, in his telling, that conspiracy promised to use legions of evil foreigners against him and his supporters.
The crowd cheered, beginning to stir more as Trump recounted a recent murder of a university student at the hands of a Venezuelan man illegally in the country. “Kamala Harris let in the savage monster who murdered Laken Riley,” Trump declared. He railed against “migrant crime” and falsely claimed that “thousands” of Americans were being killed in this way.
He continued: “If Harris wins, a never-ending stream of illegal alien rapists, MS-13 animals, and child predators will flood into your communities. If I win, on day one we will begin the largest deportation operation in American history.”
The crowd roared at this signature line from his speech.
“We have no choice,” Trump said.
Who was listening? Perhaps some disturbed young man there in the crowd, or elsewhere watching Trump live on YouTube—perhaps someone who might feel enraged, like the El Paso mass shooter surely did when he wrote down the lie that Democrats “intend to use open borders, free healthcare for illegals, citizenship and more to enact a political coup by importing and then legalizing millions of new voters.”
Shortly after Trump’s speech in Atlanta, I talked to a longtime threat assessment source with expertise in counterterrorism and far-right extremist groups. His response was blunt when I noted that no major media focused their coverage on Trump’s inflammatory language, almost as if all that rhetoric was just business as usual.
“There’s nothing normal about any of this,” the source said. “We have the First Amendment and he can say whatever he wants, that’s our democracy. But it really disturbs me how politicians in his party won’t stand up and say one word against it now. The country really needs that. We’ve already seen where this goes and it can easily go there again.”
The use of Trump’s rhetoric to justify racist and organized political violence began early in his presidency. Strained denials of that reality crumbledfor good with the horrific events at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. This June, I reported again on Trump’s years of incitement against his many perceived enemies, a method known to national security experts as stochastic terrorism. The results, as I’ve reported, grow even worse when a high-profile figure emphasizes themes of contempt and disgust.
Security and law enforcement sources told me that topping the list of concerns now for election-year violence are threats stemming from white supremacist groups and Trump’s MAGA movement. After the assassination attempt against the ex-president in mid-July, sources told me that the promotion of conspiracy theories and false blame on Democrats by Trump allies could provoke retaliatory attacks.
At the Aug. 3 rally in Atlanta, JD Vance doubled down on that very blame, declaring in his speech that Trump’s political opponents “tried to kill him.” Meanwhile, a new intelligence report from the FBI and Homeland Security focused on the upcoming Democratic National Convention highlights similar concerns about retaliatory violence.
I contacted three people with the Trump campaign asking specifically for comment on these warnings about political violence: spokespersons Brian Hughes and Steven Cheung, and Trump senior advisor Alina Habba. None of them responded.
America faces immense challenges with immigration, a top issue for voters. It is precisely that reality Trump seeks to exploit.
Trump shows no signs of stopping the incitement. Last Thursday, in a rambling speech to reporters assembled for a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, he again emphasized that America was under invasion by millions of migrants “from prisons, from jails, from mental institutions, insane asylums.” They are flooding in “from all over the world,” he claimed. “Prisons are being emptied into our country.”
He delivered more of the same at a rally on Friday in Montana: “Fifty million of them… they’re destroying our country, they’re ruining our country… migrants praying on our women and our girls.”
Fear and loathing, dressed up as just another stump speech.
Trump’s incitement focused on migrants is not mutually exclusive with the fact that America faces immense challenges with immigration, a top issue for voters. It is precisely that reality Trump seeks to exploit. In early 2024, Congress was poised to pass a bipartisan border security bill, with President Biden ready to sign it. Trump killed the deal. No one bothered trying to hide why he pressured Republicans to do his bidding: He wanted immigration to remain his political weapon.
“The fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and Congress people that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem, because he wants to blame Biden for it, is really appalling,” Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah told reporters in January, the deal dead.
Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, who helped author the legislation, later revealed how “a popular” media commentator had threatened him: “If you try to move a bill that solves the border crisis during this presidential year,” that Trump ally told him, according to Lankford, “I will do whatever I can to destroy you. Because I do not want you to solve this during the presidential election.”
What else might follow when the leader of a major political movement smears a population as a menace to public health and safety and even national survival?
Trump’s relentless fear-mongering against migrants underscores how he has always seen immigration and the border as essential to his political power. There is zero doubt that his current trajectory—begun nearly a decade ago when he announced his first campaign and inveighed against Mexican criminals and “rapists”—will continue to the November election.
Most news media are no longer paying any of this much attention. But that carries risk of the public forgetting about the violence that has already occurred. More broadly, shouldn’t we be asking: What else might follow when the leader of a major political movement smears a population as a menace to public health and safety and even national survival?
According to one of Trump’s own senior national security advisers in the White House, Trump was informed explicitly and repeatedly about how his rhetoric had been used to justify acts of violence. Credible evidence of his awareness—and his demonstrated unwillingness to respond meaningfully against the violence—suggests that, for him, more bloodshed will be welcome.
On Sunday, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) made the rounds on the morning shows, seemingly trying to clean up the mess he has made from his past comments about “childless cat ladies” and abortion—among other topics—that have re-emerged since former President Trump named him as his running mate.
In interviews on ABC, CBS, and CNN, Vance fielded questions about his stances on the issues, Democrats’ labeling him as “weird,” and what he makes of some of Trump’s craziest statements. But in doing so, Vance may have generated even more controversy.
Here are some of the highlights of some of his most bizarre—and flat-out false—Sunday morning statements:
He criticized Tim Walz for…not kissing his wife?
Vance tried to cast Walz—who coined the “weird” label Democrats have been using against Republicans—as the weird one for how he greeted his wife following his first rally with Harris in Philadelphia this past week.
“Tim Walz gave his wife a nice, firm Midwestern handshake, and then tried to sort of awkwardly correct for it,” Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash. “I think what it is, is two people, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who aren’t comfortable in their own skin, because they’re uncomfortable with their policy positions for the American people.” Something tells us, though, that line is not quite going to land in light of Trump’s and Vance’s extensively weird records (which includes Trump suggesting an “injection” of disinfectant could cure the coronavirus and Vance calling daycare “class war against normal people.”)
.@JDVance responds to Democrats calling him “weird,” telling @DanaBashCNN that it’s “fundamentally schoolyard bully stuff” and that he thinks it’s “a little bit of projection.” pic.twitter.com/1ySPsvljME
He described exactly how the Trump administration would enact its “mass deportation” plan
When Jonathan Karl of ABC asked Vance how, exactly, a second Trump administration would enact the “mass deportation” plan it has promised, Vance broke it down in chillingly clinical terms: “There are 20 million people here illegally. You start with what’s achievable. You do that, and then you go on to what’s achievable from there. I think that if you deport a lot of violent criminals and frankly, if you make it harder to hire illegal labor, which undercuts the wages of American workers, I think you go a lot of the way to solving the illegal immigration problem.”
“There are 20 million people here illegally. You start with what’s achievable. You do that, and then you go on to what’s achievable from there.”
Later in the interview, he added, “I think it’s interesting that people focus on, well, how do you deport 18 million people? Let’s start with 1 million.”
He tried to dismiss his past claims that parents should get more votes than non-parents
Vance said his prior comments about allowing parents to vote on behalf of their kids were simply a “thought experiment” in light of some Democrats being open to lowering the voting age to 16.
“I’m talking about a thought experiment here,” Vance told Karl. “And do I regret saying it? I regret that the media and the Kamala Harris campaign has frankly distorted what I said,” he said, adding that those people turned his comments “into a policy proposal that I never made.” (His original comments were: “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children.”)
He falsely implied abortion pills are unsafe—and lied about his record trying to criminalize them
As I previously reported, Vance signed onto a letter last year with more than 40 other Republican lawmakers demanding that the Department of Justice apply the more than 150-year-old Comstock Act—a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that bars the mailing of “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use”—to “shut down all mail-order abortion operations” nationwide. That’s exactly what Project 2025, an initiative led by dozens of conservative groups and spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, has said the DOJ should do in the next conservative administration.
But when Margaret Brennan of CBS asked Vance if he would seek to enforce that law in a Trump administration, he tried to rewrite history: “What we said in that letter, Margaret, is that we want doctors to prescribe this stuff to ensure that it’s safe.” That’s not what the letter said, and—again—abortion pills are safe. So not to worry, JD!
.@JDVance says a Trump-Vance administration would not use the FDA to block access to mifepristone, the widely used abortion pill mifepristone, even as Donald Trump suggested he is open to restrictions on it.
He disavowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes…and tried to claim the government perpetuates ‘reverse racism’
Vance dismissed Fuentes—who dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump in 2022 and more recently attacked Vance’s Indian-American wife, Usha, who he characterized as “a non-White wife”—as “a total loser.”
“Certainly I disavow him,” Vance told Brennan after she asked if there’s room for Fuentes in the MAGA movement and if Vance would disavow him.
.@JDVance says that antisemitism and white supremacy don't "have any room in the MAGA movement." He calls Nick Fuentes — a white supremacist who dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, and has criticized Vance's wife for her race — "a total loser." pic.twitter.com/RioS5ItYJT
“If you ask me what I care more about, is it a person attacking me personally, or is it government policy that discriminates based on race? That’s what I really worry about,” Vance said.
He agrees with Trump that the VP does not matter all that much
At his disastrous interview at the National Association of Black Journalists’ Convention, Trump told the moderators, “Historically, the Vice President, in terms of the election, does not have any impact. I mean, virtually no impact.”
Vance seems to agree: “I think President Trump’s right about that, actually,” the candidate told Brennan. “I think most people are voting for Donald Trump or for Kamala Harris.”
In the ABC interview, when asked the same question, Vance added: “I absolutely am sure that Donald Trump is confident in my abilities. I also think that he’s right that the politics of this really don’t matter that much.” Vance certainly has incentive to hope so, considering polling shows more than 40 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of him.
Asked about Donald Trump's recent suggestion that VP picks rarely matter in the outcome of elections, @JDVance tells @margbrennan, "I think President Trump's right about that, actually."
"Most people, when they cast their ballots, they're basing it based on who the presidential… pic.twitter.com/BUTLww7F04
On Sunday, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) made the rounds on the morning shows, seemingly trying to clean up the mess he has made from his past comments about “childless cat ladies” and abortion—among other topics—that have re-emerged since former President Trump named him as his running mate.
In interviews on ABC, CBS, and CNN, Vance fielded questions about his stances on the issues, Democrats’ labeling him as “weird,” and what he makes of some of Trump’s craziest statements. But in doing so, Vance may have generated even more controversy.
Here are some of the highlights of some of his most bizarre—and flat-out false—Sunday morning statements:
He criticized Tim Walz for…not kissing his wife?
Vance tried to cast Walz—who coined the “weird” label Democrats have been using against Republicans—as the weird one for how he greeted his wife following his first rally with Harris in Philadelphia this past week.
“Tim Walz gave his wife a nice, firm Midwestern handshake, and then tried to sort of awkwardly correct for it,” Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash. “I think what it is, is two people, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who aren’t comfortable in their own skin, because they’re uncomfortable with their policy positions for the American people.” Something tells us, though, that line is not quite going to land in light of Trump’s and Vance’s extensively weird records (which includes Trump suggesting an “injection” of disinfectant could cure the coronavirus and Vance calling daycare “class war against normal people.”)
.@JDVance responds to Democrats calling him “weird,” telling @DanaBashCNN that it’s “fundamentally schoolyard bully stuff” and that he thinks it’s “a little bit of projection.” pic.twitter.com/1ySPsvljME
He described exactly how the Trump administration would enact its “mass deportation” plan
When Jonathan Karl of ABC asked Vance how, exactly, a second Trump administration would enact the “mass deportation” plan it has promised, Vance broke it down in chillingly clinical terms: “There are 20 million people here illegally. You start with what’s achievable. You do that, and then you go on to what’s achievable from there. I think that if you deport a lot of violent criminals and frankly, if you make it harder to hire illegal labor, which undercuts the wages of American workers, I think you go a lot of the way to solving the illegal immigration problem.”
“There are 20 million people here illegally. You start with what’s achievable. You do that, and then you go on to what’s achievable from there.”
Later in the interview, he added, “I think it’s interesting that people focus on, well, how do you deport 18 million people? Let’s start with 1 million.”
He tried to dismiss his past claims that parents should get more votes than non-parents
Vance said his prior comments about allowing parents to vote on behalf of their kids were simply a “thought experiment” in light of some Democrats being open to lowering the voting age to 16.
“I’m talking about a thought experiment here,” Vance told Karl. “And do I regret saying it? I regret that the media and the Kamala Harris campaign has frankly distorted what I said,” he said, adding that those people turned his comments “into a policy proposal that I never made.” (His original comments were: “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children.”)
He falsely implied abortion pills are unsafe—and lied about his record trying to criminalize them
As I previously reported, Vance signed onto a letter last year with more than 40 other Republican lawmakers demanding that the Department of Justice apply the more than 150-year-old Comstock Act—a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that bars the mailing of “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use”—to “shut down all mail-order abortion operations” nationwide. That’s exactly what Project 2025, an initiative led by dozens of conservative groups and spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, has said the DOJ should do in the next conservative administration.
But when Margaret Brennan of CBS asked Vance if he would seek to enforce that law in a Trump administration, he tried to rewrite history: “What we said in that letter, Margaret, is that we want doctors to prescribe this stuff to ensure that it’s safe.” That’s not what the letter said, and—again—abortion pills are safe. So not to worry, JD!
.@JDVance says a Trump-Vance administration would not use the FDA to block access to mifepristone, the widely used abortion pill mifepristone, even as Donald Trump suggested he is open to restrictions on it.
He disavowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes…and tried to claim the government perpetuates ‘reverse racism’
Vance dismissed Fuentes—who dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump in 2022 and more recently attacked Vance’s Indian-American wife, Usha, who he characterized as “a non-White wife”—as “a total loser.”
“Certainly I disavow him,” Vance told Brennan after she asked if there’s room for Fuentes in the MAGA movement and if Vance would disavow him.
.@JDVance says that antisemitism and white supremacy don't "have any room in the MAGA movement." He calls Nick Fuentes — a white supremacist who dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, and has criticized Vance's wife for her race — "a total loser." pic.twitter.com/RioS5ItYJT
“If you ask me what I care more about, is it a person attacking me personally, or is it government policy that discriminates based on race? That’s what I really worry about,” Vance said.
He agrees with Trump that the VP does not matter all that much
At his disastrous interview at the National Association of Black Journalists’ Convention, Trump told the moderators, “Historically, the Vice President, in terms of the election, does not have any impact. I mean, virtually no impact.”
Vance seems to agree: “I think President Trump’s right about that, actually,” the candidate told Brennan. “I think most people are voting for Donald Trump or for Kamala Harris.”
In the ABC interview, when asked the same question, Vance added: “I absolutely am sure that Donald Trump is confident in my abilities. I also think that he’s right that the politics of this really don’t matter that much.” Vance certainly has incentive to hope so, considering polling shows more than 40 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of him.
Asked about Donald Trump's recent suggestion that VP picks rarely matter in the outcome of elections, @JDVance tells @margbrennan, "I think President Trump's right about that, actually."
"Most people, when they cast their ballots, they're basing it based on who the presidential… pic.twitter.com/BUTLww7F04
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