“In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there."
When Donald Trump barked that out at the one and only debate, it sounded like he’d lost both his mind and the election. Provably false and overtly racist, it appeared he’d fallen down a rabbit hole and into a trap. It also looked like the cherry on top of a huge debate win for Kamala Harris, who’d goaded him into one outlandish rant after another. But it was the pet-eating dog whistle that dominated the newscycle for days and, it turns out, for weeks to come … although its impact wasn’t what “rational” observers might’ve expected.
Instead of being the beginning of the end of Trump’s candidacy, it was the beginning of the end of Harris’s momentum. Yes, the polls crested for her in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s apparent debate debacle. And yes, the news media quickly debunked the pet-eating. They also covered the ensuing bomb threats and detailed the upside of immigrants in Springfield. In response, Trump amped-up his rhetoric with a call to deport Springfield's Haitian population, and he continued to bark about "pet-eating migrants."
It didn't matter that it'd all been ridiculed and debunked.
Nor does it matter that good reporting has since debunked his wild assertions about the takeover of Aurora, Colorado by Venezuelan gangs … or his disingenuous claim about 13K migrant murderers menacing America’s streets … or his silly lie about migrants taking “Black jobs” … or his whole-cloth fable about nations exporting an army of Hannibal Lecters to eat America with a side of fava beans and a nice Chianti. And it doesn’t seem to matter that his long-standing affinity for eugenics remerged when he warned Americans that their blood was being poisoned and their genes jeopardized by biological interlopers from the world’s darkest lands.
The the only truth that matters is the sad truth that he didn’t lose the debate. And afterwards he won the debate about the debate because the fact-checked truth doesn’t matter. It hasn’t mattered since he came down the escalator. We’ve seen it yet again in the wake of Hurricane Helene as he’s lied about needy Americans being “robbed” of their rightful restitution by Kamala Harris, who, in turn, supposedly spent it all on houses for marauding migrants.
The unavoidable truth about immigration is that “the truth” is irrelevant.
Trump knows that. He knows existential fear trumps logic. And he knows this specific fear is a soft-spot in the electorate. It motivates “the poorly-educated.” It motivates the working class White men and the White evangelicals he needs to turn out in big numbers. And it seems to appeal to Hispanic males who may have fled one of the “shithole countries” Trump keeps in his rhetorical crosshairs. Most importantly of all, Trump knows his only edge in the presidential personality contest is his ruthlessness. You may not "like" him, but if you think your "way of life" is at risk? Then "likeability" is a liability, not an asset.
He's using fear of immigrants to flip that script.
And it’s working.
As pollster Stanley Greenberg explained in The American Prospect earlier this week:
Trump shifted the momentum in the race when he began his outrageous, slanderous, and racist statements about Haitian immigrants. He has also made immigrants the cause of high rents and food prices and spread the false rumor that FEMA ran out of funds for North Carolina hurricane victims.
It was very effective and is still shaping the race.
Trump’s daily blows pushed up Republican enthusiasm ahead of Democrats and shifted white working-class and Hispanic voters. They shifted votes toward Trump in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. And critically, they dropped Harris’s margin in Pennsylvania from near 2 percent to a half percent. Polls in Pennsylvania and nationally show her support trending down.
Longtime political reporter Joe Klein reacted to Greenberg’s assessment:
Certainly, the failure of a near-majority of our electorate to know a charlatan showboat hater when they see one—or worse, to like Trump’s viciousness—speaks to a certain moral retardation among the people. The least incredible, but still ridiculous, rationale for people to vote for Trump is that they’ve “seen” him run “his business” decisively on The Apprentice, but that was just make-believe. Given the lax, waning state of American education, this shouldn’t be all that surprising. But it’s interesting to watch a solid, old-fashioned conservative like Gerard Baker of the Wall Street Journal mystified by Trump’s appeal.
Unlike Gerard Baker, I am not “mystified” … nor am I surprised. Not only is anti-immigrant xenophobia is a long-standing American tradition, but I’ve both seen and written about the repeated use of the “Southern Strategy” in presidential politics. And I sensed it was "déjà vu all over again" when an unrepentant JD Vance first started the Springfield crisis. It signaled the campaign’s intent to put the economy in the backseat and instead “ride or die” on demonizing immigrants.
That’s exactly what they’ve done.
They’ve made immigrants this campaign's Willie Horton.
Why is Trump doing it? Because it works. That's why the Southern Strategy has been around for nearly fifty years. And when your key to victory rests on activating and turning out White voters in places like Arizona and Georgia and Michigan, why not dance with the devil you know? Why not dance with “the devil what brung ya” in the first place?
It’s almost a no-brainer for a guy who kicked-off his political career by demonizing "Mexican rapists.” It also reflects a level of self-awareness most are loathe to ascribe to history’s greatest narcissist. He knows his likeability is permanently underwater and he knows women don’t like him. That means he has to convince some college educated suburbanites to vote for him in spite of his personality. He has win some of the people who’d never-ever sit down to have a beer with him. Hell, he doesn’t even drink beer.
But Kamala Harris does.
I suspect he knows he cannot win a personality contest with a joyful, hopeful Kamala Harris. In fact, he was losing that personality contest in the weeks between his rambling convention speech and the debate. Trump was losing when it was a referendum on him.
Then he used immigration to flip it into a referendum on us.