In a shocking new development—OK, it was entirely predictable—the mayor of Springfield, Ohio has now confirmed that the widely reported threat by email to bomb Springfield’s City Hall included hateful language toward immigrants. This suggests at least the possibility that MAGA’s Two-Minute Hate of the Week about Haitians eating people’s house pets helped incite a threat of mass violence.
Which raises a question: Will Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and their merry band of MAGA propagandists stop pushing such vile demagoguery about immigrants, now that there’s cause for real concern that this latest iteration could end up getting people hurt or even killed?
Of course they won’t.
An underappreciated aspect of this sorry saga is that Trump and Vance constantly rhapsodize about places like Springfield, a small metro region in the heartland that has wrestled with postindustrial stagnation and population decline. Yet all of a sudden—and we see this again and again—they are almost pathologically unconcerned with the real-world harms their demagoguery is visiting on the people who live there, including the ones they regard as Real Americans.
Springfield Mayor Rob Rue’s latest comments on the bomb threat illustrate the point. He told the local ABC News affiliate that there was “negative language toward immigrants” in the threat email, including “towards Haitian folks.” That was “followed up” with the “bomb threat,” Rue said.
Rue was also asked whether he fears Trump’s elevation of MAGA’s shiny new lie at the presidential debate—he ranted wildly that in Springfield, immigrants are “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats”—is linked to the bomb threat. Rue didn’t answer directly, but he said something remarkable.
“When a federal politician has the stage,” Rue said, “and they don’t take the opportunity to build up the community, instead of inadvertently not understanding what their words are gonna do … it can really hurt the community.” Rue added that “we’ve been punched,” and that “it was their words that did it.”
The only false note there is the word “inadvertently.” Trump and Vance know exactly what they’re doing. By the way, Rue is a Republican, and in another interview, Rue explicitly called the anti-immigrant language in the threat “hateful.”
We may never know how serious this threat really was. But it did result in the evacuation of Springfield’s City Hall as well as two schools, meaning the safety of all kinds of innocents was thought to be in jeopardy. Law enforcement appears to have taken that possibility extremely seriously.
What’s more, on Friday, the news broke that another bomb threat has again forced the evacuation of schools, this time at least three of them. Yet it’s unlikely that Trump will back off in inciting hate and rage at the region’s Haitian population.
On this score, let’s not lose sight of the larger context here. Multiple times when Trump was president—that is, when he controlled arguably the biggest megaphone in the world—he kept on using inciting language even after such language apparently inspired threats of violence and possibly even actual acts of violence.
For instance, in 2018, a California man named Robert Chain was arrested for threatening to murder Boston Globe journalists, while snarling into one employee’s voicemail: “You’re the enemy of the people.” Chain echoed Trump’s own language about the media. After that, Trump kept on using that same language.
Want more? Robert Bowers, who murdered 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, appeared motivated by hateful white nationalist tropes, which he trafficked in himself, about Jewish organizations bringing in “invaders”—that is, refugees—who “kill our people.” Also in 2018, a man who owned a van festooned with Trump stickers attempted to mail improvised bombs to prominent Democrats, media organizations, and George Soros. After all that, Trump again fed the Soros-obsessed conspiracy theorizing. The “invasion” ugliness has been flowing nonstop since.
The point is not that Trump or his rhetoric are to blame for these heinous acts. Rather, it’s that in situations like these, it would be minimally responsible in a leader to refrain from using this sort of language, if only to err on the side of caution. It will blow your mind to hear this, but Trump is not that leader.
In fact, on Thursday, after news broke of the bomb threat in Springfield (but before it had been linked to anti-immigrant sentiment), Trump unleashed a long rant that ramped up the disgusting language about Haitians. He falsely claimed they’re in Springfield illegally and cast them as akin to an invading force:
Trump: Illegal Haitian migrants taking over a beautiful place… Nobody knows where they come from. pic.twitter.com/YKZHvDo7T7
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 12, 2024
Again, this was after we knew about the bomb threat. Now that the Republican mayor of Springfield has explicitly linked the threat to anti-immigrant hate rhetoric, all of this looks even darker and more sinister.
The news also wrecks the defense Republicans have mounted on Trump’s behalf. As Notus reports, some are claiming the pet-eating meme has highlighted the supposed ill effects of immigration more broadly. Vance too declared in a postdebate interview that the veracity of the pet-eating claims is tangential to the key issue—that Springfield “has been ravaged” by Haitians. Oozing with phony piety, Vance insisted that “the media didn’t care” about “what’s going on in these communities” until people like him virtuously drew attention to it with their “meme about cats.”
Well, guess what, J.D.: We have now spent days in a national debate over whether immigration to Springfield has been good or bad. We’ve learned that these immigrant workers helped fill the town’s genuine labor shortages and helped drive its growth, and that they are bringing rectitude and a healthy work ethic to societally useful manufacturing jobs—something Vance is supposed to valorize. We’re having the debate you wanted, J.D. So would you stop the vile nonsense already?
Sure, the influx of Haitians into Springfield has produced genuine tensions. Some social spending is way up, and some services are being strained. But we have also learned that—as Springfield’s mayor and city manager have both articulated—its leaders regard these tensions as eminently manageable. They believe resolving them judiciously is in the area’s best interests—and that inflaming those tensions is very much contrary to them.
Which is the ultimate point: MAGA thought leaders like Vance appear to see exacerbating these tensions as a desirable end. They seem to believe not just that it activates the MAGA coalition’s grievances—energizing its voters for political ends—but also that it forces those grievances to the forefront of the national agenda. Vance said this himself, in his own twisted way: The media would not pay attention to these grievances if MAGA didn’t lie odiously about immigrants, so, hey, it’s all good! Of course, the media actually has reported diligently on the influx for some time, but it has produced a nuanced picture that validates immigration to the region as a positive development—precisely what Trump and Vance cannot accept.
What’s missing from the Trump-MAGA stream of deceptions is any meaningful conception of what’s good for Springfield itself. Now that its own leaders have called on MAGA to stand down—and now that all this MAGA demagoguery has been linked to an active threat of violence—if Trump and Vance don’t finally desist, it will be confirmed once again: Supercharging all these toxic and destructive social tensions is precisely what they want.
