If you’ve watched Donald Trump demonize immigrants to fuel his political rise over the last decade, the former president’s insistence that immigrants are abducting the cats and dogs of Americans and eating them shouldn’t come as a surprise.
It probably also shouldn’t come as a surprise that Republican lawmakers are not only indifferent to the former president making these claims; they largely support him spreading the conspiracy.
In interviews with more than two dozen GOP lawmakers this week, Republicans brushed off Trump’s allegation that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. They didn’t care that Trump’s claims during a presidential debate were, predictably, not true. They weren’t worried that, by blurting out “they’re eating the dogs,” he was elevating racist rumors — the most cited of which relies on a neighbor’s daughter’s friend — to the national stage.