Trump Knows What He’s Doing in Springfield. So Does Vance.

Where once Donald Trump attracted only the right-wing fringe of American politics, now he leads it. Where once he kept some distance from agitators and provocateurs like Laura Loomer, now they’re at the center of his campaign. And where once he merely inspired extremists to act, now he points them directly at the objects of his rage.

Take Springfield, Ohio, where schools, colleges and municipal buildings have been shut down and community events canceled owing to bomb threats targeting the city’s Haitian community. Those threats come as Trump — and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio — smear the Haitians of Springfield with the lie that they’re stealing and eating the pets of presumably native-born Americans. Vance, who was ostensibly elected to represent and aid the people of towns like Springfield, has been even more vicious than his boss, spreading the additional lie that Haitians have carried disease and disorder to Ohio.

Despite pleas from both the Republican mayor of Springfield and the Republican governor of Ohio, who called the story of the attacks on pets “a piece of garbage that was simply not true,” neither Trump nor Vance is willing to end the rhetorical assault on the city’s Haitian immigrants. If anything, they’re unapologetic.

During a rally in Tucson, Ariz., on Thursday, for example, Trump expanded the lie even further. “Twenty thousand illegal Haitian immigrants have descended on a town of 58,000 people, destroying their way of life,” Trump said. “Residents are reporting that the migrants are walking off with the town’s geese. They’re taking the geese. You know where the geese are, in the park. And even walking off with their pets.”

When asked about the bomb threats, he dodged the question. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” Trump said. “I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants and that’s a terrible thing that happened. Springfield was this beautiful town and now they’re going through hell.”

The hell, of course, is of his own making.

As for Vance, who spearheaded this smear campaign when he amplified the claim on social media, he confessed to elevating rumors and lies to prove a political point. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” Vance said on Sunday, “then that’s what I’m going to do.”