Column: The Nazi roots of the Trump-Vance smear of Haitian immigrants

If you were tuned in to the political jabber this weekend and undistracted by news of an apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, you may be aware that Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance acknowledged having “create[d] stories” about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, to focus the media’s attention on the immigration issue.

Among the stories that Vance spewed in appearances on TV talk shows Sunday was that there are 20,000 Haitians in Springfield, that they’re illegal immigrants, that they were “dumped” on this unsuspecting municipality, that they’re responsible for “skyrocketing” HIV and tuberculosis cases, that they’ve driven up housing prices, and of course that they’re stealing and eating the city’s geese and household pets.

None of these goonishly malevolent claims is authentic, some have been decisively debunked, and some are flagrant misrepresentations.

On CNN, Vance rationalized his mainstreaming of these urban legends — which have been picked up and amplified by Trump on the campaign trail — by stating, “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.”

To many commenters online, Vance’s casual dismissal of the need to authenticate slanderous claims about an ethnic group evoked propaganda campaigns of the past.

One that came up was a judgment by the Nazi Party’s chief racist ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, about “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” an antisemitic tract wholly fabricated by officials in czarist Russia.

In 1934, Rosenberg wrote that the issue “was less the so-called authenticity of The Protocols than the inner truth of what is stated.”

When I first encountered this quote in a posting on X, I found it so overdetermined that I thought it must be apocryphal. It’s not. It has been documented by Holocaust historians. Indeed, Rosenberg’s thinking reflected the general approach to the “Protocols” among Nazis. They included Hitler’s propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who wrote in his diary in 1924: “I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols.”

The Jewish community will recognize these statements as related to the “blood libel”—the persistent assertion that Jews used the blood of Christian children to bake matzoh or for other ritual purposes. A core tenet of Nazi antisemitism, it was designed to stir up anti-Jewish reaction with a visceral intensity. Of course it was completely fabricated.

This is what Vance and Trump are up to. Vance surely knows that the poison he has injected into political discourse has no resemblance to truth. Pressed on the issue by CNN’s Dana Bash, he claimed to have heard about the pet kidnappings in Springfield from “a dozen” constituents, 10 of whose stories are “verifiable and confirmable.”

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He didn’t say that he had verified or confirmed them. Rather, he said it’s up to the news media to do that job for him. His own office doesn’t appear to have considered the claims authentic enough to pass any evidence on to law enforcement or civic leadership in Springfield, since neither the police nor the city’s mayor say they have seen any evidence to validate them.

Questioned by Bash, Vance veered into the argument that the news media had ignored the purported crisis in Springfield until he caught their attention with his eye-opening “stories.” In other words, his concern was less the authenticity or inauthenticity of his stories, but their, well, inner truth.

One more thing before we examine the other claims retailed by Vance and Trump: Urban legends about immigrants eating household pets have long been a staple of anti-immigrant propaganda in the U.S. The eminent folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand traced them at least as far back as the 1970s, when immigrants from Southeast Asia reached these shores.

“These stories have all the earmarks of urban legends,” Brunvand wrote. “As with most such legends, the stories told about eaten pets are spread by word-of-mouth, and are unauthenticated by actual, traceable details.” (Props to NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny for unearthing a 1987 column by Brunvand on the topic.) Brunvand observed that the core of these stories is prejudice against immigrants, “who are also dismissed as ‘invaders’ who live on welfare and violate our cultural norms.”

The Trump-Vance campaign didn’t respond to my request for comment about the ideological roots of its attack on Haitian immigrants. “We hope the media will continue to cover the stories of the very real suffering and tragedies experienced by the people of Springfield, Ohio,” the campaign told me by email.

In European history, blood libels were often the precursors to murderous pogroms directed at Jews; Vance and Trump may imagine that they can stir up hostility to immigrants by blaming immigrants for “real suffering and tragedies” experienced by their neighbors, while dodging responsibility for any violent outbreaks that occur in the wake of their words, but they are like infants playing with fire.

That brings us to the other calumnies Vance and Trump have directed at the Haitians in Springfield.

First of all, estimates of Haitian residents in Springfield run to about 10,000 to 15,000, not 20,000. They are legal residents, not illegal. Nor did they all appear suddenly; some of them have been in this country long enough to have green cards.

“What we do know,” Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, said Sunday on ABC, “is that the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal. They came to Springfield to work .... Springfield has really made a great resurgence with a lot of companies coming in. These Haitians came in to work for these companies. What the companies tell us is that they are very good workers. They are very happy to have them there. And frankly, that has helped the economy.”

As for the claim that Haitians are kidnapping and eating pets, DeWine called that “a piece of garbage that was simply not true. There’s no evidence of this at all.”

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Vance’s claim that HIV and tuberculosis cases are “skyrocketing” in Springfield doesn’t appear to have any empirical support. New diagnoses of HIV generally declined from 2018 to 2022, according to a survey by the state Department of Health dated June 30, 2023. The department’s director told the Columbus Dispatch that his agency hasn’t seen any “measurable or discernible increase” in vaccine-preventable illnesses, a category that includes TB. (The TB vaccine generally isn’t given in the U.S. because the disease incidence is so low.)

The influx of Haitian immigrants into Springfield was born in a deliberate local effort to shore up a shrinking economy, starting about 2017 — while Trump was President. The local boosters succeeded in attracting so many companies to the city that a labor shortage occurred. Haitian immigrants arrived, as DeWine said, to fill those jobs.

It’s true that the influx of new residents has strained the municipal infrastructure, including its schools and hospitals, and driven up rents. That’s what happens in any town that becomes a magnet for new employment, such as — to name a couple at random — Austin, Texas, and San Francisco.

The state of Ohio has committed $2.5 million over two years to augment the city’s primary healthcare resources, among other assistance.

That said, the problems caused by the influx of working and taxpaying new residents pale in comparison to the damage done by Vance to his own constituents through his decision to mainline Springfield into the national immigration debate. The city appealed to its federal representatives for help dealing with the infrastructure problems from Washington. What they got was a partisan campaign that, so far, has led to bomb threats against local hospitals and the closures of schools and a local college in response to threats of violence.

In his TV appearances Sunday, Vance tried to steer the conversation to what he described as “creat[ing] the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story.” He didn’t seem to notice that he has become the story.

Vance is wrong to say that the story is about “the suffering of the American people” because of immigration. The story is about the utter lack of judgment, character, shame and integrity he and his running mate have displayed in targeting an entire community of working people with smears, just for partisan gain.