Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice presidential nominee, said Sunday that he stood by the debunked claims he and former President Donald Trump have spread suggesting Haitian migrants were eating pets, saying that he was willing “to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.”
And Vance responded indignantly when asked about the bomb threats that have upended life in Springfield, Ohio, the city where he and Trump falsely claimed that the pets were being eaten.
“I’ve been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months,” Vance said on CNN, referring to strains he said that a large influx of Haitian migrants had placed on the city’s public services. He went on: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. 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.”
When the CNN host, Dana Bash, noted that he had used the word “creating,” Vance replied, “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”
Even as Vance was standing by the claims in interviews on CNN, CBS News and NBC News, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, was rebutting them in an interview on ABC News. DeWine said the claim that migrants were eating pets was “a piece of garbage that was simply not true.” And the governor said that while there had been some “challenges” involved in accommodating thousands of migrants, they were there legally and had benefited Springfield economically.
Vance said that the claims — which have been debunked by city officials in Springfield, and which resemble smears that have been lodged against immigrants for decades — had come from “firsthand” accounts from his constituents. He called one of his interviewers a “Democratic propagandist” for connecting his words and Trump’s to the bomb threats, and told another that she should “ignore” the threats and focus on Vice President Kamala Harris’ immigration policies instead.
And he demeaned immigrants in vivid terms, saying they spread diseases and claiming that Democrats wanted to “overwhelm” cities and towns with them.
“This is what Kamala Harris wants to do to every town in this country,” Vance said on CBS. “Overwhelm them with migration, stress their municipal budgets, see communicable diseases on the rise. What is happening in Springfield is coming to every town and city in this country if Kamala Harris’ open border policies are allowed to continue.”
The false claims about the immigrants in Springfield have exploded since Vance became the first prominent national figure to promote them last week, repeating them on social media. The Trump campaign quickly amplified them, and Vance subsequently acknowledged that “it’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false,” while encouraging his supporters to continue spreading them.
But Trump amplified the claims when he repeated them to an audience of tens of millions of people during his debate with Harris on Tuesday.
Vance’s interviewers on Sunday noted that Springfield city officials had asked national figures including him and Trump to stop demonizing the migrants, who are mostly in the country legally under a temporary authorization program for people whose homelands are in crisis.
“All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it,” the mayor, Rob Rue, told WSYX, a local news station in Ohio.
But Vance expressed no regret about any of his statements and responded testily to mentions of the bomb threats.
“I want whoever made these threats to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” he told Margaret Brennan of CBS. “But we don’t believe, Margaret, in a heckler’s veto in this country.” He added: “I think that we should ignore these ridiculous psychopaths who are threatening violence on a small Ohio town and focus on the fact that we have a vice president who’s not doing her job in protecting that small Ohio town.”
On CNN, Bash asked what Vance, as a senator from Ohio, had done to help Springfield. “Instead of saying things that are wrong and actually causing the hospitals, the schools, the government buildings to be evacuated because of bomb threats, because of the cats and dogs thing, why not actually be constructive in helping to better integrate them into the community?” she asked.
Vance called the question “more appropriate for a Democratic propagandist than it is for an American journalist” and denied that his and Trump’s words had any connection to the threats that immediately followed them.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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