J.D. Vance held court on CNN’s State of the Union. “The American media completely ignored this issue,” he lamented last Sunday, “until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.”
But this wasn’t just a meme, interviewer Dana Bash objected. The Republican vice presidential candidate responded pointedly: “If I have to create stories to really bring attention to the suffering of the American people in the American media, then I’m going to do that, Dana, because you guys are letting Kamala Harris be completely comfortable.”
Relating to: ‘Racism is part of our society’: How attacks on immigrants in Ohio reveal US disinformation crisis
If ever there was an example of saying the quiet part out loud, Vance has mastered the art. The cat memes he’s referring to stemmed from unfounded rumors in his home state of Ohio that legal Haitian immigrants were eating pets — rumors that led to bomb threats and evacuations of schools and government buildings in Springfield.
But Vance’s desire to “create stories” to get attention ahead of the November election heralded a new frontier in a post-truth America, where lies are no longer distributed insidiously but rather are displayed openly as a tactic to gain political support and create social chaos.
Some commentators have drawn a parallel to the concept of “alternative facts” introduced by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway on another Sunday politics show in 2017, when she tried to defend then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s false statements about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration.
Democratic strategist Kurt Bardella said: “This is a logical continuation of what the same camp once called ‘alternative facts. ’ It’s clear that this is a long-term mission statement, more than just a cursory comment.”
“Their whole strategy is to say anything, make up anything, invent false narratives to distract from the real consequences of their radical and extreme agenda, which is so far from the mainstream of the American people’s interests. They think they have a better chance of winning by making up crazy stories about people eating their pets and then giving a speech about the consequences of their policy agenda.”
Dishonesty in politics is nothing new, from President Richard Nixon’s Watergate cover-up to the weapons of mass destruction allegations used as a pretext for the Iraq war. In 2004, the New York Times Magazine quoted an unnamed official in the George W. Bush administration as saying, “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
It was fertile ground for Trump, who for years exaggerated his personal wealth and charitable giving, misled the public about initiatives such as Trump University, and even misrepresented his own height and weight. Starting in 2011, he was a prominent promoter of the false conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to be US president.
By the Washington Post’s count, Trump has made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims in his four years in the White House since taking office. He has memorably claimed to have presided over the biggest tax cut ever — in fact, Ronald Reagan’s was bigger — and has repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus pandemic, publicly telling us it will soon “disappear.”
But perhaps the biggest lie of all came the night of the 2020 presidential election, when Trump claimed he had won. He insisted on that position, arguing that it was “stolen” from him through widespread voter fraud, which ultimately led to the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He has since recast the rioters as martyrs and “patriots.”
Now running for the White House for a third consecutive term, Trump’s mendacity has, if possible, stepped up a gear. He made more than 30 false claims during the presidential debate against Joe Biden in Atlanta, according to a fact check by host CNN, but escaped close scrutiny because of Biden’s lackluster performance.
In the Philadelphia debate against Harris, he made false claims about inflation, immigration, tariffs, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s role in the Jan. 6 incident, Joe Biden’s role in criminal cases against him and public support for repealing the constitutional right to abortion.
In a stunning twist, he pulled the racist Springfield conspiracy theory out of the fiery swamps of the internet and onto a national platform in front of millions of viewers: “They eat dogs in Springfield. People who come in, they eat cats. They eat the pets of the people who live there.”
Not for the first time that night, ABC News moderators had to step in for a fact check. There is no evidence for such a claim. The Wall Street Journal reported that on the same day Vance first promoted the right-wing rumors, he told Springfield’s city manager’s office they were false.
Vance’s team gave the Journal a police report in which a resident alleged that his cat may have been stolen by his Haitian neighbors. But a Journal reporter tracked down the resident and learned that his cat had been in the basement the entire time, leading him to apologize to his neighbors.
Yet Trump and Vance continued to knowingly lie at rally after rally throughout the campaign, ignoring White House warnings that they could trigger an ugly backlash against Haitians in Springfield. Then came Vance’s shocking admission that he had made it up and was proud of it.
Days after the CNN interview, Vance continued to defend the comments while admitting he had not verified the residents’ claims about the pets. “The media has a responsibility to verify the truth,” he said at a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in an effort to shift blame.
Conservative author and presenter Charlie Sykes said: “What JD Vance is saying is that facts don’t matter and I have no shame in spreading a false story.
“It highlights how dependent Trump, Vance and the Maga movement are on these fake internet memes and how unwavering their commitment to them is. Even when they’re debunked, they stick with them, and that’s dangerous because it means that no matter how much evidence you can provide, no matter how dangerous the lies, they’re not going to back down.”
Sykes warned: “They’re going to keep pushing. Project that into what happens in November and the election results. Project that into anything.”
On Saturday, Vance will appear alongside conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson on the former Fox News host’s live tour in Hershey, Pennsylvania — a decision that has been roundly condemned by Jewish members of Congress, despite Carlson recently hosting Nazi apologist and Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper on his podcast.
Trump, meanwhile, was accompanied on the campaign trail by far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who appeared at the debate and a day later in New York to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Loomer, who has 1.2 million followers on the X social media platform, has previously suggested that 9/11 was an inside job. Trump said at a rally in Las Vegas that he heard Harris using a hidden earpiece during their debate, a baseless conspiracy theory that Loomer has promoted on X.
Loomer also said on X that if Harris, who is of Indian descent, wins the election, “the White House will smell like curry and White House conversations will be facilitated through a call center.” Even far-right Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene condemned the comment as racist.
Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, sees Loomer as a symptom rather than a cause. “Just go through the list of all the conspiracy theories that Donald Trump has embraced or supported, it’s long,” he says. “It’s not like Laura Loomer turned Donald Trump into a conspiracist. Donald Trump has been for years. Now he’s finding people to flatter and validate his dark impulses.”
Trump and Vance have another sense of impunity. Their lies are borne out of and legitimized by a right-wing media ecosystem that includes X, formerly Twitter, now owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Musk has endorsed Trump, interviewed him, and sought to portray his critics as enemies of free speech.
“This is a right-wing media ticket,” said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the watchdog group Media Matters for America. “Donald Trump and JD Vance are both completely immersed in the far-right’s information ecosystem, and they’ve embraced that ecosystem’s complete lack of standards and its unwillingness to use any means necessary to achieve their goals of political gain and political victory. What we’re seeing here is how these lies can spiral completely out of control. Springfield, Ohio, is in real chaos right now.”
As he heads into the final sprint for the election, Trump is outdoing himself with a series of lies as he faces prison time if he loses. On Thursday, CNN’s fact-checkers compiled a list of “12 completely fictional stories” he has told in the past month, including that Harris should restart military service, that schools should send children for gender-affirming surgeries without their parents’ knowledge and that Harris negotiated with Russian President Vladimir Putin to prevent a 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “There is nothing worse than a desperate man. There is nothing worse than a desperate racist man who cannot control the African American woman in front of him. He cannot control the changing conditions around him, such as the tightening of the political race for the presidency.
“I can’t control what people say about him, the fact that Republicans are now coming out and speaking out against a second Trump term and creating ways in which we are more willing to support the Democrat than Donald Trump because he is so bad and so dangerous. When he can’t control that, he becomes even more dangerous and even more desperate, and you need to be aware of that because there’s going to be more of this coming into November.“