Blow: The darker aims behind Trump’s vilification of Haitians

By Charles M. Blow / The New York Times

It has been over a week since Donald Trump stood on a debate stage and repeated the bogus claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets in a small Ohio city. And it’s pretty obvious that he; his running mate, J.D. Vance; and their campaign see longer-term utility in keeping this narrative going.

In a speech Friday, Trump said, “I’m angry about illegal Haitian migrants taking over Springfield, Ohio,” even though the majority of the Haitians in Springfield are there legally.

In an interview Sunday, Vance left the impression that he was making things up to amplify the smear against Springfield’s Haitian community: “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.”

What Trump is doing is important to the outcome of the election, and it’s not simply the usual race baiting aimed at charging up part of his base. He has failed for weeks to come up with an effective line of attack against Kamala Harris. But with Springfield, he has found a fear-driven argument that places the issue of immigration right into the town square of a Midwestern city in one of the most electorally important states, and it looks like he and Vance see this as a more potent argument than just talking about the Southern border: There’s reason to believe that they’re trying to stoke public anger and garner public support around immigration policies that Trump promoted in his first term and that he presumably hopes to act on in a second.

Trump has spent years barking about the purported scourge of immigration from Mexico and Central and South America, but that didn’t quite produce the poster villain that would perfectly focus public sentiment; it didn’t give him Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” or George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton.

But Trump knows what works and how to lean into it. He began his 2016 presidential campaign by disparaging Mexican immigrants as people “bringing crime,” “bringing drugs” and “rapists,” but he would later train his rhetoric on inner cities, painting Black Chicago, especially, as a lawless hellscape.

The mythos of Black savagery remains so imprinted on the American psyche that many Americans are quick to believe it, even without evidence. And so Trump has again turned to it; it seems clear that his attack on Haitian immigrants, who are of African descent, is in part an attempt to link broader anti-immigrant sentiment with anti-Black sentiment. It goes hand in hand with his characterization, a few years ago, of Haiti as a “shithole” — a place from where people, he seems to want us to think, are of course uncivilized and therefore incapable of blending into the American melting pot.

But it’s even more than that. When you look at the arguments made, over time, by Trump and some of his allies, the Haitians-eat-pets narrative comes across as laying the groundwork for nativist aspirations.

Indeed, this episode calls back to the sentiments expressed around the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882: In an 1884 Supreme Court case challenging the application of that law, Justice Stephen J. Field wrote, in his dissenting opinion, that Chinese immigrants “have remained among us a separate people, retaining their original peculiarities of dress, manners, habits, and modes of living, which are as marked as their complexion and language,” and that “they do not and will not assimilate with our people.”

During the same period in our history, Army Officer Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School for the purpose of “civilizing” Indigenous children, articulated his theory of assimilating Indigenous people: “Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”

Against this backdrop, it’s not difficult to see the denigration of Haitians as a way of saying that they’re just another group that doesn’t belong.

It’s a case that could help generate future support for mass deportations. It’s a potential piece in the argument for ending birthright citizenship — something Trump said, last year, that he could and would accomplish by executive order — and for expanding a project of “denaturalization.”

Last year, Trump adviser Stephen Miller bragged on the social platform X, “We started a new denaturalization project under Trump. In 2025, expect it to be turbocharged.” In his post, he linked to a 2020 New York Times article reporting on the creation of a Justice Department section that would “strip citizenship rights from naturalized immigrants, a move that gives more heft to the Trump administration’s broad efforts to remove from the country immigrants who have committed crimes.”

Revoking the citizenship of naturalized Americans who’ve committed serious crimes may sound like common sense to Trump and some of his supporters, but it’s a slippery slope. Consider one passage in Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” manifesto that proposes the prosecution of “denaturalization cases, in combination with the Department of Justice, for aliens who obtained citizenship through fraud or other illicit means.”

Without even getting into the constitutional implications of “denaturalization,” that’s considerably broader than focusing solely on people who’ve committed serious crimes, and to the extent that Trump’s influenced by Project 2025’s aims, despite disclaiming them, it could mean almost anything from his point of view. Who’s to say that a second Trump administration wouldn’t eventually deem any claims of asylum or refugee status from people coming from Caribbean nations to be fraudulent, null and void?

(Don’t forget that not long after saying, “I think Islam hates us,” Trump instituted his “Muslim ban.”)

Making broad, unsubstantiated accusations against Springfield’s Haitian community and then suggesting, based on those accusations, that the members of the Haitian community are destroying their new home illustrates just how easily slogans might influence political and policy outcomes.

At its core, this canard should be seen as part of a crusade to build support for not only closing the door to immigrants but also throwing them out of the country.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.