Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

Perhaps the most telling moment of yesterday’s debate came when former President Donald Trump, desperate to find a convincing line of attack against Vice President Kamala Harris, repeated the right-wing lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating people’s pets.

“They’re eating the dogs. The people who came here are eating the cats,” Trump shouted into the microphone. “They’re eating the pets of the people who live there, and that’s what’s happening in our country, and it’s a disgrace.”

A moderator, David Muir of ABC News, quickly noted that the city manager had said the story was baseless.

A weakened Trump responded, “Well, I’ve seen people on TV. People on TV say, ‘My dog ​​was kidnapped and used for food.'” That response was tremendously revealing about how Trump’s brain works — and by extension, the brains of his Fox News-captive followers, who will just believe anything they’re told, no matter how outrageous or wrong, as long as it aligns with their existing biases. Trump felt so hurt by the exchange that he appeared on Fox News this morning and demanded that ABC News be “shut down” for fact-checking him. This is a reminder that Trump doesn’t believe Americans should have the right to criticize him.

This lie, directed at a community that has done nothing wrong except come from a different place than the surrounding residents, shows how much the Trump campaign’s strategy relies on poisoning the information landscape with lies about vulnerable groups that Republicans want to blame for the country’s problems. Yet for all their dishonest doom-mongering about immigrants, Republicans offer no solutions, only unbridled cruelty toward scapegoats. Trump, checking the facts in real time, could offer no evidence for his slander other than the fact that, like a small child, he believes everything he sees on television.

Read: What was he even talking about?

Much of Republican political strategy relies on pumping such poison into public discourse. It is idiotic nonsense that children go to school and come home after a sex change, as Trump claims. It is completely false that illegal immigrants influence elections. It is a vicious fabrication that women have their babies killed immediately after birth. Like the Trump campaign’s efforts to stoke hatred against Haitian immigrants, these are nothing more than lies designed to intimidate the target audience into supporting extreme measures against constituencies too small or politically weak to defend themselves.

I don’t want to overstate the extent to which the media has acted as a bulwark against these falsehoods. Many members of the press have not covered themselves in glory, perhaps fearful that correcting Trump too aggressively would make them appear biased in favor of the Democrats. But disinformation has been able to flourish largely because social media has largely abandoned its moderation efforts after a successful intimidation campaign by conservatives seeking to ensure that their most baseless propaganda reaches the widest possible audience. Members of the press may fail to tell the truth, but they will at least try. Social media has no such obligation to provide its users with accurate information; its priority is to ensure that you stay glued to your devices for as long as possible. The extent to which this toxic information dynamic is entirely due to Republican interest in defending every bit of nonsense that comes out of Trump’s mouth, no matter how confusing, is probably underestimated.

In this environment, and especially on Elon Musk’s X-Account, where the right-wing billionaire uses his account to spread one false claim after another, disinformation can flourish largely unchecked. This is why Russian influence operations have been so successful at paying conservatives to do their bidding; this is why Republicans in Congress have used their authority to attack disinformation researchers; this is why conservatives pay online influencers to spread misogynistic lies about Harris. This is also why the lie about Haitian immigrants spread so quickly despite having no basis in reality.

Trump had no evidence to support this lie. His running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, repeated it despite tacitly admitting its inaccuracy, writing, “It is possible that these rumors will turn out to be false.”

Vance’s response deserves closer examination. Some 15,000 Haitian immigrants have moved to Springfield, helping to revitalize the local economy and filling the pews of local churches. But there have been problems; a sudden influx of people is likely to temporarily strain infrastructure built for a smaller population. Last year, a child was killed when a Haitian immigrant collided with a school bus; the child’s family has said the Haitian community as a whole is not to blame and has called on the Trump campaign to stop exploiting their son’s death to fuel a xenophobic anti-immigrant campaign. Moreover, the Haitian community is not collectively responsible for the actions of any of its members, any more than white people in Ohio are responsible for Vance.

Read: How Harris roped in an idiot

The Haitian immigrants in Springfield did exactly what conservatives expect immigrants to do: They entered legally, worked hard, and contributed to their new home. But it was precisely because these immigrants did what was asked of them that it was necessary to lie about them. As Vance’s response shows, he doesn’t care if the slanderous accusations he makes are true. He doesn’t care. If immigration is bad and immigrants are bad, then even a lie serves a larger truth.

These smears against Haitian immigrants are dishonorable. They are cowardly. They are dishonest. And in that, they are as clear an example of the values ​​of Trump-era conservatism as one could hope for: an entire political movement worshipping an old man who believes all the racist lies that come across his television screen.