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It’s been five weeks since Donald Trump stood on a debate stage and told a bizarre lie about developments in Ohio. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” the former president said before a national television audience, despite reality. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Predictably, there were dangerous consequences — bomb threats, closed buildings, canceled events, terrified residents, death threats, etc. — both for the immigrants and the broader community. State and local officials from his own party urged Trump to stop lying. He declined.
More than a month later, the problem persists. His running mate, Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, still won’t back down from the conspiracy theory, and the former president himself continues to pretend his alternate reality is real. In fact, during his latest Fox News town hall, Trump told new and related lies about Springfield, rooted in part in his apparent confusion about his own country’s immigration laws and the meaning of “probation.”
Hanging overhead is a related question: Did the lie work?
The answer is one of perspective. The Washington Post reported last week on the results of a statewide poll in the Buckeye State.
Most Ohio voters don’t believe former president Donald Trump’s debunked claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield are “eating people’s pets,” and agree with Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s defense of Haitians as hard workers who are in the United States legally, a Washington Post poll finds.
The results weren’t especially close: According to the survey, only 24% of Ohioans said they believe Trump’s comments about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets were “probably” or “definitely” true, while 57% said the claims are probably or definitely false. (Click the link for additional information on the survey’s methodology and margin of error.)
At first blush, this seems relatively encouraging. Sure, it’s unsettling that roughly 1 in 4 Ohioans fell for this ugly nonsense, but the Post’s poll nevertheless found that a majority of the state knew better than to accept the garbage at face value.
Note, however, the next sentence in the newspaper’s article on the results: “But Trump holds an edge of six percentage points over Vice President Kamala Harris among likely voters in the Buckeye State — 51 percent to 45 percent — similar to his eight-point winning margin four years ago.”
In other words, quite a few voters in Ohio believe that Trump and Vance lied to them about developments in their own state, attacking their neighbors and dividing a local community in order to advance their political interests.
But those same voters have decided to vote for the folks who lied to them anyway.
The more Trump and his allies see this, the greater the incentive they’ll feel to keep lying, confident in the knowledge that they’ll pay no price for the public deceptions.