How Trump’s pet-eating claim became a meme for right and left alike

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It started as a xenophobic local rumour, became a right-wing talking point on Elon Musk’s X, and burst onto prime-time television when Donald Trump uttered it live onstage in Tuesday’s presidential debate.

Now conservatives and liberals alike are playing pet-eating for laughs as an online meme.

The claim that Haitians are eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio – an echo of a racist trope that has been lobbed at other ethnic groups in eras past – has yet to be substantiated by a single confirmed example. But on TikTok and across the internet, it has morphed from a nasty bit of gossip into fodder for irony-drenched humour that is striking chords across the political spectrum, even as it spills scarily into real-world consequences for some.

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On Friday, schools and municipal buildings in Springfield closed for the second straight day due to bomb threats, a day after they were shuttered following one such threat that included hateful language toward migrants, according to the city’s mayor. Even before that, Haitian families in the city of about 60,000 told the Haitian Times they were feeling unsafe and unwelcome, with some afraid to send their children to school.

So far, that hasn’t stopped politicians and ordinary social media users around the country from remixing and riffing on Trump’s comments – some approvingly, others mockingly – with both right and left seeming to think the joke is on their opponents.

Before and after the debate, Trump amplified several fake, evidently AI-generated images of himself with cats, while running mate JD Vance on Tuesday called on “fellow patriots” to “keep the cat memes flowing” – even as Vance admitted it was possible that “all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”

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Conservatives have gleefully obliged, with U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and the official account of the House Judiciary Committee’s Republican leadership among the many who shared manipulated images of Trump with cats. On Friday, Musk reposted a meme from Trump’s Truth Social account that showed a cat holding a campaign sign that read, “Kamala hates me.”

On the left, however, there’s a sense that the bit is backfiring. While the Harris campaign has not posted any cat memes, she responded to Trump’s remarks onstage with incredulous laughter, saying, “Talk about extreme.” Her running mate, Tim Walz, took his own jab at the claim at a rally in Michigan on Thursday, prompting the crowd to chant, “We don’t eat cats.”

Now, some of their supporters online are making pet-eating memes of their own.

On TikTok, audio clips of Trump saying, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs” and “they’re eating the cats” have become the soundtrack to numerous tongue-in-cheek videos that toy with the notion of America’s house pets being under attack.

One opens with the caption, “Well… now that he has exposed the secret of us undocumented immigrants….” The video shows a family seated around a dinner table with live house cats on their plates, pretending to shake salt and pepper onto the pets as they prepare to dig in.

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In others, pet owners set the audio of Trump’s remarks to video clips of their dogs and cats making alarmed facial expressions or bolting from the room. Some of the videos have millions of views.

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“It’s not surprising at all that people are meme-ifying it,” said Whitney Phillips, a media studies scholar at the University of Oregon. While the underlying claims have serious implications, she added, taking Trump’s words out of their original context allows people to highlight their absurdity in humorous ways.

That some on the left are embracing the meme rather than shunning it may be emblematic of the party’s tonal shift in dealing with Trump, from righteous indignation to mockery.

Renee DiResta, an author and researcher who studies online manipulation, said Trump gave Democrats “a gift” in the debate by turning what had been an ambiguously ironic right-wing meme into a “a serious statement of grievance.”

But it’s noteworthy that what some on the left see as an obvious gaffe, Vance and others on the right still seem to consider part of a winning message. In an era when social media algorithms refract political information through the lens of each user’s partisan leanings, viral campaign moments can become digital Rohrschach tests.

“It’s clear the cat thing was a dud with most Americans, yet some people still share it,” said Emerson T. Brooking, resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab. “Maybe they spread it because sharing dumb memes is the closest thing many Americans still have to political participation in this country.”

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While Phillips said she doesn’t begrudge people “having fun online,” she warned that liberals who think they’re cutting Trump down to size risk giving oxygen to a trope that ultimately plays into his hands – and endangers the Haitians who were its original targets.

“When you’re making a joke using the frame” of immigrants as cultural invaders, she said, even if you’re pushing back on it, “the frame is still amplified.”

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