J.D. Vance to CNN host: ‘Shut up’ about baseless, racist pet-eating rumor I helped start

After Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance have been humiliated on the national debate stage in front of 60 million people, and on social media, for fueling a ridiculous and baseless rumor about Haitian immigrants eating pets, Vance got testy in a CNN interview on Sunday with host Dana Bash.

When Bash quoted the Springfield, Ohio, mayor’s plea for Trump, Vance and other Republican politicians to stop using his town as a political prop, Vance got touchy and told her to “shut up” about Springfield.

“You’ve heard a lot of the media focusing on every possible distraction from the story in Springfield,” Vance said. “You’ve heard them focus on these Proud Boy marches. … the suggestion that because some psychopath is is calling it a bomb threat, somehow we have to then ignore 40,000 Springfield having their lives worsened by Kamala Harris’s policies. …

“What is the implication when you say calling out these problems has caused a bomb threat? You accused me of causing a bomb threat. Doesn’t that mean you should shut up about the residents of Springfield? Don’t you realize you’re engaged in basic propaganda silence the concerns of American citizens?”

Vance, of course, was one of the first Republicans to promote the unfounded rumor. On Twitter/X, Vance wrote, “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

He was referring to a label Republicans have pinned on Harris, who was tasked by President Biden with working to examine the root causes of migration from Central America.

Haitian immigrants in Springfield are not undocumented and are under temporary protected status.

In his debate with Harris last Tuesday, Trump screamed, “They’re eating the cats” and “they’re eating the dogs!” as Harris laughed and mocked him by saying, “You’re unbelievable.”

Those rumors have sparked racist verbal attacks on Haitians, marches in the town by the white-nationalist Proud Boys, bomb and shooting threats, closed schools and Donald Trump’s insistence that he’ll visit the town and eventually save it with mass deportations, if re-elected.

Bash reiterated that she was “not accusing you of anything,” but was quoting the mayor, who said, “After these bomb threats, federal politicians are negatively spinning our city. They need to know they are hurting our city. It was their words that did it.”

Bash also pointed out that neither Trump nor Vance, not any of the right-wing conspiracists has produced a single person with evidence that their pet has been eaten by Haitian immigrants.