Springfield

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance incite terror in Springfield OH, for political gain.

I'm excited about the newsletter coming out on Sunday with an exceptional guest writer. But given all the news this week, I’ve decided to write a second post instead of my usual paid subscriber ICYMI post. 

Yesterday, Springfield, Ohio, was hit with bomb threats targeting multiple municipal buildings. The threats were emailed to multiple city agencies and media outlets. Police evacuated Springfield City Hall and asked residents to avoid the area while they investigated if the threat was credible. At least one school had a bomb threat as well.

Meanwhile, the Haitian community in Springfield is living in fear. The Haitian Times reports that many Haitian families are keeping their children home from school or making plans to move away from the area.

The threats were almost certainly in response to MAGA’s targeted harassment campaign against Springfield and Haitian Immigrants who live in the community. MAGA has seized on the 2023 death of 11-year-old Aiden Clark, who died tragically in a bus crash that injured several other students. The driver who caused the crash was a Haitian Immigrant who was charged and found guilty of involuntary manslaughter this Spring. 

J.D. Vance, a Senator representing Ohio, began exploiting this local tragedy. Last week he ramped up, using his social media and his elevated profile as the VP nominee to spread disinformation and false conspiracies that Haitian Immigrints in Springfield were eating the pets of other local families. When Vance was called out for this he said that these stores might prove to be false, but that ultimately didn’t matter, and encouraged his MAGA followers to “keep the cat memes flowing.”

Donald Trump amplified the disinformation even further both on TruthSocial and using a nationally televised debate to declare "In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there.” Trump’s false claims were so egregious that the debate moderators at ABC news were compelled to fact check him in real time. 

It was appropriate and necessary for the moderators to call out Trump’s false claims—not because they were untrue but because they were intended to incite—something Vance all but admitted when he told his followers to keep sharing the memes anyway. 

Trump and Vance are intentionally exploiting a tragedy to incite terror and violence. Trump does this every election cycle in the final months, and it results in violence and terror every time. As I wrote when I covered incitement two years ago, “Americans can’t keep pretending this is accidental. Every public figure on the Right who engages in this behavior knows what they’re doing and is working to accomplish the same goal: destroying American Democracy and seizing power. The violence is a feature, not a bug, and the people using the rhetoric aim to incite more violence. The violence manifests in ways large and small, from mass shootings to vandalism, online harassment, an insurrection, and [this week] the attempted murder of the Speaker of the House.”

We can add bomb threats in Springfield to the growing list of violent acts incited by MAGA.

Aiden Clark’s family, already grieving the loss of a child, now have to deal with their son’s death being turned into a conspiracy theory and everything that comes along with that. Something no family should be forced to ensure. At a city commission meeting, Aiden’s father, Nathan Clark, publicly begged politicians, including Trump and Vance, to stop exploiting the worst day of his life, saying, “I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone. The last thing that we need is to have the worst day of our lives violently and constantly shoved in our faces, but even that’s not good enough for them. They take it one step further. They make it seem that our wonderful Aiden appreciates your hate, that we should follow their hate.”

The Clark family are J.D. Vance’s constituents. Vance was elected to serve them in the U.S. Senate. Instead, he exploits them. And endangered an entire community of people he’s supposedly meant to represent. It doesn’t matter that Nathan Clark has begged him to stop, that other parents whose children were injured in the crash Springfield’s City Manager have all begged him to stop. Vance will continue terrorizing this community, inciting violence and terror, and exploiting a family’s tragedy for his own gain.

There’s a pattern here, but we tend to still talk about these as isolated incidents rather than a larger social problem. The only way to combat this is to ensure these folks don’t hold elected office by beating them at the ballot box and creating ways to hold them accountable when they abuse the offices they hold to incite.