JD Vance keeps insisting the debunked racist claims he has helped spread are not, in fact, false.Gage Skidmore/ZUMA
JD Vance loves a Sunday morning media blitz.
In his latest round of television interviews, it appears he will not be swayed by the mounting evidence that the racist lies he amplified about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets—which former President Trump repeated on the debate stage this week to 67 million viewers—are demonstrably false. Instead, Trump’s historically unpopular running mate doubled down on his claims in a series of interviews on CNN, NBC, and CBS—even after the reporters fact-checked him.
Let’s start with Vance’s interview on CNN’s State of the Union, which saw the most time dedicated to the topic—and featured Vance’s most combative exchange.
Host Dana Bash asked Vance why he continues amplifying the claims, given that Springfield has received multiple bomb threats that led to two hospitals going into lockdown Saturday, plus several schools and the city hall being evacuated since Trump mentioned the lies at the debate. As Bash also pointed out, Springfield’s own mayor told a local television station, “All these federal politicians that have negatively spun our city, they need to know they’re hurting our city, and it was their words that did it.”
“These are your constituents,” Bash began, “so why are you putting them at risk by continuing to spread claims about Haitian immigrants, despite officials in your state saying that there’s no evidence and pleading for you to stop?”
Vance replied by insisting that he was amplifying the claims of “firsthand” accounts he heard from his constituents—even though, as Bash pointed out, they don’t appear to have any basis in reality.
On Friday, NBC News reported that the Springfield resident who first shared the false claims on Facebook about migrants eating pets—which she allegedly heard through the grapevine of her neighbor’s daughter’s friend—said she had no firsthand knowledge of any incident and regretted that her post sparked a national rumor, adding, “I feel for the Haitian community.” And as Bash noted, the Clark County Sheriff’s Office examined 11 months of 911 calls and found only one, on Aug. 26, that alleged four Haitians were carrying geese within the city of Springfield, according to a report in the Springfield News-Sun. The sheriff’s office directed the call to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, whose officials were not able to substantiate the claim—but that did not stop Donald Trump Jr. from posting audio of the 911 call to X this week.
But Vance, ultimately, did not seem to be interested in confronting these inconvenient facts. Instead, he called Bash’s implication that his words led to the threats in Springfield “disgusting” and said her question was “more appropriate for a democratic propagandist than it is for an American journalist,” leaving Bash visibly shocked. “We can criticize violence,” Vance added later in the interview. “We can also still talk about the problems that are happening in Springfield, and we should be able to do both those things simultaneously.”
When Bash once again gave him an opportunity to acknowledge the rumors about migrants eating pets were unfounded, he did not save himself. “The evidence,” he told Bash, “is the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened.”
Things didn’t go much better for Vance on NBC or CBS. He made the same argument—that he believed the accounts he heard from unspecified constituents over fact-checks from officials and the media—to Kristen Welker, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. When she asked why he couldn’t make his argument about immigration without amplifying these lies, he referenced yet another debunked rumor about migrants eating pets in the Ohio city of Dayton, about 30 miles southwest of Springfield.
On CBS the same morning, Vance told Margaret Brennan, host of Face the Nation, that while he condemned violence and the threats that have been phoned into Springfield, he did not believe the claims were “false rumors,” adding, “Everybody who has dealt with a large influx of migration knows that sometimes there are cultural practices that seem very far out there to a lot of Americans…the American media is more interested in fact checking innocent people who are begging for relief than they are in investigating some of these claims.” (Again: Multiple officials have confirmed there is no evidence to support these claims, including the state’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.)
Predictably, Vance and his cronies on the right used the interviewers’ fact-checking of him as evidence of their alleged biases. Donald Trump Jr. lauded him in a post on X for “embarrassing the Fake News.”
As my colleague Noah Lanard pointed out, Springfield is dealing with real challenges as it seeks to accommodate roughly 15,000 Haitian immigrants in a town of 60,000 people: Rent has gotten more expensive, in part due to landlords reducing the number of affordable housing units in the town, and schools are in need of more funding to support their growing numbers. And now, thanks to Vance and others involved in amplifying the falsehoods, there are new issues to worry about in Springfield: Schools and hospitals getting bomb threats, and Haitians are living in fear. But if Vance’s trio of Sunday interviews were any indication, none of this, apparently, is enough to stop him.
