It’s been five weeks since Donald Trump stood on a debate stage and told an audience on national television a bizarre lie about developments in Ohio. “They eat the dogs in Springfield,” the former Republican president said, despite the reality. “The people who came in ate the cats. They eat the pets of the people who live there.”
Predictably, there were dangerous consequences – bomb threats, closed buildings, canceled events, terrified residents, death threats, etc. – both for the immigrants and for the wider community. State and local officials from his own party urged Trump to stop lying. He refused.
Over a month later the problem still persists. His running mate, Republican Senator JD Vance of Ohio, still won’t back down from the conspiracy theory, and the former president himself continues to act as if his alternate reality is real. During his latest Fox News town hall, Trump made 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 over your head is a related question: Did the lie work?
The answer is one of perspective. The Washington Post reported the results of a statewide poll in the Buckeye State last week.
Most Ohio voters do not 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 work legally in the United States, according to a Washington Post. find polls.
The results weren’t exactly consistent: 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 that the claims are probably or definitely false. . (Click the link for additional information about the survey’s methodology and margin of error.)
At first glance, this seems relatively encouraging. Sure, it’s disturbing that roughly one in four Ohioans fell for this ugly nonsense, but the Post’s poll nevertheless showed that a majority of the state knew better than to accept the garbage at face value.
However, notice the following sentence in the newspaper article about the results: “But Trump has a six-point lead over Vice President Kamala Harris among likely voters in the Buckeye State — 51 percent to 45 percent — similar to his eight-point percentage . profit margin four years ago.”
In other words, quite a few Ohio voters believe that Trump and Vance have lied to them about developments in their own state, attacking their neighbors and dividing a local community to advance their political interests.
But those same voters still decided to vote for the people who lied to them.
The more Trump and his allies see this, the greater the incentive they will feel to keep lying, confident that they will not pay a price for the public deception.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
