Former President Donald Trump was confronted in a Fox News interview on Sunday about his repeated lies about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.
“Media Buzz” host Howard Kurtz asked the ex-president why he would not acknowledge that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio were not “eating the pets of the people who live there,” as he suggested in a September debate.
“I don’t know if it’s true or not,” Trump responded. “What about the geese?”
‘What happened to the geese there? What happened there? They are all missing,” Trump said. “I have no idea, I said something, the big problem is you can’t put 30,000 people in a town or city of 50,000 people and expect that town to even survive or do well.”
Fox host: You said, “They eat the dogs, they eat the cats.” That turned out not to be true
Trump: I don’t know if it’s true or not
Fox Host: Don’t you know? It has been debunked
Trump: What about the goose, the geese? What about the geese? What happened there? I have… pic.twitter.com/hgcw6WLdhS
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 20, 2024
The lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio eat local pets was amplified in the Trump campaign by Trump’s running mate JD Vance. He has refused to part with the story, even though it has been debunked by local police and the city’s mayor. Vance has gone on to say that he was “creating a narrative” to address the larger problem.
Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, centered on a promise of mass deportation, continues. At a town hall on Wednesday, the ex-president again claimed that Haitians were “also eating other things that they weren’t supposed to.”
Trump defended those comments on Sunday, saying he was still not convinced his initial claims were untrue.
“I don’t think it’s been debunked at all. I don’t think anyone is talking about it except you,” he told Kurtz.
