By the time the Arizona Republican Party’s digital billboards urging Phoenix residents to “EAT LESS KITTENS” and “VOTE Republican!” went online on Tuesday, the narrative they referenced had been largely debunked.
The week before, claims began circulating on social media that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating cats. None of the reports were substantiated, and local officials in Springfield—a small city where public services have been strained in recent years by a large influx of Haitian migrants—said they had seen no evidence that any of the reports were true. Major conservative media outlets had given the story only cursory coverage.
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But while the story has so far proven unbelievable, it has proven itself amenable to memeing, giving it a life that extends far beyond the right-wing internet.
For days, images and videos of former President Donald Trump and cats have been appearing online, tongue-in-cheek and in understanding support of Trump’s tough immigration message. Their exaggerated imagery gives them the feel of an inside joke. The implication that they’re a “joke” is enough to draw in political figures who might otherwise hesitate to spread debunked material. Reality is beside the point.
Memes have been a fixture, if enigmatic, feature of American politics since the dawn of social media. But the first months of the Trump-Harris race have put a twist on this familiar phenomenon: More than once, memes largely or completely unrelated to actual events have spilled over from the internet into the three-dimensional reality of the campaign itself.
They are now on billboards in Arizona and, most importantly, were on the debate stage Tuesday night, where Trump exclaimed, “The people on TV are saying their dog got eaten by the people who went there!”
The attention was unwelcome in Springfield, where tensions over immigration have flared since an 11-year-old boy was killed last year when a Haitian immigrant with no valid driver’s license crashed his minivan into a school bus. White supremacists have rallied in the city and condemned immigrants at local public rallies. Several public buildings, including a school and City Hall, were evacuated Thursday after bomb threats. At a City Council meeting on Tuesday, the boy’s father, Nathan Clark, called Trump and J.D. Vance, his running mate and Ohio’s junior senator, “morally bankrupt” for using his son’s death for “political gain.”
Some Republicans question whether the attention on Springfield is actually to Trump’s advantage.
“The GOP is getting distracted by these stories that are just not true,” said conservative commentator Erick Erickson, who argued that the panic over pets obscured more substantive discussions about immigration. “You could have had actual conversations about what was happening,” he said of the debate. “The problem wasn’t that people were eating pets.”
Yet Trump’s politics have long been deeply entwined with meme culture, and he and his allies have eagerly embraced Springfield memes to push one of his central campaign themes, immigration, into the center of campaign coverage.
“It is, of course, possible that all of these rumors turn out to be untrue,” Vance, who was among the first prominent figures to amplify the rumors last week, wrote in the first of a pair of X posts Tuesday night. He went on to voice broader complaints about the impact of immigration on Springfield and highlight Vice President Kamala Harris’s past support for granting asylum to Haitian migrants.
“In short, don’t let the crybabies in the media scare you, fellow patriots,” he wrote. “Keep the cat memes flowing.”
And so it is. Most of them are images and videos with the insidious, creepy sheen of artificial intelligence image-generating programs. Some are outright racist, like the one of Trump with a kitten under each arm, running from a pair of shirtless black men. Others verge on the absurd, like the photo of the former president in the cabin of a private jet packed to the rafters with kittens and ducks. (There have also been unsubstantiated reports of waterfowl being shot in Springfield.)
The kittens have spread across the social media feeds of conservative influencers, state Republican parties, Republican-led congressional committees, and Trump himself. In a Truth Social post hours before he took the stage in Tuesday night’s debate with Harris, the former president uploaded an AI image of a platoon of cats in tactical gear and MAGA hats, holding military-style rifles.
For years, meme politics of this sort have been a more natural fit for Republicans than for Democrats. Trump’s 2016 campaign’s mix of right-wing politics, trolling, and taboo-breaking transgressions played perfectly with the discontent and playful instincts of the internet’s wilder fringes.
“We love our meme makers,” Alex Bruesewitz, a Trump campaign adviser, said in a statement. “Meme makers are truth tellers, unlike the liberal mainstream media, and the left can’t make memes.”
But Democrats have begun to close the meme gap this year, helped by the enthusiasm and improvisation that has marked Harris’ candidacy. The vice president emerged nominated amid a flurry of “brat” and “coconut” memes, which attempted to reframe her often stiff malapropisms as evidence of a free-spirited sensibility on par with the internet itself.
And they too have helped memes grow beyond internet jokes, blurring the lines between satire and disinformation.
Within minutes of Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate on July 15, an anonymous account on X claimed that Vance’s book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” contained a passage in which he describes having sex with a couch. The joke — which the X account had obliquely identified as a joke from the start — quickly and explosively went viral, so quickly that its creator quickly made the post private. But the meme was quickly embraced by Harris’ campaign.
“JD Vance does not hide his hatred of women,” a message was posted on the campaign’s official X account later that month.
In his first rally speech as Harris’s running mate in August, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz told a crowd in Philadelphia that he couldn’t wait to debate Vance — “if he’s willing to get off the bench and show up.” As the crowd laughed, Walz added with a wink, “See what I did there?”
The bank’s status as a satirical meme would have made it easier for the kind of Democratic politicians who fiercely condemn disinformation campaigns to repeat it. The meme’s virality propelled it into the political conversation — a status cemented by an Associated Press story debunking the joke, which the press service later retracted.
At a party hosted by young Democratic influencers during the Democratic National Party Convention, guests took selfies on a couch next to a faux bronze statue of a sullen-looking Vance.
Yet Republicans’ and Democrats’ embrace of meme politics remains asymmetrical, much like the memes themselves. Thursday’s bomb threats in Springfield underscored the dark context of AI kittens, as did Clark’s plea for “hateful people” to “leave us alone.”
“The last thing we need is for the worst day of our lives to be forced upon us continuously and violently,” he said at Tuesday’s meeting.
Walz dropped the bank joke from his speeches after he first spoke about it in Philadelphia. Trump, on the other hand, posted five Springfield cat memes in an hour on his Truth Social account on Thursday.
Jeff Giesea, an entrepreneur who was part of Trump’s online movement during the 2016 election and who has written about the geopolitical implications of memes for NATO, has argued that the role memes play in Democratic and Republican politics highlights the two parties’ very different relationships with the informational Wild West of social media — a difference shaped by Trump himself.
“I don’t think anyone believes that Harris thinks J.D. Vance is actually having sex with banks,” said Giesea, who eventually grew to dislike Trump and now supports Harris. “But Trump, ironically, can’t tell the difference between fake news and reality.”
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