Early on in last night's presidential debate, former President Donald Trump was given opportunity after opportunity to hammer the Biden-Harris administration's unloved immigration policies. Instead, he claimed that immigrants are making off with people's beloved dogs and cats and dining on them. "They're eating—they're eating the pets of the people that live there," he said mirthlessly, possessing the earnest, dead-eyed conviction of someone who frequents websites like The Gateway Pundit and believes everything he reads uncritically. It happened multiple times last night, and judging from the post-debate polling and media framing, it was definitely not a winning strategy.
In retrospect, Trump's blizzard of conspiracy-fueled hallucinations should have been entirely expected given that notorious grifter and conspiracy-monger Laura Loomer was photographed getting off his plane in Philadelphia prior to the debate yesterday. It seems pretty clear what they spent their time in flight chatting about—the bizarre-even-by-their-standards right-wing hoax about Haitian immigrants in some place called Springfield, Ohio (cue The Simpsons jokes), stealing and eating dogs and cats from the locals. Trump's spiritual leader, Twitter/X owner Elon Musk, tweeted about it, as did vice presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio. It is, of course, all complete nonsense that has been disavowed by Springfield authorities.
You have to be a bit credulous and vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking to hear this claim and even briefly entertain the idea that it might be true. But unfortunately for all of us, this kind of hate-fueled algorithmia has more or less eaten the contemporary Republican Party whole. And Trump, for his part, seems completely unaware that his brain has been colonized with content produced by mendacious bottom-feeders using Elon Musk's Nazi monetization website to make a quick buck.
In Jonathan Hill's magisterial 2023 novel Wellness, about two Chicago parents struggling with ennui, longing, and trauma, the main character spends countless hours fruitlessly fighting on Facebook with his retired, radicalized father in Kansas, who joins Facebook and relieves his loneliness by joining a host of conspiracy-pushing groups. He falls for the 2014 hoax about the CDC buying and stacking millions of plastic coffins so they can use Ebola to cull the population, gets drawn into anti-vaxxer groups and fluoride-is-poisoning us pages, all of which offer him "stories of epiphanies and transformation having a kind of familiar Christian flair."
The joyless, friendless, gormless Trump is the perfect target for algorithm-driven conspiracy content. He lacks any interest in cross-checking claims against evidence. He is predisposed to think the very worst about immigrants, trans folks, racial and ethnic minorities, and Democrats. He reads headlines but not articles. He is infamously persuadable by the last person he talks to.
As Dannagal Young, the author of Wrong: How Media, Politics and Identity Drive Our Appetite For Misinformationargues, "We don't actually want the truth." Instead, people are drawn to conspiracies because what makes us "feel whole and safe is knowing that we are part of a community." Trump is part of a large community of people who loathe immigrants and Democrats, and the federal government, and so sharing what they believe to be dark, illicit, almost unspeakable truths with one another is both exhilarating and uplifting.
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The problem for Trump in going on national television and repeating bizarre talking points that are completely inscrutable to most people is very simply that he sounds insane. He takes a genuine frustration with the country's inability to competently administer the southern border and properly care for the people it takes in, and he throws it all away in favor of memetic hallucinations that are off-putting, and which call his basic wellness into question.
And his basic wellness very much should be in question. He is surrounded by an increasingly unhinged coterie of quacks, QAnon weirdos, anti-vaxxers, and various and sundry cranks who wouldn't have gotten within a thousand miles of power 20 years ago but who are now perched on the precipice of sweeping into Washington, D.C. and turning their Facebook-grandpa delusions into policy. He alternates between manic posting on his Truth Social site and ranting for hours to crowds of true believers about mass deportations and trans immigrants getting gender reassignment surgery in prison. He wasn't able to even pretend to be normal for 90 minutes in front of tens of millions of viewers.
This will almost certainly hurt him in the polling in the coming days. But it is extremely concerning that this brand of toxic, "red-pilled" trutherism has been moved to the mainstream of Republican discourse and thinking. This is the kind of madness that elected Republicans who actually know better (which is still most of them) are tolerating and cultivating while telling themselves that they can stop it from getting too far out of hand if Trump wins.
Vice President Kamala Harris did heroic work last night pushing back on these deranged lies and goading Trump into sounding unhinged for most of the debate. But the fact that at least 47 percent of the country is willing to vote for someone who can be taken in by such obvious hucksterism and make that person the single-most powerful individual on the face of the Earth is terrifying, and a polling bump for Harris should not comfort us or make us complacent about the scale of the threat that the MAGA movement poses to America's future.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
