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For our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, who spent 23 years with The BBC, and 41 years in journalism (when he was trained to use simple language, avoiding jargon), political stories have always been central, so now he looks with fascination at the continued fall out today over the US TV election debate where Donald Trump said immigrants were ‘eating pets’.
Next to the cliché ‘witch hunt’ can now be added ‘immigrants eat pets’, on the list of crazy things said by Donald Trump.
The Democrat Presidential nominee Kamala Harris could be seen laughing when Mr Trump stated this on the TV debate, and declared: “Talk about extreme”.
But to the supporters of Mr Trump, this is all part and parcel of the man.
For example in Pennsylvania Pat Gilluli said: “He’s a lunatic (but) you have to either accept him as that and (accept) that he’s a good businessman and I believe he can run the country better than Democrats can, but there are certain things that come along with him”.
So when Mr Trump proclaims: “In Springfield (Ohio), they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats… they’re eating the pets of the people that live there”, it is the acceptable face of lunacy because he is a good businessman.
Almost immediately the comment was lampooned on Facebook (FB).
in a ‘song’ about it, one man performed the lyric: “Please don’t eat my cats. Why would you do that? Eat something else”, and he then offered a ‘catalogue’ of other things to eat.
Even the Pope has weighed in to the election, which is due in November, and called Ms Harris a ‘child-killer’ because of her views on abortion, as well as dubbing Mr Trump’s attitude to immigrants a “grave sin”.
In an extraordinary intervention Pope Francis said: “Both are against life, be it the one that kicks out migrants, or the one that kills children”.
Needless to say the Democrats have made hay with Mr Trump’s comment.
Soon after it was mentioned, they put out on social media a mocked-up picture of a man standing at a bar with an array of cats in cardboard trays before him.
At a campaign event in Michigan by the Vice-President Democrat nominee Tim Waltz, the crowd chanted: “we’re not eating cats”, instead of Ms Harris’s campaign phrase “we’re not going back”.
David Muir, the co-moderator of the television debate where Mr Trump uttered these immortal words, replied that, according to Springfield’s city manager, there were NO credible reports of pet-eating.
The former president’s claim must have struck many viewers as bizarre, but lots of Mr Trump’s fans were primed for it: the allegation had been circulating in right-wing groups on social media, boosted by Elon Musk.
On September 9, Mr Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, amplified these claims by posting on X that Springfielders were having their “pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country”.
Mr Musk posted a video of one such resident, who claimed that immigrants were stealing ducks from parks and eating them.
The official account representing the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee (HJC) posted an AI-generated image of Mr Trump with his arms around a duck and a kitten.
The cat and dog-eating allegation seems to stem from a Springfield Facebook (FB) post which cited fourth-hand knowledge, with the repeating of it by Mr Trump making headlines across the world.
Some conflated it with an incident that occurred 175 miles away: in August a woman born in Ohio was charged with animal cruelty for killing a cat, but the Springfield police said they had received no reports of pets being stolen or eaten.
People in the media believe that it is also possible that the ‘information’ came from one of Mr Trump’s high-profile supporters – Laura Loomer.
As the Sunday Times (ST) put it yesterday: “It seems likely that his (Mr Trump’s) riff about Haitians eating pets, which derailed a section of the debate on immigration that might have damaged Harris, came from Loomer”
But Ms Loomer has a questionable background. She wrote on X (describing it as a ‘joke’): “If @KamalaHarris wins, the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated by a call center…”.
Controversial billionaires like Mr Musk are also among Mr Trump’s backers, as well as smaller businesses as represented by Mr Gilluli, and they don’t seem to have been put off by what they heard.
As an insult, Mr Musk offered to have Taylor Swift’s baby when she endorsed Ms Harris.
Yet, sad to say, Mr Trump’s extraordinary comment falls into a familiar pattern after what he has said and done.
He has proclaimed (along with his supporters) that his latest appearance in a court room was all part of a “witch-hunt” against him.
Mr Trump was convicted of falsifying business records over payments made to the porn actress Stormy Daniels to cover up their alleged affair. Apart from calling the proceedings a “witch-hunt”, Mr Trump described the judge as a “disgrace” for refusing his legal team’s application that this was all a mistrial.
But this was FAR from being the first time he has wielded this cliché.
The judge in another of his many cases, Arthur Engoron, ruled that Mr Trump had:
- Overvalued his Florida home Mar-a-Lago by 2,300 per cent in one financial statement.
- Overvalued his Penthouse at Trump Tower in New York by claiming that it was three times its actual size.
- “Absurdly” argued that calculating the area of the Penthouse was subjective, with the judge saying that “a discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud”.
Yet, of course, Mr Trump (who retains a core of backers in swing-states) said the case was another political “witch hunt” brought by a prosecutor who was ‘biased’ against him, and he accused the judge of being “highly politicised” (as though he ISN’T!).
In the bi-partisan House of Representatives (HoR) investigation into the riot which is at the centre of another of his legal problems, it was revealed that Mr Trump had engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy”, but he attacked the results of their 18-month long inquiry, by saying on his social media platform: “The highly partisan Unselect Committee Report purposely fails to mention the failure of Pelosi to heed my recommendation for troops to be used in DC, show the “Peacefully and Patrioticly” words I used, or study the reason for the protest, Election Fraud. WITCH HUNT!”.
Use of this term, however, may raise eye brows with the background evident to what happened. The committee report into the rampage, was based on interviews with more than 1,000 witnesses, it followed 10 hearings and resulted in millions of pages of documents.
The politicians who wrote it, concluded that the evidence “has led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed. None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him”.
He demanded all the legal cases against him be dismissed (the one about him storing top secret documents on the ballroom stage at his huge home in Florida was thrown out by a judge appointed during HIS administration!).
The tired phrase of ‘witch hunt’ was heard in abundance among his faithful supporters, as Mr Trump was officially crowned the Republican nomination, and he named Mr Vance as his running mate (who has also used it).
I don’t think we’ll see the phrase ‘immigrants eat pets’, alongside ones saying ‘witch hunt’ on placards supporting Mr Trump.
But you never know…
The memories of Phil’s decades long award-winning career in journalism (when words were always chosen carefully and political stories were often covered) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disease Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now.
Tomorrow – news that dozens of people have been charged in connection with riots in Cardiff last year, has highlighted inaccurate comments by the controversial former public monitor of South Wales Police (SWP) who was paid over £86,000 a year in taxpayers’ money.
