Opinion | Trump Knows What He’s Doing in Springfield. So Does Vance.

Where once Donald Trump attracted only the right-wing fringe of American politics, now he leads it. Where once he kept some distance from agitators and provocateurs like Laura Loomer, now they’re at the center of his campaign. And where once he merely inspired extremists to act, now he points them directly at the objects of his rage.

Take Springfield, Ohio, where schools, colleges and municipal buildings have been shut down and community events canceled owing to bomb threats targeting the city’s Haitian community. Those threats come as Trump — and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio — smear the Haitians of Springfield with the lie that they’re stealing and eating the pets of presumably native-born Americans. Vance, who was ostensibly elected to represent and aid the people of towns like Springfield, has been even more vicious than his boss, spreading the additional lie that Haitians have carried disease and disorder to Ohio.

Despite pleas from both the Republican mayor of Springfield and the Republican governor of Ohio, who called the story of the attacks on pets “a piece of garbage that was simply not true,” neither Trump nor Vance is willing to end the rhetorical assault on the city’s Haitian immigrants. If anything, they’re unapologetic.

During a rally in Tucson, Ariz., on Thursday, for example, Trump expanded the lie even further. “Twenty thousand illegal Haitian immigrants have descended on a town of 58,000 people, destroying their way of life,” Trump said. “Residents are reporting that the migrants are walking off with the town’s geese. They’re taking the geese. You know where the geese are, in the park. And even walking off with their pets.”

When asked about the bomb threats, he dodged the question. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” Trump said. “I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants and that’s a terrible thing that happened. Springfield was this beautiful town and now they’re going through hell.”

The hell, of course, is of his own making.

As for Vance, who spearheaded this smear campaign when he amplified the claim on social media, he confessed to elevating rumors and lies to prove a political point. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” Vance said on Sunday, “then that’s what I’m going to do.”

A more self-aware person would see that “the suffering of the American people” includes all of the people of Springfield, who are facing the ugly consequences of Trump’s decision to make them a prop for his campaign. To him, their day-to-day lives are worth less than their symbolic value. This is why Trump wants to visit — it’s his chance to fan the flames, as well as fuel the fire for his own purposes.

There’s something familiar in the spectacle of a caravan of far-right agitators descending on a small city to weaponize the tensions that surround inclusion, belonging and identity.

Seven years ago, a group of white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Va., under the banner of “Unite the Right.” On their first night, they held a torchlight rally on the front steps of the Rotunda at the University of Virginia, where they chanted slogans such as “You will not replace us.” The next day, an even larger group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis rioted throughout the city’s downtown. One of them drove a Dodge Challenger through a group of counterprotesters, killing a young activist, Heather Heyer, and injuring several other demonstrators.

In the wake of the attacks in Charlottesville, Trump gave three separate sets of remarks. In the first, he criticized “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides,” a formulation that earned the scorn of Democrats and Republicans alike, who condemned it as an equivocating attempt to avoid the reality that the hatred, bigotry and violence on display in Charlottesville was perpetrated by one side — and one side only. Facing up to this backlash, Trump gave another set of remarks in which he condemned the Unite the Right marchers. He followed up with an impromptu news conference at Trump Tower, where he made his infamous claim that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the incident. Although Trump now insists that he did nothing wrong with regard to the march and the violence, it was clear at the time that his response was an abdication of presidential duty.

“These people love me. These are my people,” Trump said in a phone call to Paul Ryan after his initial remarks. “I can’t backstab the people who support me.”

In spite of Trump’s own words, you could — if you were feeling generous — make some distinction at the time between the former president and those who marched on Charlottesville. Trump did not publicly claim them, nor did he adopt their rhetoric, even if the connection between his rise and their boldness was clear and unmistakable.

Today, if you were to place the rhetoric of Unite the Right side by side with that of Trump’s 2024 campaign, you would struggle to find a difference. Echoing the chants of “blood and soil” we heard in Charlottesville, the former president now tells audiences that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He calls his foes “vermin” and warns that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”

The reason Unite the Right marchers were screaming the slogan “you will not replace us” (and, intermittently, “Jews will not replace us”) was their devotion to the idea of the so-called great replacement, the once-fringe conspiracy theory that liberals and their allies are importing immigrants into the United States to replace the white population. Now something like this is part of the Republican mainstream; Vance told Ohio voters two years ago, during his campaign for Senate, that President Biden had opened the border, “with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” His tirades against Haitian immigrants are simply more of the same.

For the Trump campaign to descend on Springfield would be to recapitulate the dynamic that led to the events in Charlottesville. The difference, of course, is that then Trump was several places removed from the extremists who led the effort to “Unite the Right.” Now he’s the standard-bearer.

It is important to say that if presidential campaigns are a glimpse into presidential governance, then the Trump campaign’s anti-Haitian agitation is a clear glimpse into how President Trump would behave and govern in a second term. One can imagine Trump spreading Springfield-esque lies from the Oval Office directly to the American public. One can imagine a Vice President Vance touring cities with new immigrant populations, attacking them with the same smears he’s used to target the Haitian community of Springfield, spreading hate so that the public will accept the mass deportation of millions of immigrants. Trump, in fact, has already promised to start mass deportations in Springfield. “We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” Trump said on Friday. “And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora.”

Trump did not have a successful presidency. He failed to manage the pandemic. His permissive attitude toward authoritarian regimes emboldened figures like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. His appointments to the federal judiciary left the basic rights of millions of people in shambles. His contempt for ordinary decency coarsened and corroded American civic life. He left both the nation and the world in worse shape. But for all of his failures as chief executive, Trump was an able rabble-rouser. He has a genuine talent for exploiting the worst passions of ordinary people. And Vance, his junior partner in that regard, appears to be a quick study.

I have little doubt that, given real power, Trump and Vance will fail as leaders. But that doesn’t mean they won’t succeed as demagogues.

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