I posted a joking spoof of Trump’s outrageous lie that illegal Haitians in Springfield, Ohio were eating (White) people’s pets. I was called out on this over Facebook, on grounds that I was escalating Trump’s lies into the public domain, that responding to lies only ‘perpetuates the myth’. After all, this plays right into J.D.Vance’s admitted strategy that it’s OK for Trump to invent any falsehood, as long as it emphasizes his point. By mocking those lies, you focus attention on the point about illegal, horrible, black Haitians invading America.
So what’s the alternative? The most obvious reply is no reply: ignore it and hope it goes away. I would argue that this tactic doesn’t work with Trump’s lies. He will continue to hammer them home on the assumption that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes truth. If the media ignore those everyday repetitions, it becomes an accepted truth that Haitians are eating pets. Trump made the statement to millions of viewers on the televised debate, and Vance has spread it virally to the Trump online echo-chamber. At some point someone is going to have to stand up and say “That’s a lie.”
So the second option is the fact-checking and logical rebuttal. Over the past 8 years, this has not worked with Trump’s 30,000 lies, or whatever the going number is. A logical discussion falls on deaf ears, and even gives the Trumpies the opportunity to raise counter-arguments — usually more and bigger lies. Think of his Covid lies, his anti-vaccine lies, his climate-change hoax lies, etc., going right back to his Obama ‘birther’ lies. You can’t just refute these with the facts.
No, the only way to shut him up or shut him down is to mock him. After a couple of weeks of Haitian cat jokes, you don’t hear him pushing that issue any more. The thing Trump hates most is to be laughed at. The Haitian cat joke takes the issue beyond the realm of rational argument or fact-checking. Rather, cat-eating becomes so ridiculously false that only the craziest Trump radicals can give it any credence.
Suppose that tomorrow, Trump claims to millions of Americans that Harris has hired green Martians to land on Earth to take away all guns. If you try to ignore this, he will keep repeating and amplifying it until people start to fear the green Martians. If you push back that he has no evidence, he will manufacture new evidence, such as saying that their spaceships have been sighted. The issue enters into the public debate as something that could conceivably be true. But if the public laughs at such a ridiculous and impossible lie with a host of internet jokes, Trump would shut up on the issue, as his ego would be under attack.
Trump has said that he will visit Springfield, Ohio, in the next couple of weeks. It will be interesting to see whether he sees this through, or whether he quietly lets the matter drop. I’m guessing the latter, since a visit to Springfield would only raise more derision and humiliation. But with Trump, you never know just how far he will push an obvious lie.
After more than eight years of Trump’s many lies, it appears that mocking him is the only way to shut him up.