One of the remarkable features of the current presidential campaign is the degree to which President Trump has essentially won the argument about the southern border. Even President Biden and Vice President Harris are boasting about their supposed success in bringing down encounters there. All the more shocking, though, is the uproar in Ohio where GOP brass is stoking outrage over rumors that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating pets.

These allegations, our Novi Zhukovsky reported yesterday, gained traction after a conservative pundit, Charlie Kirk, claimed on Sunday in a widely shared post on X that residents of Springfield, Ohio, “are reporting that Haitians are eating their family pets, another gift of the Biden-Harris mass immigration replacement plan.” Mr. Kirk suggested that liberals will soon be lecturing Americans on why they need to be “sensitive to Haitian culture.” 

Mr. Kirk is alarmed that liberals might call for this to be accepted as the “new normal.” He suggests that “those” — presumably liberal — “idiots deserve to be condemned and mocked mercilessly. Save our pets. Secure our borders.” It turns out, though, that the Springfield, Ohio, police department says that it has received no complaints of pets being kidnapped or eaten by immigrants, Haitian or otherwise.

One anonymous user of Facebook accused Haitian immigrants of stealing and eating a neighbor’s lost cat, which was, the anonymous user wrote, found “hanging from a branch, like you’d do a deer for butchering,” and the migrants were “carving it up to eat.” The user added: “I’ve been told they are doing this to dogs” and, at a local park, with “ducks & geese.” The post, our Ms. Zhukovsky reports, has since received more than three million views.

The most shocking part, though, are reports the GOP brass — including Senators Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, and Cruz, and even the House Judiciary Committee — are citing online rumors as evidence of Biden-Harris’s failed immigration policy. The Sun-News newspaper at Springfield reports that no complaints of this kind of pet-stealing have reached the police blotter. The Times calls the reports “false.”

“Despicable,” is how these rumors are described by our contributing editor, Raymond Joseph, long-time proprietor of the Haiti-Observateur, and Haiti’s ambassador at Washington between  2005 and 2010. He says the pets story is reflective of a “desperate” last-ditch effort to “make the Biden administration — and also Kamala Harris — look bad.” They forget that Haitians vote, often as a bloc, in states like New York and Florida — and Ohio. 

We’ve long since lost our taste for affinity politics. The current presidential campaign, though, is tighter than a tick. Trump can claim success at the border and has the jobs and growth platform that would produce an economy in which legal immigrants could thrive and feel welcome. One would think that President Trump would want his backers to be courting Haitians, not accusing them of eating other people’s pets.