J.D. Vance’s Pet Memes Request Comes Back to Bite Trump After Debate

J.D. Vance invited the internet Tuesday to “keep the cat memes flowing,” hoping to spread cartoonishly racist rumors that Haitian immigrants in Ohio had begun eating house pets (which even he acknowledged were probably untrue).

Donald Trump would later go on television that night and make an impassioned—and entirely nonsensical—plea to the American people to buy into the xenophobic smears.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in! They’re eating the cats! They’re eating … they’re eating the pets of the people who live there,” Trump cried, while Kamala Harris laughed at him.

Ultimately, there is little humor to be found in a presidential candidate spreading extremist right-wing lies that have already made targets of a group of extremely vulnerable people.

Still, Trump’s mindless parroting of these lies did lead to an onslaught of memes, but not the lame A.I.-generated ones that Vance had hoped for. On X, a veritable tidal wave of memes have emerged nailing Trump for just how stupid he sounded.

While many right-wing pundits are blaming ABC moderators for undermining Trump during the presidential debate, The Onion’s CEO Ben Collins pointed out in a post on X that Trump could do bad all by himself.

Comedian Kylie Brakeman wrote that Trump had originally made the outlandish claim in response to Harris’s claim that he was too outlandish.

At home across America, viewers of all species were disturbed by the president’s empathic delivery of patently unsubstantiated claims.

But some could acknowledge that maybe there was something different about Trump’s cadence as he unloaded his total garbage—maybe even musical?

There were actually a lot of Simpsons references, for some reason.

Most regrettably, some X users quickly moved to verify Trump’s claims. What they found was beyond disturbing.

At the bottom of this internet spiral, there are two simple truths. One, combating the lies of Trump and Vance requires facts, such as the official statements of local officials who insist that there are “no credible reports” to back up the Republican presidential ticket’s fantastical claims of migrants digging in on house pets.

And another point, that countering Trump’s blatant extremism requires an acknowledgment of just how ridiculous he has become.

“F you, Taylor Swift!” shouted Megyn Kelly, “and f all of the people who want to see these children have body parts chopped off.”

For those not fluent in Republican crazy-speak, Kelly’s meltdown was triggered by Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris the night before, barely one hour after Trump all but face-planted on the debate stage. Kelly was especially triggered by Swift highlighting her appreciation for vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s support of LGBTQ+ rights.

“So this woman is fine with his plan to take custody of the children from parents who won’t want them to chop off their body parts and put them in Minnesota courts’ custody so the body parts can be chopped off and they can be sterilized,” Kelly ranted, echoing Trump’s recent baseless lies about “transgender operations.”

Other Republicans seemed just as nervous about Swift’s endorsement. Vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance took a more cordial tone speaking with Fox News on Wednesday—but still felt the need to weigh in on the news. “I don’t think most Americans, whether they like her music or are fans of hers or not, are gonna be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who I think is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans.” (Perhaps the same could be said of Donald J. Trump.)

Other right-wing commentators, like Ben Shapiro, took another approach: making fun of Swifties. “Note: if you vote for a particular candidate because your favorite singer is doing so, please don’t vote. You are too stupid to vote,” wrote Shapiro on X. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, threatened to impregnate her.

Trump himself offered a vague threat to the singer, saying, “She’ll probably pay a price for it at the, uh, in the marketplace.”

They probably have a right to be concerned. As of Wednesday morning, at least 300,000 people clicked on Swift’s link to register to vote.

Remarkably negative reactions to Donald Trump’s performance during his first formal matchup against Vice President Kamala Harris have left conservatives reeling—and Trump panicking.

On Wednesday, the former president attempted to wiggle out of any further debates against Harris, claiming that he had actually beaten Harris and deserved to be acknowledged for the “K.O.”

“In the World of Boxing or UFC, when a Fighter gets beaten or knocked out, they get up and scream, ‘I DEMAND A REMATCH, I DEMAND A REMATCH!’” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Well, it’s no different with a Debate. She was beaten badly last night. Every Poll has us WINNING, in one case, 92-8, so why would I do a Rematch?”

Later, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Trump insisted that he didn’t believe he “had to do it a second time,” only to suggest that he could be open to following through on the two other debates slated to be hosted on NBC and Fox in the coming weeks.

(No polls have indicated that Trump would win by such a large margin. A CNN flash poll after the debate indicated that 63 percent of Americans felt that Harris outperformed Trump.)

Meanwhile, the Harris campaign was more than ready for a second face-off, inviting Trump to debate the former prosecutor again just hours after the debate ended.

“Under the bright lights, the American people got to see the choice they will face this fall at the ballot box: between moving forward with Kamala Harris, or going backwards with Trump,” Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement on Tuesday night. “That’s what they saw tonight and what they should see at a second debate in October. Vice President Harris is ready for a second debate. Is Donald Trump?”

Conservatives can’t accept the fact that Donald Trump struck out at Tuesday night’s presidential debate, so they are claiming the whole thing was rigged against him.

Several right-wing politicians and personalities are crying foul, following the lead of the former president and convicted felon himself.

Newsmax’s Greg Kelly thinks that because ABC News used a blue set and signs reading “We the People,” and the DNC also used that as a slogan in the 2020 election, the network was biased against Trump. (Never mind that those are the first three words in the Constitution and the debate was held at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center.)

Former Trump adviser turned far-right legal troll Stephen Miller thinks that ABC was “aggressively working to sabotage and undermine the legal process.”

Even early in the debate, some on the right thought it was fixed against Trump. Clay Travis, who should probably stick to sports, saw “rigged news.”

Several on the right complained about Harris’s earrings, alleging that they were secretly “smart audio” earrings allowing her to cheat in some way. In reality, Harris’s earrings are Tiffany jewelry, in a different design and color than the devices the right alleged she was wearing.

The Human Events blog, run by right-wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, claimed that Trump’s placement on the left side of the stage with the camera pointing down at him was “a classic filmmaking technique to make someone appear villainous.” What this is based on is unclear, especially as film techniques actually say the opposite: People and objects moving from left to right actually inspire positive feelings in the audience, and vice versa from right to left. 

In reality, right-wing figures are making these complaints because even they can’t deny the fact that Harris soundly defeated Trump in Tuesday night’s debate. So they have to come up with conspiracies and allegations of a rigged contest to somehow spin the reality that Trump lost on Tuesday night. Just like when Trump lost the 2020 election, they can’t accept the truth even when it’s quite obvious.

Will there be another presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump? The former president and his campaign don’t seem to be on the same page.

On CNN Wednesday morning, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the campaign, told Kasie Hunt that Trump “has already said that he is going to do three debates.” But minutes later, on Fox News, Trump told Fox & Friends that he wasn’t sure about another debate.

“I’d be less inclined to because we had a great night. We won the debate. We had a terrible, a terrible network,” Trump said.

Last month, Trump’s campaign team wasn’t on the same page with Harris’s team, with the latter claiming that the two campaigns had agreed to two presidential debates and one vice presidential debate. Trump’s team, on the other hand, said there was an additional Fox News debate and two vice presidential debates. As of right now, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether there will be another debate at all and if J.D. Vance will decide that he doesn’t want to debate Tim Walz on October 1.

Trump complained and hedged about whether he’d actually show up to Tuesday’s debate, so it’s not surprising for him to cast doubt on debating again, especially considering how badly it went for him. The former president and convicted felon has not been taking it well, lashing out at Fox News and threatening Taylor Swift after the pop star endorsed Harris following the debate Tuesday night. If he looks at the stock price for his media company, he’d probably get even more upset.

Donald Trump really did not like getting live fact-checked by ABC News during Tuesday night’s debate, so much so he wants the network shut down.

In a call to Fox & Friends Wednesday morning, Trump called the debate “rigged” and claimed that due to the moderators debunking his false statements, “it was a three-on-one.”

“So many things I said were debunked, totally debunked, like Charlottesville,” said Trump, referring to his infamous “very fine people” line referring to neo-Nazis. Trump went on to complain that as he was under the microscope during the “unfair” debate, “[Kamala Harris] could say anything she wanted.”

“They ought to take away their license for the way they did that,” said Trump, in a clear threat to ABC News.

Trump lied for a good portion of Tuesday night’s debate, and ABC News moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir occasionally tried to chime in with a correction.

For example, when Trump said Democrats, including vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, “execute” babies after they are born, Davis clarified, “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born.” And when Trump claimed, “They’re eating the pets,” referring to Haitian asylum-seekers in Ohio, Muir interjected that “there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.” As Trump sparred with Muir over the correction, Harris looked on with disbelief.

When asked by Fox News why Trump felt moderators hadn’t given the same treatment to Harris, Trump answered: “Because they’re dishonest.” Perhaps, instead, Harris didn’t have the gall to lie so flagrantly and frequently on the national stage.

Donald Trump’s debate coach was torn to shreds online following the Republican presidential candidate’s disastrous performance, with critics online wondering who set the MAGA leader up for failure.

The woman behind the curtain was one of Kamala Harris’s 2020 Democratic primary opponents: former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who informally coached Trump for roughly a month before his first matchup against the vice president. But shortly after the debate concluded, commenters online ripped Gabbard apart for failing to adequately prepare Trump for his showdown against a former prosecutor.

“Shout out to Tulsi Gabbard for her brilliant debate prep—and to RFK Jr, for lending Trump his brain worm,” wrote one X user. “Well done you two!!!”

Another online critic sneered that Gabbard’s “career as a debate coach didn’t even last a whole Scaramucci,” referring to former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who famously lasted just 10 days in Trump’s White House.

Democrats also joined in on the fun, with one Harris staffer writing that “on behalf of Democrats everywhere, I’d like to thank Tulsi Gabbard for her hard work tonight.”

“Feel confident saying Trump got worked in that debate,” wrote former Obama staffer Tommy Vietor. “Prepping by holding ‘policy sessions’ with idiots like @mattgaetz and @TulsiGabbard was a fatal mistake. He looked angry, swallowed the bait every time, and his rants about eating animals and crowd size tanked in dials.”

Despite the fact that she likely has a one-way ticket off the Trump campaign, Gabbard was still working to salvage Trump’s performance in the aftermath of the debate, complaining on X that the debate was “three vs one,” with ABC News’s debate moderators “clearly shilling” for Harris. (In reality, ABC actually allowed Trump to speak for six minutes longer than his Democratic opponent over the duration of the debate.)*

* This article originally misstated how many extra minutes Trump got.

Donald Trump spent the twenty-third anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks accompanied by a far-right conspiracy theorist who previously claimed the attacks had been an inside job.

Laura Loomer, a self-described “pro-white nationalist” and “proud Islamophobe,” accompanied Trump and J.D. Vance Wednesday to the annual service at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, and then to a fire station in lower Manhattan to meet with New York firefighters and commemorate those who died in the 9/11 attacks.

But for Loomer, those deaths took on a special meaning, because she believes that the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans—or at least, that’s what she posted on X last year.

“On 9/10/01 , one day before 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld under the Bush administration said the US Government ‘lost’ $2.3 Trillion dollars. The very next day, 9/11/01, we were attacked,” Loomer wrote in a post in June 2023.

In addition to those killed on 9/11, another 6,781 people are believed to have died as of December from illnesses linked to exposure to Ground Zero in the days after the World Trade Center fell. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, an estimated 70,000 civilians were killed between 2001 and 2023 as a result of the U.S. military campaign.

It makes sense that Loomer kept close to Trump and his posse, because she’d already been hanging out with them on the plane ahead of Tuesday night’s presidential debate.

Loomer has hawked plenty of far-right conspiracy theories, including that Kamala Harris’s mother committed immigration fraud and that former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, who survived being shot in the head, was “brain dead.”

Loomer spent her time at Ground Zero Wednesday posting on X about how President Joe Biden “looked like death.”

The parents of a young boy who was killed in a bus accident Springfield, Ohio, were forced to beg Republican lawmakers to stop using their son’s death as a political tool against Haitian immigrants.

Last month, Aiden Clark was killed after a minivan went left of center, causing his school bus to crash into it and go off the road, flipping over. The minivan was driven by Hermanio Joseph, a Haitian immigrant in the country under temporary protected legal status. Joseph was sentenced to nine to 13.5 years in prison for the crash on charges of first-degree felony involuntary manslaughter and fourth-degree felony vehicular homicide.

In the last week, this incident has become part of an outcry from right-wing extremists elevating racist rumors that Haitian immigrants were wreaking havoc in Springfield and had started eating people’s pets to boot.

Aiden’s parents appeared at a Springfield City Commission meeting on Tuesday, where Aiden’s father, Nathan Clark, made a startling but powerful plea for lawmakers to stop speaking about their son.

“I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man,” Clark said. “I bet you never thought anyone would say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone.

“The last thing that we need is to have the worst day of our lives violently and constantly shoved in our faces, but even that’s not good enough for them. They take it one step further. They make it seem that our wonderful Aiden appreciates your hate, that we should follow their hate,” Clark said, according to the Springfield News-Sun.

Clark condemned statements from U.S Senate candidate Bernie Moreno and Texas Representative Chip Roy, as well as Ohio Senator J.D. Vance and former President Donald Trump. “They have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain,” said the grieving father.

“This needs to stop now. They can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants, the border crisis, and even untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members,” Clark said. “However, they are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio. I will listen to them one more time to hear their apologies.”

“To clear the air, my son Aiden Clark was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti,” Clark said, countering a claim from Vance’s extremist social media rant on Tuesday, where he’d written that “a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.”

“Did you know that one of the worst feelings in the world is to not be able to protect your child?” Clark continued. “Even worse, we can’t even protect his memory when he’s gone.”

Tuesday night’s first presidential matchup between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was a wake-up call for Americans—including some of Trump’s closest allies.

On Wednesday, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham had just one word to describe the MAGA leader’s performance: “disaster,” according to The Bulwark Podcast’s Tim Miller.

Speaking with reporters in the spin room following the debate, the conservative legislator lamented Trump’s lackluster answers, calling it a “missed opportunity” where Trump “had a chance to lay it all out.”

“[Harris] said, ‘We inherited a mess,’” Graham said. “I was yelling and screaming, ‘No you didn’t—you inherited low gas prices, a secure border, a vaccine for Covid, you inherited the biggest Mideast change of my lifetime, the Abraham accords, and now everything is to shit.’”

But Trump’s response wasn’t satisfactory, leaving Graham imagining the answer that he wished had entered Trump’s mind.

“What I was hoping for was: ‘When I left we had the most secure border in 40 years, mortgage rates were below 3 percent, gas was $1.87, the Abraham accords, energy independent, you screwed it all up,’” Graham said. He added that he had spoken with Trump to suggest that in future debates against Harris, he should “effectively prosecute what you had and where we’re at” with regard to the state of the country before and after Trump’s administration.

Other notable conservatives were feeling equally cynical about Trump’s performance. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie told ABC News that whoever had “prepared Donald Trump should be fired,” adding that the former president was “not good tonight at all.” Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume said that there was “no mistake” that Trump “had a bad night.”

“We just heard so many of the old grievances that we all know aren’t winners politically,” Hume said.