Cowardly Ohio Governor Won’t Blame Trump or Vance for Bomb Threats

Despite openly refuting the Haitian migrant conspiracy that has plagued his state, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine still won’t come down on Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for their part in spreading the violent rhetoric.

After attempting to dodge a direct question on the issue during an interview Monday evening with CNN’s Pamela Brown, DeWine defended the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio—but wouldn’t combat the MAGA leaders.

“But my job, I think, is to reflect exactly what’s going on in Springfield,” DeWine said. “So, the mayor tells us and the chief of police tells us there’s been no evidence at all of anyone eating a dog or any Haitians doing any of that. These Haitians that are there are legal. They work very, very hard. I met this morning with a number of business people who employ these Haitians, and they tell me that they are really essential to them getting the job done.”

When pressed again by Brown to answer the question, DeWine finally fessed up that the town was facing “challenges,” but wouldn’t chalk up any of the blame for the city’s mass closures on the baseless allegations spewed by Trump and Vance.

“Look, I’m not here to place blame,” DeWine said. “I’m here to tell what we’re seeing on the ground. And look, there are challenges. We’ve got 15,000 extra people in a town of about 58,000.”

So far, the epicenter of the conspiracy theory—Springfield—has received at least 33 bomb threats since the top of the conservative ticket started pushing the idea that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets.

Springfield shut down two of its elementary schools Monday, while two local colleges switched to all virtual classes and activities. The city also canceled its annual CultureFest due to safety concerns.

The city saw even more closures last week. Springfield evacuated two elementary schools and closed a middle school on Friday after receiving information from the Springfield Police Division. The day before, several other schools and a significant portion of Springfield’s government facilities—including City Hall, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the Ohio License Bureau, the Springfield Academy of Excellence, and Fulton Elementary School—were shut down due to bomb threats.

On Sunday, Vance effectively admitted that the anti-immigration conspiracy was bogus.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance told CNN.

A new report by the World Justice Project, an international group that assesses the rule of law in different countries, includes some startling findings regarding the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Nearly half of Republican respondents, 46 percent, “said they would not accept election results as legitimate if the other party’s candidate won.” In addition, 14.2 percent said they would “take action to overturn election results,” though “the type of action—whether legal or illegal—was not specified in the survey question.”

The numbers were lower for Democrats: 27 percent said they would not accept the election results if the other party’s candidate won, and 10.6 percent said they would take action to overturn them.

Republican respondents expressed significantly less faith than Democrats in electoral processes, results, and authorities. They lacked confidence, for example, in the trustworthiness of election officials and the legitimacy of vote counts. On a few electoral issues, namely voting rights, Democratic respondents’ concerns tended to exceed those of Republicans.

Overall, the report—for which 1,046 U.S. households were interviewed just over a month before Joe Biden bowed out of the presidential race—found that around one-third of respondents would not accept the legitimacy of the upcoming election results if their candidate lost. Commenting on the report, the executive director of the World Justice Project, Elizabeth Andersen, told USA Today that the survey results seem “like a recipe for potential conflict in the aftermath of the election.”

Indeed, the findings about Republicans’ unwillingness to accept the 2024 election results, in particular, conjure grim memories of Trump’s efforts to overturn the last election, which culminated in the violence of January 6, 2021. And they’re hardly surprising, given Trump’s constant claims to his supporters, in this election cycle and throughout his political career, that electoral defeat is only possible in the event of foul play by his political opponents.

J.D. Vance published a lengthy screed Monday night blaming “out of control” Democratic rhetoric for the presence of a gunman on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property, while simultaneously downplaying his own racist extremism that has incited bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio.

Vance wrote a 1,200-word diatribe on X in which he attempted to pin the potential violence on Democratic rhetoric and the American media.

“Here is what we know so far: Kamala Harris has said that ‘Democracy is on the line’ in her race against President Trump,” Vance wrote. “The gunman agreed, and used the exact same phrase. He had a Kamala Harris bumper sticker on his truck.”

Vance’s claim that the gunman, Ryan Routh, was motivated by his Democratic politics doesn’t entirely fit with the man’s own statements. In January, Routh (who voted for Trump in 2016) advocated for a Republican ticket of Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy as a means to keep Trump out of the White House.

“How do you think the Democrats and their media allies would respond if a 19-time Republican donor tried to kill a Democratic official? It’s a question that answers itself. For years, Kamala Harris’s campaign surrogates have said things like ‘Trump has to be eliminated,’” Vance wrote.

Of course, Vance’s argument about Democratic rhetoric falls flat for, well, anyone who has ever listened to Trump speak. In the last five days alone, Trump also called Harris a “threat to democracy” and warned repeatedly that she would bring mass “destruction” if elected to the White House.

Unsurprisingly, Trump and his extremist rhetoric have been directly linked to multiple acts of violence going back to his first presidential campaign and his election in 2016, which prompted an anomalous rise in hate crimes across the country. The former president’s anti-immigrant “invasion” rhetoric was used by a mass shooter in El Paso, Texas, who killed 22 people in 2019.

Vance also complained about the way the recent attempt on Trump’s life had been portrayed by the media.

“NBC News called the attempted assassination a ‘golf club incident.’ The LA Times told us ‘Trump Targeted at Golf Club.’ The USA Today’s top of the fold headline is ‘Hope in America,’ and they published a preposterous letter to the editor arguing that Trump ‘brings these assassination attempts on himself,’” Vance wrote.

The Trump campaign had already published a list of their least favorite coverage yesterday, which included these points, citing specific journalists they felt had inaccurately covered the near-attempt on Trump’s life.

Vance also refused to take any responsibility for inciting the 33 bomb threats that have created chaos in Springfield, a town he brought into the national spotlight when he falsely claimed Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets there.

“The double-standard is breathtaking,” Vance wrote. One can’t help but agree.

“Donald Trump and I are, by their account, directly responsible for bomb threats from foreign countries. Why? Because we had the audacity to repeat what residents told us about the problems in their town. Meanwhile, Harris allies call for Trump to be eliminated as the media publishes arguments that he deserved to be shot,” Vance wrote.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine said that Springfield has received at least 33 bomb threats since last week, when Vance took up the task of helping his constituents by spreading disinformation. His newest screed was no exception.

Vance continued to claim that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield were “illegal” even though they are not. Vance also continued to claim there have been “rising rates of disease” and an “HIV uptick” as a result of the city’s new Haitian residents. The Clark County Combined Health District Commissioner Chris Cook said Friday that Vance’s claims that cases of HIV and tuberculosis had risen were completely false.

“Overall, we have not seen a substantial increase in all reportable communicable diseases,” Cook said, according to NBC News. “In fact, if you look at all reportable communicable diseases together (minus Covid) for the year ending 2023, you will see that we are at our lowest rate in Clark County since 2016.”

But to Vance, whether or not Haitian immigrants are spreading disease or eating their neighbors’ pets isn’t a matter of fact; it’s a matter of opinion.

“It is one thing to say that pets are not, in fact being eaten, and another thing to say that anyone who disagrees is trying to murder people. Dissent, even vigorous dissent, is a great tradition of the United States. Censorship is not,” Vance said.

For someone writing ad nauseam, Vance seemed strangely concerned with the threat of being censored. He then conflated the spread of disinformation with simply sharing his opinion.

“Their next move with these stories is censorship. In Springfield, a psychopath (or a foreign government) calls in a bomb threat, so they blame that on President Trump (and me). The threat of violence is disgraceful of course, yet the media seems to relish it. They cover a bomb threat, but not the rise in murders. They cover the threat, but not the HIV uptick. They cover the threat, not the schools overwhelmed with new kids who don’t speak English.”

“The message is always the same: Don’t you dare express an opinion on the public affairs of your nation. The message is: Shut up,” Vance said.

Vance then encouraged his supporters to say whatever they want, true or untrue, dangerous or not. “I’m asking all of us to reject censorship. Reject the idea that you can control what other people think and say,” he wrote after whining for 1,100 words about trying to control what Democrats or the media say.

“Embrace persuasion of your fellow citizens over silencing them—either through the powers of Big Tech or through moral blackmail,” Vance wrote. “I think this will make our public debate much better.”

Taking things to their logical extreme, Vance concluded, “The reason is simple. The logic of censorship leads directly to one place, for there is only one way to permanently silence a human being: put a bullet in his brain.”

A Trump-appointed judge upended labor law Tuesday in granting an injunction in favor of a company arguing that the National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional.

Judge Mark Pittman in Texas issued the injunction for Findhelp, a tech company headquartered in Austin accused of unfair labor practices. The NLRB is a federal government agency that enforces labor law practices as well as collective bargaining.

The preliminary injunction cites the recent Supreme Court decision in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, which weakened federal regulatory agencies. Findhelp argued that the NLRB’s judge system, which hears cases, violates the separation of powers, and Pittman agreed in granting the injunction. This does not bode well for the NLRB, and signals a long legal fight between big business and unions, divided along ideological lines between conservatives and liberals. The case could go all the way to the Supreme Court, where it would meet a pro-business majority handpicked by Donald Trump himself.

Conservatives and their corporate allies have been attacking the NLRB for quite some time, with Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s all mounting legal cases against the agency in an attempt to destroy it. Trump’s time as president was four years of pro-business practices, appointing corporate-aligned attorneys to the Department of Labor and weakening laws that would have expanded worker pay and strengthened unions.

Donald Trump is back on the crypto grind, even though he doesn’t seem to understand it.

On Monday, the Republican presidential nominee used the buzz of his campaign to formally announce a cryptocurrency project that he and his sons have been teasing since August: World Liberty Financial.

The decentralized finance, or DeFi, project has been likened to a get-rich-quick scheme for the former president should he retake the White House in November. But when asked directly about it on Monday, Trump seemed to lack for details—not just on World Liberty Financial but also on what cryptocurrency is in general.

“Why is it so important for America to lead in cryptocurrency adoption and innovation?” asked an audience member on the far-right streaming network Real America’s Voice.

“It’s A.I., it’s so many other things. You know, A.I., speaking of an interest in future, it needs tremendous electricity capability beyond anything I’ve ever heard,” Trump started. “If you take all the electricity coming out of the U.S., in order to have it to be dominant in A.I. you need twice that amount. Just for this one thing. Who would make that? You need twice the electricity we already have.

“China is already building electric plants,” he continued, completely dodging the question. “They want to build them for the A.I., and it’s very important, but you need tremendous electric—and in this country, because of our strong environmental impact statement problems that we have, you know, China doesn’t have those problems.”

Trump allies have decried the slow rollout of World Liberty Financial as a “mistake.” The DeFi project, spearheaded by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, has ushered in an onslaught of misinformation. Fraudsters have relentlessly attacked it, compromising the social media accounts of Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump and Tiffany Trump, and sending supporters to fake websites with inaccurate details about the platform.

False Telegram channels posing as the official World Liberty Financial channel have also drawn thousands of users to a host of misinformation, thwarted only by the Trump brothers’ loose warnings not to click on unaffiliated links and avoid scams.

Trump has increasingly tried to frame himself as a pro-crypto candidate in this election cycle. At a bitcoin conference in Nashville in July, Trump promised to build out a “strategic national bitcoin reserve” if elected, according to CoinDesk. But the former president’s recent investments would show that his change of heart on the digital assets isn’t all an act. Financial disclosures released in August show that Trump has $7.15 million coming from a source labeled NFT INT., likely referring to his NFT series. He’s also kept a stockpile of cash in the new-wave currencies, with the disclosure listing roughly $5 million in crypto.

MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert thinks she knows someone who can get her answers about the assassination attempts on Donald Trump: failing social media executive, and right-wing extremist shill, Elon Musk.

She suggested bringing Musk into the federal fold during an interview on Newsmax Monday evening.

“Do you have confidence that the Secret Service can keep Donald Trump safe?” asked the host.

“I am a member of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, and I do not have any such confidence,” replied Boebert.

“We had Director [Kimberly] Cheatle in the day before she resigned. She refused to answer any of our questions. She lied before us, you know, or just simply acted like she didn’t have the answers, and only the FBI did, when she absolutely saw the details that we were requesting from her. And we have not seen any accountability since.

“Now,” said Boebert, “President Trump says that he’s going to create a commission when he’s president, a Commission to Oversee the Federal Government, hold them accountable, whether it’s for their spending or their actions, and have, possibly, Elon Musk as the director of this commission.

“You know, we used to call this Congress, but unfortunately, the agencies that Congress has allocated taxpayer money to and has authorized to exist refuses to answer to us.”

“I do not have confidence in the leadership of the Secret Service,” Boebert said, noting that she also didn’t trust Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Boebert, a democratically elected official, is seemingly hopeful that Musk’s commission can serve as a replacement for one of the essential branches of government and improve the state’s ability to keep its authoritarian head safe.

In the aftermath of the arrest of a gunman at Mar-a-Lago Sunday, Musk issued an alarming tweet questioning why Trump had been targeted by violence but there had been no such attempt against Vice President Kamala Harris. He later said it was a joke.

Donald Trump has already found a new town to harass with racist claims that immigrants have overrun it, and it’s in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.

At a rally in Tucson, Arizona, last week, Trump railed about immigrants in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, which he said had “experienced a 2,000 percent increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris.”

“So Pennsylvania, remember this when you have to go to vote,” Trump said.

“It’s a small town, all of a sudden they got thousands of people!” he continued. “The schools are scrambling to hire translators for the influx of students who don’t speak not a word of English, costing local taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.” 

The former president also claimed that the town had been rendered “virtually bankrupt” and that the increased immigrant population had led to an increase in crime.

Like with Springfield, local officials have had to come forward to combat the former president’s fearmongering. The borough manager of Charleroi, Joe Manning, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that many of the president’s claims about the town were blatantly untrue.

Manning said that the town’s Haitian residents were “not the burden on the local government or any of our resources or anything that’s being portrayed.”

“It’s no different than, you know, people moved to here from Tucson, Arizona, you’d have to deal with it,” Manning said.

While Charleroi’s population had increased by 2,000 percent as a result of immigration, that number was relative, Manning explained, because the town’s population had been so small. Charleroi had a population of 4,324 in 2022, according to the most recent census estimates.

Charleroi Area School District Superintendent Ed Zelich said that immigrant students were “not necessarily” costing taxpayers “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” as Trump had claimed. As enrollment rose, so did the reimbursement from the state’s Department of Education, he explained—but the new classmates didn’t present that much of a strain.  

“We have that in place. We have teachers in place,” Zelich told the Inquirer. “There was a language barrier at first for the younger students when they come, but it’s not insurmountable.”

“I just want to say there’s a cost associated with all parts of education,” Zelich added. “But these students are blending into classrooms.”

Charleroi Borough President Kristin R. Hopkins released a statement on behalf of the borough, expressing “deep concern” over Trump’s comments about the town. 

“Trump chose to exploit our town for political purposes, using divisive rhetoric to unfairly target the Haitian immigrant community,” Hopkins wrote. 

“Rather than acknowledging the real economic issues the town is facing, some have chosen to unfairly target the Haitian community, judging the entire group based on misinformation and fear of outsiders.”

Hopkins’s statement sparked considerable backlash from the Republican Party of Washington County and City Council Member Larry Celaschi, who said he had not signed off on the statement. 

Celaschi told right-wing propaganda site Breitbart News that the town’s budget was “suffering.”

“The impact of the immigrants has affected our school district tremendously, and so from the borough standpoint, it’s impacted our budget to where and the school districts. We weren’t prepared for any of this. We did not get any help from the federal government or the state government,” he said. 

The Haitian immigrants whom Trump has chosen to deride are in the United States legally under Temporary Protected Status. They pay taxes, own property, and work. Now Trump is counting on his attacks against a vulnerable group to persuade voters in swing states to support him.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced Monday that the state would implement additional Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers in Springfield schools to conduct daily sweeps amid the mounting bomb threats against government buildings, schools, and hospitals.

J.D. Vance said Monday that to even suggest that the Republican ticket’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was responsible for inciting the bomb threats was “disgusting.” 

Ohio’s Republican attorney general was called out Monday by CNN for his handling of the false and racist rumor that Haitian immigrants are capturing and eating cats, dogs, ducks, and geese. And he didn’t handle it well.

CNN’s Brianna Keilar asked Dave Yost about his role in repeating and advancing the false story, noting that the mayor of Springfield, the town at the center of the rumors, debunked the story last week.

“Do you think the mayor is lying?” Keilar asked.

Yost didn’t address the question, instead defending his own social media posts and saying they’ve been about “real impacts” on Springfield, insisting that “my tweet was about the media’s disregard for citizen reports, citizen interaction with their government.”

Keilar pushed the Ohio attorney general about those reports, which Yost said were about “several videotaped comments that were made by citizens regarding a variety of things going on in Springfield.” While Yost admitted that these comments were not enough “to make a case,” he then tried to say that too many of Springfield’s children in schools didn’t speak English.

Keilar then asked Yost why he was pushing a false story about killing animals instead of discussing the strain on local communities “when you are supposed to be a very serious law enforcement individual.”

This upset Yost, who accused Keilar of “implying, of course, that you think I’m not [serious].”

Ohio’s Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican like Yost, defended Springfield’s Haitian population Sunday, telling ABC’s Martha Raddatz that “the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal. They came to Springfield to work. Ohio is on the move, and Springfield has really made a great resurgence with a lot of companies coming in. These Haitians came in to work for these companies.”

Yost seems to be paying no attention to local officials, instead taking cues from Ohio Senator and Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, who on Sunday argued that spreading the false and dangerous rumor is justified because it is bringing “attention to the suffering of the American people.” In reality, the rumor has led to violent threats against Springfield’s schools, government buildings, hospitals, and other gathering places, even leading to the cancellation of a local festival.

If Vance, Yost, and the rest of the GOP were serious about their concern for the strain on local communities like Springfield due to a population increase, they’d perhaps be offering practical, positive solutions instead of amplifying racist rumors that terrorize their own constituents.

While Donald Trump’s allies have tried to create the illusion of distance between the Republican presidential nominee and Laura Loomer, the alt-right conspiracy theorist has continued to cozy up to him, going so far as to brag over the weekend that Trump “likes” and “trusts” her.

“The media is full of shit. OK?” Loomer said on her podcast, ​​Loomer Unleashed, on Saturday. “These people are liars. They are con artists, and all they do is lie. They are running a coordinated smear campaign because I am effective. Donald Trump likes me. Donald Trump trusts me. OK?

“Obviously, he trusts me if I’m on his plane, and I don’t work for Donald Trump,” she continued. “They can’t imagine the fact that the president of the United States has people in his life who he considers to be friends. Is the president of the United States not allowed to have a friend? Oh my God. Is he not allowed to invite people onto his own private jet?”

But Loomer’s insistence that she’s an “effective” addition to Trump’s political fold might not jibe with some of his closest allies. Loomer has taken credit for urging Trump to utter the Haitian migrant conspiracy theory that has plagued his vice presidential pick, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, over the past week. The self-described “white advocate” also sparked backlash from even the depths of the MAGA movement, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Senator Lindsey Graham, after Loomer posted that Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascendency to the Oval Office would make the White House “smell like curry.”

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt insisted Saturday that Trump “does not agree with all of the comments” that Loomer has made. But any efforts to paint Loomer as an outsider have fallen flat.

Trump has been seen with Loomer several times over the last couple of weeks, with the pair getting eyebrow-raisingly close (Trump’s hand has been spotted in the small of Loomer’s back), while Melania Trump has largely remained out of the limelight. Loomer, a 9/11 denier, attended a 9/11 memorial service with Trump and also accompanied him to the presidential debate.

On Sunday, before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire celebrated the prospect of political violence against Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero,” the party wrote on X, before receiving swift backlash and deleting the post. Later that day, the party published a follow-up, announcing that it “deleted a tweet because we don’t want to break the terms of this website we agreed to” and claiming that libertarians are “the most oppressed minority.”

On Tuesday, the account released a lengthier additional follow-up, insisting that the original tweet did not call for Harris’s assassination but “merely acknowledg[ed] how some members would react to one.”

But the newest post somehow made things worse, referring to historical instances of violence that were supposedly “necessary to advance or protect freedom,” including the assassination of “past tyrants like Abraham Lincoln.” Further, it stated that “it’s good when authoritarians” (that is, “progressives, socialists, and democrats”) are made to “feel unsafe or uncomfortable,” which the account’s provocative posts “are frequently explicitly intended” to do.

On Sunday, Libertarian Party presidential candidate Chase Oliver condemned the post as “abhorrent.” The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire replied by calling him a homophobic slur.

On X, New York Times opinion writer and libertarian Jane Coaston criticized the provocative state party as repellent and noxious to its purported cause: “Like if the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire were a CIA plot to destroy the Libertarian Party writ large what would they be doing differently.”