The Rebirth of a Nation

Of all the lies perpetrated by the Trump-Vance campaign this election season, the one about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs seems to have touched the biggest public nerve. Initially spread by JD Vance through social media and elevated by Donald Trump on a presidential debate stage, the whopper was quickly dismissed as baldly racist garbage by a surprising range of media and public figures, including Ohio Republicans. The blowback was so sustained that when Tim Walz accused the GOP of villainizing people during the vice presidential debate, Vance sidestepped the Haitian story with a general critique of immigration and the need to protect Americans. It suggested there may indeed be consequences for what the GOP says, that lines do exist that cannot be crossed without alienating those undecided voters who will tilt the election one way or the other. 

Whether it represents a tipping point or not, the scurrilous attack on a Haitian asylum community in small-town Ohio confirms the official Trump-GOP voter outreach strategy as one based not on appealing to as many people as possible, but on condemning as many as possible. This is not new, but it feels historic. Since 2016, Trump has distinguished himself as the first candidate since Richard Nixon to openly reject the democratic American ideal of strength in diversity that had become the stock and trade of both parties. For half a century, every politician has had to accommodate this ideal in his or her rhetoric. No longer. In rejecting a consensus legitimacy of this ideal, Trump has inspired — if that’s the right word — roughly half the country to follow him back into a darker, less kind era of our national history. We have lost an important rudder in our politics, maybe our only rudder. The diversity ideal still lives, of course, but it feels like it’s fighting for its life. 

The pet-eating story, for all its outlandishness, is a primal lie that has plenty of precedent going back to the country’s founding, when the Constitutional fathers invented the fictional census math that Black people were three-fifths human. That foundational lie established for whites an essential truth about Black people that the country accepted and that we have lived with ever since. Black people eating dogs fits comfortably into a tradition of constantly reinforcing that truth with more lies, including ornate 19th-century pseudoscience about escaped slaves suffering from a psychological disorder called “drapetomania.” 

Nothing has maintained and reinforced these “truths” about Black folk as effectively as the media. Long before internet memes, advertising and popular entertainment saturated our consciousness with depictions of Blacks as either monstrous — physically ugly, intellectually inept, driven by base desires — or as childlike and harmless. In everything from food packaging to minstrel shows to sheet music, Black people were drawn as coal black, bug-eyed, grimacing. The savage imagery demonized and dehumanized Africa, long called “the dark continent,” and by extension African Americans.  It also demonized Black populations in the western hemisphere. Special ire was reserved for Haiti, where the successful slave revolt led by Toussaint Louverture so unnerved American slaveholders that they doubled down on anti-Black measures to quell any similar rumblings in the American social order.  

A modern landmark of the anti-Black propaganda tradition was D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” a 1915 blockbuster film that represented Black people as dangerous, animal-like and unfit for white civilization in the wake of the Civil War. Embraced by no less a public figure than President Woodrow Wilson — who reportedly said it was “like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it’s all so terribly true” — the film helped mainstream and normalize the ugliest lies that ballasted segregation into the 1960s. Although not all Americans created these lies, all were forced to live them, even after the massive Civil Rights movements of the ’60s exposed and challenged Jim Crow laws and practices at their racist roots. But while the Jim Crow laws were eventually nullified, the “truth” about Blackness continued to hold sway. For example: a decent neighborhood anywhere in America today is understood as white, and a visible Black presence (even an invited one) as a degradation, at least cause for alarm. Property “value” is predicated not on money, but color. 

When Trump says the country is going to hell, he means the post-’60s principles of racial justice have failed, and we have to return to the principles of racial hierarchy that in his mind “worked.” Enacting those principles means once again deploying ugly lies about Black people as a moral and civic necessity. Trump did not create this social compact, but he has staked his movement on its revival, probably with more success than even he expected. That success is evident in the fact that while many objected to the Haitian lie, many more did not. A poll taken after the presidential debate found that nearly 70% of Republicans found the Haitian story some degree of “weird.” That’s better than not-weird, but it’s a long way from “unacceptable.” Another poll found that more than half of Republicans believed the lie, weirdness notwithstanding.

In the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection attempt, Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist and author of “Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul,” issued a warning about the 45th president. “We require active intervention to stop him from achieving any number of destructive outcomes for the nation,” she wrote.  “We need to remember that he is more a follower than a leader, and we need to place constraints from the outside when he cannot place them from within.”

Nearly four years later, it is safe to say the country has failed to learn this lesson. The rousing defense of the Haitian immigrants, while heartening, is a reaction, not constraint. Nor have we learned the bigger lesson that odious as Trump is, he has always been a follower more than a leader. He spontaneously spread an ugly racial lie only because he knows its origins and its utility lie deep in the nation’s lived experience, and that despite the important cultural shifts of the ’60s, we simply don’t have enough constraints on racism. Trumpism aims to keep it that way.