Asked during a recent campaign trail trip to Las Vegas whether he denounces bomb threats that have been shaking up Springfield, Ohio, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump… demurred.
The threats correspond to the spread of conspiracy theories about Haitian immigrants living in that Ohio community: false claims that even Trump himself spread from a debate stage last week. The unsupported conspiracy theories assert that these individuals have been taking pets and other animals for food.
“I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” Trump told journalists. “I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and it’s a terrible thing that happened. Springfield was this beautiful town, and now they’re going through hell.”
To be clear, Springfield wasn’t “taken over” by anybody, and the Haitians residing there are, by and large, doing so legally. On multiple levels, Trump’s description is off the mark.
“Donald Trump is a sociopath,” conservative legal figure George Conway said on MSNBC. “Sociopaths lie relentlessly. They have no empathy or caring for other people. I mean, who refuses to say that they condemn a bomb threat? A sociopath! A psychopath! Somebody who has no care, no feeling for other people and only cares about himself. And it’s all about him. It’s all about how he thinks he can spur people along into violence, to support him, and he’s just a dangerous person.”
Conway then pointed to the support from himself and certain fellow conservatives, like a group of 17 former staff members to Ronald Reagan, for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
Even Trump’s running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), whose own home state includes the Springfield community, is promoting that vitriol. He already tried tying new arrivals to the U.S. to supposed spikes in “communicable diseases” and traffic accidents. In both cases, it’s not immediately clear the spikes are even happening.
