‘A very old political trope’: the racist US history behind Trump’s Haitian pet eater claim

Trump's bizarre rant about pet-eating Haitians is just the latest in a hoary US tradition of scapegoating immigrants

Less than half an hour into Tuesday's presidential debate, former president Donald Trump deployed an updated version of a century-old slur against immigrant communities: that newcomers are eating other people's pets and vermin.

They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats," Trump said about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. In the past four years, 15,000 Haitians have settled in the city of almost 60,000, most of whom through a legal resettlement program for migrants. They're eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame."