Former President Donald Trump was confronted about his repeated lies about Haitian immigrants in Ohio during a Fox News interview on Sunday.
“MediaBuzz” host Howard Kurtz asked the ex-president why he wouldn’t acknowledge that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, weren’t “eating the pets of the people that live there,” as he famously suggested in a September debate.
“I don’t know if it’s true or not true,” Trump responded. “What about the geese?”
“What happened there with the geese? What happened there? They’re all missing,” Trump said. “I have no idea, I said something, the big problem is that you can’t put 30,000 people into a 50,000-person town or city and expect this city to even survive or do well.”
Fox host: You said ‘they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats.’ That turned out not to be true
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 20, 2024
Trump: I don't know if it's true or not
Fox host: You don’t know? It’s been debunked
Trump: What about the goose, the geese? What about the geese? What happened there? I have… pic.twitter.com/hgcw6WLdhS
The lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating local pets was signal-boosted into the Trump campaign by Trump's running mate JD Vance. He has refused to back away from the story even as it has been debunked by local police and the city's mayor. Vance has said he was "creating a story" to call attention to immigration policy.
Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, centered around a promise for mass deportation, continues. In a Wednesday town hall, the ex-president once again claimed Haitians were “eating other things, too, that they’re not supposed to be.”
Defending those comments on Sunday, Trump said he still wasn’t convinced his initial claims weren't true.
“I don’t think it’s been debunked at all. I think nobody talks about it, except you,” he told Kurtz.
