JD Vance explains the political utility of anti-immigrant hostility

The Ohio senator’s effort Sunday to defend his virulent, racist rhetoric about immigrants eating pets was remarkably dishonest.

Just about every part of Sen. JD Vance’s efforts on Sunday to defend his relentless fearmongering about Haitian immigrants was dishonest.

To hear Vance (R-Ohio) tell it — as he told CNN’s Dana Bash and NBC’s Kristen Welker in separate news show appearances — the senator and running mate to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was simply highlighting long-standing concerns that had been ignored by the media. But those concerns hadn’t been ignored, and his focus on the Ohio city of Springfield and its population that came from Haiti was demonstrably a function of the presidential campaign. Which, Vance admitted to Bash, was the point.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” Vance said, “then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”

Bash noted that Vance had just admitted that he “created” these stories, ones asserting (without reliable evidence) that the immigrants were eating people’s pets in an echo of long-standing racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric.

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