Trump and Vance keep repeating lies about Haitian immigrants in Ohio. Republicans know exactly what they are doing.

In recent days, Republican presidential candidates have chosen to spread inflammatory lies about an immigrant community of approximately 15,000 people in a small Ohio town.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance spread this message on Monday when he declared that “illegal immigrants from Haiti” were “wreaking havoc all over Springfield, Ohio” and that “pets are being kidnapped and eaten by people who have no business being in this country.”

This claim was false on all counts. The Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio, is made up mostly (if not entirely) of legal U.S. citizens. And there is no evidence that any pets have been kidnapped or swallowed in Springfield recently. Local police and authorities say they have received no reports of such animal cruelty.

Still, other GOP senators and Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee immediately echoed Vance's claim. The Republican vice presidential candidate then told his supporters on X that in Springfield, “a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here.”

That was also wrong. Vance was referring to the death of 11-year-old Aiden Clark (which the Trump campaign had previously reported on). But Clark was not murdered. Rather, he died in a car crash in which a Haitian immigrant without a driver's license collided with a school bus. Clark's father has pleaded with the Trump campaign to stop exploiting his son's death to spread hate.

Then, at Tuesday's presidential debate – on the biggest political stage of this campaign season – former President Donald Trump repeated his running mate's falsehoods, saying, “In Springfield, they eat the dogs. The people who came here. They eat the cats. They eat – they eat the pets of the people who live there.”

Trump's use of political xenophobia to stoke fears is nothing new. The Republican has been fighting for Muslim travel bans and mass deportations for nearly a decade. But the Republicans' smear campaign against the Haitian community in Springfield is downright vicious.

Trump's demonization of entire immigrant groups is dangerous. But when he advocated a travel ban for Muslims during his first presidential campaign, he did not direct his supporters' fear and hatred against the worshippers of a particular mosque or community.

With this new slander, Trump and his running mate are stoking hatred against a single group of 15,000 people in one place, dramatically increasing the risk that their campaign of dehumanization will lead to violence. And indeed, on both Thursday and Friday, Springfield was forced to close its public schools and municipal buildings due to bomb threats. At the same time, a Haitian community center in town is receiving threatening phone calls and Haitian families are keeping their children home out of fear for their safety.

The contrast between the sacrifice of such innocents and the Republicans' gleeful proliferation of AI-generated cats supposedly endangered by the existence of the Haitians in Springfield is morally repugnant, at least to anyone who believes in the equal dignity of all human life. And the fact that Vance has implored his followers on social media to continue to spread such slanderous memes, at the expense of the safety of his own constituents, is equally scandalous.

But all this begs the question: Why do Trump and Vance believe it is in their interest to display such moral bankruptcy and recklessness?

The Republican push to stoke ethnic hatred in a single community cannot be understood as thoughtless or impulsive. Sure, Trump regularly makes demagogic statements inspired less by political calculation than by what he just happened to see on Fox News.

But Vance is a ruthless and disciplined nerd. You can't rise from humble beginnings to Yale Law School without the ability to filter your thoughts or pursue your goals rationally. And a person who compared Trump to an opiate in 2016 and championed his insurrection just a few years later when that stance became politically useful is clearly willing to do almost anything to gain power.

Vance has not only vilified Springfield's Haitian community once. He has chosen to double and triple down on that slander, repeating it again in an X-post Friday morning in which he accused Haitian immigrants of bringing “contagious diseases” to Ohio (without providing any evidence to support this timeless nativist cliche).

So why would a party that has strong incentives to demonstrate moderation and appease swing voters direct its hatred at a small community, even when its words have already led to bomb threats?

I guess it's about the ugliness.

The Republicans have a big lead on the immigration issue. In the recent New York Times/According to a Siena College poll of likely voters, voters preferred Trump over Kamala Harris on immigration by 53 percent to 43 percent, a result consistent with other national and swing state polls.

Polls on Americans' views on immigration policy paint a similar picture. In the Gallup poll, for the first time in 20 years, a majority of Americans said they wanted to reduce immigration, while only 16 percent wanted to increase it. A recent Axios/The Harris Poll found that a majority of voters support the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

If voters support the candidate who best represents their view of immigration, Trump will win in a landslide. It follows that the more voters think about immigration on Election Day, the better off Trump and Vance will be.

It's not easy to get the media to focus on a particular issue or story, but precisely because Vance's attack on Haitian immigrants in Springfield is so explosive, it has garnered a lot of media attention.

And because Trump and Vance's behavior is so at odds with liberal values, it has prompted Democratic politicians and commentators to publicly express their compassion for immigrants and concern for their well-being.

The calculation is that it could push a swing voter to the right, even if they find Vance's behavior abhorrent. That voter may disapprove of Vance's cat memes and still infer from the discussion around him that Republicans are the party that is tougher on immigration.

If this interpretation is correct, the Republican platform is banking on voters looking for someone to finish an ugly job. The health of our republic and the safety of its most vulnerable citizens depend on this being a mistake.