Senator Joseph McCarthy was ultimately brought down by his lack of decency. In 1954, McCarthy was riding high as the infamous hunter of alleged leftists in the government. The beginning of the end to his reign of terror came swiftly on June 9, 1954 at a congressional hearing when a Boston attorney hired by the army, Joseph Welch, responded to an allegation by McCarthy that one of his young colleagues was a Communist sympathizer. As an amazed television audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately ended McCarthy’s career: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?” Overnight McCarthy’s popularity plummeted and he was censured by his Senate colleagues, disavowed by his party and ignored by the press. Donald Trump’s totally unfounded racist claims about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio during the debate between him and Kamala Harris were strikingly reminiscent of the shameful utterances of Senator McCarthy. Going into the debate, I expected the former President would attack Kamala Harris on the Biden administration’s immigration program. However, what I was not expecting was the totally bizarre vitriolic manner in which he tried to use falsehoods and stereotypes to conjure up fears of immigrants. “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump said during an answer to a question about immigration. “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.” Vice President Harris looked away and laughed at the comments while moderator David Muir stepped in, saying there have been no credible reports of pets being harmed by Springfield’s immigrant community. Trump didn’t back off; instead, he dug himself deeper with his riposte “I’ve seen people on television,” he said. “People on television say my dog was taken and used for food.” As Heather Cox Richardson wrote on September 11th in her Letter from an American “Observers correctly noted that the racist trope of immigrants eating pets dehumanizes marginalized people who are already vulnerable, putting them in danger.” Trump’s comments echoed claims made by his running mate, JD Vance, in the days leading up to the debate. Vance had repeated a debunked rumor that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating people’s pets. Vance’s posting on “X” indicated that he had “received many inquiries” about Haitian migrants abducting and eating their pets. The post was viewed more than 4.7 million times. Vance subsequently acknowledged that it was possible “all of these rumors will turn out to be false.” Nevertheless he urged his supporters not to “let biased media scare you into not discussing this slow moving humanitarian crisis in a small Ohio town. We should talk about it every single day.” Springfield, a city of around 60,000, has received around 12,000-15,000 legal migrants in the last four years, the majority from Haiti. The Mayor of Springfield, Rob Rue, recently told NPR that the influx of immigrants has led to the city struggling with basic infrastructure. It’s led to tension, as well as unfounded rumors about gang activity, voodoo practices, and eating of cats, dogs, and park ducks. The Springfield police have repeatedly denied all of the claims and indicated that there is no credible evidence to support the allegations that pets were being abducted and then eaten. This has not prevented the rumors from spreading throughout social media. Ohio’s Republican Governor, Mike DeWine, a supporter of former President Donald Trump and JD Vance, who has lived his entire life less than 10 miles from Springfield, wrote the following in an op editorial in The New York Times on September 21, 2024 entitled I’m Ohio’s Governor. Here’s the Truth About Springfield, “I am saddened by how they [Trump and Vance] and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants in Springfield. This rhetoric hurts they city and its people, and it hurts those who have spent their lives there.” Although I wasn’t aware of it before the debate, apparently the stereotype of immigrants eating dogs and cats has a long history in America and has been in the past used fairly frequently against immigrants. “The dog-eating stereotype has historically been utilized to belittle Asians and Asian immigrants,” writes Jean Rachel Bahk in the Inlandia literary journal. “I was incessantly pestered about whether the meat in the side dishes I brought for lunch was dog meat” she recalls about her own childhood. In speeches Trump has also likened immigrants to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer and cannibal from the film Silence of the Lambs. With both accusations, he’s pushing the notion that these people are trying to consume us. It is absolutely beyond the pale that a former President would resort to rumor-mongering to demonize legal immigrants in our country. But it should not come as a shock: For years Donald Trump has claimed that those crossing the borders are violent criminals or mentally ill people who have been sent to the United States by other countries without any evidence whatsoever to back up that claim. The false claim being made against Haitian immigrants in Springfield is just the latest example of a demented Donald Trump fostering and amplifying anti-immigrant rhetoric, xenophobic hate and racist stereotypes about Black and brown immigrants. It is just one more example of why he is totally unfit to lead our country. — Irwin Stoolmacher is president of the Stoolmacher Consulting Group, a fundraising and strategic planning firm that works with nonprofit agencies that serve the truly needy among us.