It didn’t take long for someone to bring up the cats.
Only minutes into Vivek Ramaswamy’s town hall last night in Springfield, Ohio, a man who identified himself as Kevin raised his hand. He felt awful seeing news clips of children in Haiti with “flies in their eyes,” he said. But what about the people here in Ohio? And what about “the motherless kittens in the alleys of Springfield. Where are the mothers?”
Kevin was referring, of course, to the pets—the cats and dogs and birds—that some Springfield residents allege have been eaten by Haitian immigrants in town. There is zero evidence that this is occurring, as city officials have repeatedly stressed. Still, the rumor persists—as one woman told me ominously, “You don’t see as many geese and ducks” in the park these days. And Ramaswamy—the failed Republican-primary candidate turned Donald Trump surrogate, who stood in the center of it all wearing a dark suit, his hair combed into a demi-bouffant—was not exactly there to fact-check.
He’d come, he said, as a unifier. “My hope is that, through open conversations, through actually speaking without fear, we actually not only solve the problems of this country but, dare I say, unite this country as well,” he told his audience. Yet Ramaswamy’s purported unity play felt more like a Festivus-style airing of grievances: a “community reconciliation” event that reconciled nothing, and from which nobody was going to benefit—other than, of course, Ramaswamy. Even as Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, have seized on the Springfield pet rumor to attack Democrats on immigration policy, the falsehood has also become a handy vehicle for this hungry young Republican to audition for political promotion. And with Trump promising to make his own appearance in Springfield, last night’s “conversation” attained the status of a warm-up act.
It takes a potent blend of chutzpah and political ambition to run toward a fire set by your own political allies, and declare yourself the hero who will put it out. Ramaswamy, a native Ohioan, had announced himself the man for the job over the weekend. “I live less than an hour from here,” he told the crowd. “I don’t actually blame any of the 70,000 people in Springfield” for the problems in town, he said. “I blame the federal policies.” Last night, he promised an “open, unfiltered conversation”—although he encouraged people to be respectful, he asked them not to censor themselves.
They heard him. Some 300 people, mostly white, squeezed into a hot basement meeting hall—plus an overflow room—at the Bushnell Event Center downtown. Roughly half of the attendees wore MAGA gear. Earlier, I’d seen a man carrying an AR-15-style rifle who’d posted himself outside the venue, lending the proceedings a deeply sinister vibe.
Ramaswamy had met with a few leaders in the Haitian community beforehand, he said, and he’d invited them all to his town hall. But no Haitian immigrants spoke up at the event, and I saw none. (“I think I saw one in the back,” Ramaswamy told me afterward.)
That the community of Springfield faces challenges is not in dispute. According to estimates from city officials, some 15,000 Haitian immigrants have come to this once economically depressed town in recent years, welcomed by employers looking for workers. Primary-care facilities have been overloaded. Schools are struggling to handle the influx of students for whom English is a second language. Traffic has gotten worse.
But these were not the problems that Trump referenced during the presidential debate when he declared, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs!”—thus aiming a 10,000-watt spotlight on this small city west of Columbus, and causing a string of frightening threats, school closures, and canceled community events.
Ramaswamy, whose Indian-born parents were the beneficiaries of U.S. immigration policy, last night refused to directly address the accounts repeated by Trump and Vance. “I’m not here to talk about the issues that the media has really loved to obsess over,” he told me and a handful of other journalists before the town hall. I could virtually hear my fellow reporters’ eyeballs rolling.
Instead, as he explained, Ramaswamy was determined to engage in a more noble effort: promoting harmony in Springfield—though, if that sentiment was in good faith, he was soon disabused of the notion. “I was a little concerned about the topic of this conversation, the vow for unity,” one man told Ramaswamy. “One thing we should be united on is there simply are too many mass migrants in this town.”
The town hall’s moderator was a MAGA celebrity in her own right: Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of the conservative group Moms for Liberty. But her only job during the event appeared to be passing the mic around, and reining in unruly speakers with a gentle pat on the shoulder. One after another, locals stood to share their concerns—about skyrocketing rent, bad Haitian drivers, and the new Amazon facility, which would bring only more newcomers to town. One woman said a 22-year-old Haitian man was in her daughter’s high-school class; another claimed that her daughter had been chased by a Haitian man wielding a machete.
Springfieldians are tired of being called racist, speakers said. They’re not angry at the Haitians for wanting a better life, but the community doesn’t have the infrastructure to support them. Most Haitian immigrants in Springfield came legally; still, the audience cheered when Ramaswamy suggested that a second Trump administration would bring about historically large deportations of undocumented immigrants.
“Git ’em gone!” a man wearing a cowboy hat said, from a row behind me. “If it was up to me,” another man said, “we’d send them away and start all over.” One of the few Black people in the audience, a woman named Chrissy, took the mic to say she understood that the Haitians were struggling in their home country, but there really were too many here: “The biggest problem is they don’t know how to drive!” she said.
At one point, a man named Bruce Willmann, who is affiliated with a religious nonprofit called the Nehemiah Foundation, made a pitch to Ramaswamy: Would he donate to the group’s new program to teach English to Haitian immigrants? The crowd erupted in boos. “Those are lies!” someone shouted. An angry-looking woman grabbed the mic after Willmann. Organizations like his “have contributed” to bringing in immigrants, she said. “When does it stop?” To Ramaswamy, she pleaded, “You’re here, Vivek. What do we do when you’re not here anymore?”
“When will you come back?” attendees asked Ramaswamy over and over again—during the event, and in the hallway afterward. Some of the people I spoke with had expected specifics. “It was a step in a direction. I don’t know if it was the right one,” Brock Engi, a 28-year-old biracial Springfield native, told me. “I think it may get worse in the city before it gets better.”
The only solution Ramaswamy urged was Trump. Joe Biden’s administration caused the problems in Springfield, he told the crowd, which murmured its agreement. “You don’t always have a chance to change things, but this time, in about 50 days, you actually do,” he said.
Ramaswamy didn’t commit to donating to Willmann’s organization, but he did pledge to donate $100,000 to a local nonprofit. After that, Ramaswamy said, “I don’t know what comes next for me.” But he seems to have a pretty good idea. Ramaswamy has been angling for a status upgrade, telling reporters that he’s interested in a “substantial” administration role if Trump wins the election in November. He’s also open to filling Vance’s seat for Ohio in the Senate. “I think there’s a role for Vivek to do anything he wants,” Justice, his Moms for Liberty co-host, told me.
I found Willmann, the director of Nehemiah, outside looking frazzled. There are two “legitimate” discussions to be had about the problems in Springfield, he said. One is about immigration rules and limits. “On the flip side, there are 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants in our city, and they’re here, and they have needs,” he said. “What are we going to do about them?” Wellman’s organization has set up free English classes with child care so that Haitian parents can attend with their children. As a result, he has received threats on social media, and someone on X doxxed his wife.
I asked Willmann whether the town hall would have been more productive if some members of the Haitian community had shown up. He shrugged and said, “I wouldn’t come here if I was a Haitian.”
After the event, I walked with Ramaswamy through the kitchen of the event hall, surrounded by beefy security guards. How did it go? I asked. “I feel like it went well,” he said. “I thought it was productive.” When we emerged from the back entrance, a throng of attendees was waiting, snapping photos and screaming praise for Ramaswamy, who waved and smiled like a starlet on the red carpet. “We need you!” people begged. “Run for governor!” “I love you guys,” he told them, before ducking into a waiting black car.
The town hall may not have been a success for Springfield, but it was certainly a win for its instigator.