The New Yorker:

What can be learned from the collisions between pets and politics this election season?

By Lauren Michele Jackson

With a certain liberal arrogance, many took a racist fabrication from Donald Trump at last week’s Presidential debate to be the evening’s crowning gaffe. In the Rust Belt town of Springfield, Ohio, “they’re eating the dogs. . . . They’re eating the cats. . . . They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said. The pronoun in question referred to Springfield’s Haitian community, and the claim repeated a conspiracy theory that had been circulating on the right-wing Internet, channelling the centuries-long persecution of Haitians and West Indians. Not that it mattered—Trump’s comment was an instant bipartisan hit. As Springfield residents have retreated from much of ordinary life this week amid threats of violence, including bomb threats to schools and hospitals, social media has been flooded with upbeat videos of perplexed-seeming pets “reacting” to Trump’s remarks. His words have been placed next to images of Snowball and Santa’s Little Helper, the cat and dog from “The Simpsons” (set in Springfield, U.S.A.); the audio has been remixed into a danceable beat. Trump supporters, meanwhile, have used their own memes to play up the notion of Trump as a crusader for the nation’s furry friends with slogans like “save pets vote trump” and related imagery, almost certainly generated by a text-to-image program like dall-e, such as one animation showing Trump jogging toward the viewer with a cat on either biceps while a computer’s approximation of Black people chase behind. These images’ authors and their audiences have not forgotten the goal of stoking anti-immigration sentiment, even if other posters, engrossed in winning attention with snapshots of their real-life pets, have. Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, who helped make Springfield an anti-immigrant flash point, has acknowledged the political utility of so many pet jokes, urging “patriots” to “keep the cat memes flowing.”

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