On September 10, 2024, the most memorable utterance of Donald Trump during his disastrous performance in his only debate with Kamala Harris was “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs, the people that came in, they are eating the cats, they are eating the pets.” Springfield is in Ohio, the state of Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. “Cat Ladies” Vance. The “they” that Trump was referring to was the legal Haitian immigrants that were invited and welcomed as residents in Springfield.
The lie, which Vance later admitted was made up, was Donald Trump’s attempt to bring immigration and immigrants to the fore of the contest for the presidency. Perceived as Harris’ main negative, Trump, with about 20 million Americans watching, sought to victimize and scapegoat legal Haitian immigrants as his Boogeyman in order to scare up votes from European Americans concerned about “the poisoning of American blood” (Trump’s words).
As a result of that lie, repeated severally by Trump even after it was debunked by the Republican governor of Ohio, the new immigrants were threatened and schools shut down to avert violence from right wing extremists. Some of those legal Haitians left Springfield for other cities to get away from the threats and harassment championed by a presidential candidate.
However, Trump has not been the same after that lie. He no longer listens to his advisers on the campaign team. He goes to rallies and rambles on for hours about much of nothing. He issues threats to his “enemies,” including a threat to use the US military to go after political opponents like Nancy Pelosy, Adam Schiff and even Republican Liz Cheney, to mention a few. And in the closing hours of his campaign, the macho man simulated a sexual act on stage in front of thousands and in front of reporters with cameras. The man essentially appeared to lose all sense of reality, decorum, and decency. He closed his campaign in manners that suggested that he wanted to lose. Quite puzzling to virtually every political pundit, including his campaign surrogates.
This was not just Trump being Trump. A Haitian brother suggested to me that Nzumbi may have visited Trump on behalf of his Haitian victims. What is Nzumbi? It is the spiritual phenomenon that gave rise to the popular notion of zombies.
Nzumbi is a word from the Kimbundu culture that means “soul.” It could also mean “a spirit that wanders the earth to torment the living,” perhaps in pursuit of justice, not unlike the Igbo deity known as Ogu. Ogu was invoked by Haitian revolutionaries as they went to war to defeat the French Army, making Haiti the first Black republic by African slaves in the Western Hemisphere. Many Haitians trace their ancestry to the Igbo, including the man who led the Haitian revolution (1791 to 1804) Toussaint Louverture.
