Pete Buttigieg explains exactly why Donald Trump keeps taking about eating cats

Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed this week that immigrants are eating cats in Springfield, Ohio, and it’s all for a specific purpose, out Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg argues.

Trump’s anti-immigrant claim—which he repeated during and after his Tuesday night debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, even though Springfield’s city manager and Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine have said there’s no proof to back it—is just one of several recent inflammatory spectacles that Trump has created in recent days, Buttigieg told CNN in a recent interview… and it all serves the same purpose.

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Trump’s response also convinced the woman who asked about it that he’s “not fit to be president.”

“This is a strategy, and there’s even more to it than demonizing immigrants, although that’s obviously part of what he’s doing,” Buttigieg said. “This is a strategy to get us talking about the latest crazy thing that he did, whatever urban legend he amplifies right now. It’s about people eating cats or geese or whatever, because he cannot afford for us to be talking about his record.”

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“He doesn’t want us talking about the fact that we lost manufacturing jobs on his watch, even before COVID, which is why the United Auto Workers are against him,” he continued. “He doesn’t want us talking about the fact that his main economic policy promise he actually kept was to cut taxes for the rich. He doesn’t want us talking about how he demolished the right to choose in this country, that he’s the reason that even IVF [in vitro fertilization] could be banned in many places in this country.”

Buttigieg then mentioned two other spectacles recently created by Trump: “blurting out a racist remark in a auditorium full of Black journalists” (a reference to his comments at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention) and “choosing 9/11 of all days to invite a 9/11 truther who said it was an inside job with him” (a reference to Trump’s recent appearances with Islamophobic, white nationalist conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer).

“The purpose is to do something so outrageous that we have to talk about it, that journalists have to go in, if for no other reason than to run it down and debunk it when it’s false, and to try to suck up all the oxygen into that so that we’re not talking about his profoundly unpopular policy agenda, Project 2025, and all of the failures of his actual time in office,” Buttigieg said.

Buttigieg: This is a strategy to get us talking about the latest crazy thing that he did, whatever urban legend he amplifies right now, it's about people eating cats or geese or whatever because he cannot afford for us to be talking about his record. pic.twitter.com/MLY3PLck0o

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 13, 2024

Indeed, during Trump’s campaign stop yesterday in Tuscon, Arizona, he made even more inflammatory comments about immigrants, saying, “I’m angry about young American girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens.”

Trump’s comments have caused vandalism and death threats against immigrant families in Springfield, as well as bomb threats against its city hall, at least one public school, and other facilities.

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