Jon Wiener: From The Nation Magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show: The presidential election is the main political battle in America today, but Trump’s followers have also been fighting, for years, to take over towns across the country. Sasha Abramsky reports – his new book is ‘Chaos Comes Calling.’

But first: Trump and Vance, Cats and Dogs, and Haiti—Amy Wilentz will comment -in a minute.
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Trump and Vance, cats and dogs, Haitians in Springfield and in Haiti – for that story, we turn to Amy Wilentz. She’s written about Haiti for a couple of decades for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and The Nation. Her most recent book is the award-winning Farewell, Fred Voodoo. She was also Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker. And she teaches in the literary journalism program at UC Irvine and she’s also a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow. Amy, welcome back.

Amy Wilentz: Thank you so much, Jon.

JW: There’s a recent YouGov poll that asked whether people believed that “Haitian immigrants are abducting and eating pet dogs and cats.” 26% of Americans said they believe that was true, 54% said it was not true, and 20% said they were not sure. I wonder if you have any comment.

AW: I wonder if the 26% who believe it’s true eat dog or cat? I mean is that a thing that they think people do? Or is it just specifically Haitian migrants who eat pet dogs and cats? I am amazed, even having watched my fellow Americans for a long time, I’m amazed that 46% of them believe it’s either true or could be true. It boggles the mind. Who do they think these people are who’ve come to the United States in panic for their lives, for their children’s future? It’s just no.

JW: A little more from that poll: among likely Trump voters, 52% believe that the eating cats and dogs claim is definitely or probably true. Now, the way I read that is only half of Trump’s own supporters believe him. And you might think that would be a reason for him to stop talking about it, but—

AW: But no, he goes on. He expands on it. He’s so excited by it.

JW: And Trump had planned to travel to Springfield, but changed his mind we are told, after the city’s Republican mayor asked him, “Please don’t come.” And Ohio’s Republican governor, a perfectly reasonable guy named Mike DeWine said in an op-ed for The New York Times that he was “saddened” by Trump’s continuing to, “repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield.” Of course, Mike DeWine is still voting for Trump for president. And yet as you say, Trump hasn’t stopped.

AW: Trump hasn’t stopped. At a rally in what I would call ‘Charle roi,” Pennsylvania, but I’m sure is called Charleroi.

JW: Okay.

AW: He gave a speech where he talked about Haitian migrants, and he asked the people of Charleroi whether or not their beautiful town has changed in recent years. And then he said, “It’s not so beautiful anymore, is it?” And then he said, “You have to get them the hell out.” And he reignited this charge about the eating of the cats and dogs in Springfield. And Charleroi has accepted a lot of Haitian migrants recently in Pennsylvania. So he’s targeting towns and then exploiting racism to get votes. It’s the most ugly kind of rhetoric.

JW: And it’s gotten worse than “cats and dogs.” Recently, the Trump campaign posted on social media about an 11-year-old Ohio boy named Aidan Clark who was killed when a car driven by an immigrant from Haiti crashed into a school bus. Trump posted Aidan Clark’s photo alongside that of the Haitian immigrant who hit the bus. And then Vance referred to Aidan Clark in a post on Twitter saying that “a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant.”

AW: First of all, just let me say as me, all of this is grossly exaggerated and weird except for the fact that this little boy’s bus was hit, and he did die in that accident. But you don’t need me to tell you this because the little boy’s dad, Nathan Clark, father of Aidan Clark, has gone on the record at a city council meeting where he took the microphone and asked, begged, Trump and Vance to stop using his son’s name in this campaign to get votes when his son, he said, was not murdered, he was killed in an accident, and he only wished that the person who had rammed the bus were a 60-year-old white man so that no one would be using his son’s name in this horrible racist campaign.

JW: And then he said about Trump and Vance, “They are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed to mention Aidan Clark. I will listen to them one more time to hear their apologies.” Have they apologized?

AW: No, they have not apologized, but notably, I think, they have stopped using Aidan’s name – but they’re still talking about an eleven-year-old boy being murdered by an illegal Haitian immigrant. Now, Hermione Joseph, the Haitian concerned, was not illegal. He was admitted under temporary protected status in 2022.

JW: And indeed, apparently all 15,000 of the Haitians in Springfield are there legally under temporary protected status, TPS. We’ve talked about this many times over the last few years, but remind us about how TPS works, what it is, and what it means for the Haitians there.

AW: Well, TPS is like what we used to call asylum only it’s temporary. So asylum was granted to people basically fleeing for their lives, who would be subject to threats to their lives if they returned, who were either known or associated with enemies of a government in a foreign country. That’s asylum.

JW: And TPS is not granted to individuals, but to entire populations from particular nations.

AW: From particular nations suffering from security crises or attacks on populations.

JW: I understand that Biden extended TPS for Haitians until February 3rd, 2026. Now, if Trump were to be elected on November 5th, if he took office on January 20th, he has pledged to end TPS for Haitians. Could he do that?

AW: He tried while he was president, and he failed because he couldn’t prove that the government in Haiti and the situation on the ground in Haiti had changed since TPS was extended to Haiti. So he would have a lot of trouble, I can tell you that, proving again that the nature of the situation in Haiti has changed except for the worse. So maybe he’d have to expand TPS if he pursued that argument.
On the other hand, the next Trump administration is going to be different from the past Trump administration if the next Trump administration happens. And it could be that there will be a situation at INS and throughout the government that will permit him to end TPS for Haitians. I know that Haitians are very worried in the US about that.
And the situation on the ground is worse in Haiti than ever before. I think the gangs have expanded their networks. They’ve moved into the countryside around the Capitol. You can’t get medical systems working. You can’t get gasoline necessarily. Recently internet service was completely cut off by a gang activity and had to be restored. It took a few days. That meant that no one could talk to their relatives in the US, no one could communicate outside Haiti with everybody in the outside world. Whatever happened in Haiti happened in Haiti on those two days and no one knew. So this, it’s extremely important, much less within Haiti if you had an accident or an emergency, you couldn’t communicate. So the gangs have a pretty powerful hold in Haiti, in the Haiti that Trump would like to return them all to.

JW: We’ve talked many times about the plan pushed by the United States and approved by the United Nations to send an international contingent of police officers, led by Kenyan police, to fight the gangs, control the gangs. And the first contingent of police from Kenya operating under this UN mandate arrived in June, several months ago now, to help the Haitian police wrest back control from the gangs. A year ago, Kenya said it would send 1000 police officers. How many have arrived?

AW: Well, 400 arrived in that original contingent. They’ve had some operations with the Haitian National Police, but just like the Haitian National Police they’re severely underfunded, they’re severely under armed, they’re severely outmanned and outgunned, and the new government in Haiti has been begging the UN and the international community to provide greater funding and material for these forces of order.

JW: And there were supposed to be a lot more. This is supposed to be a multinational security support mission with 2,500 security personnel coming from several countries, including Kenya. How many of the 2,500 from other countries have arrived?

AW: Two dozen from Jamaica have arrived. So that’s nice, that’s 24 people. So that’s 424 people. And Kenyan troops themselves are throwing up their hands and saying, “We don’t know what to do. We don’t know how to do this operation because we don’t have the vehicles that we need.” 24 vehicles, I guess one per Jamaican, were also delivered to Haiti recently and that’s made a little bit of a difference. But there are supposedly 200 gangs and mini gangs operating in Haiti so it’s not like you can control one guy and therefore control the gangs. They need more than this to control the gangs if this effort is even sincere. Or maybe it’s just a band aid used to get rid of the Haitian problem so that the US doesn’t have to think about it right now. But it’s not working.

JW: I understand America’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visited Haiti a couple of weeks ago. He’s the highest ranking American official to visit the country since 2015, so this is quite a big deal, I guess. Tell us about Blinken in Haiti.

AW: Blinken made what is called a lightning visit. He came in, he talked to a few people. He looked at the Kenyan troops. He went to their headquarters, which are adjacent to the airport. He went to the American Embassy. He went to some other American secured facilities. He went to the ambassador’s house, which is also secured by the US. He did not really venture onto Haitian ground. He left after five hours of this lightning tour. And the Haitians met with him, but not with great fanfare because they’re disappointed in the US. One of the reasons they’re disappointed is the last visit by anyone serious was in 2015 when their new government was in place and was allowing these gangs further inroads into the way the country is “run.” So that’s been a problem for them. This whole time the Americans have sat back and watched the whole thing unfold, have never interceded in any serious way. Officials of the embassy have resigned in protest over the way the American State Department has handled Haiti. And yet nothing much has been done.

JW: Haiti has a new prime minister, Garry Conille. The United States supports him, I understand.

AW: Yes. They support him, and he’s a very decent guy. And believe me, this government which doesn’t have much power, has been publicly so much better than the previous governments that the United States has supported. They say the right things. They seem to have the right intentions of clawing back Haiti from these gangs. But they still can’t do it. People are living in the worst kinds of conditions, and you can’t send your kids to school and most of the hospitals are closed and you’re living on top of each other. There’s a school yard where people are living in the worst conditions because they’ve had to flee their neighborhoods. It’s not like the gangs come in, have a shootout, and go out. They come in and they take over the neighborhood. They flush out the residents of the neighborhood. They burn down houses, they loot houses, in the opposite order, and then they control that area and then they move to the next area.

JW: Returning to Springfield, Ohio – I understand there’s been an interesting lawsuit filed there by a Haitian-American organization. Tell us about that.

AW: Yes. It’s called the Haitian Bridge Alliance, and it works for immigrants, Haitian immigrants, and Haitian refugees in the United States, and they’ve filed a criminal suit in Ohio with the Clark County Municipal Court which is where Springfield is, charging Trump and Vance personally with disrupting public services and making false alarms and some other offenses, using telecommunications to incite violence, et cetera. And they’re seeking arrest warrants for Donald Trump and JD Vance.

JW: How are they able to do this?

AW: There’s an Ohio law that allows you to enter such a case, so they’ve gone ahead and done it, incredibly. And the court either must issue arrest warrants or refer the matter to the prosecuting attorney. And they must hold a hearing at least before they can reject the Haitian affidavit. So they have to hold a hearing. We’ll see if they do that.

JW: Any last thoughts?

AW: Yeah: why Haitian immigrants? And I have to say it’s because Haiti has such a long history with the United States. The worst thing Haiti has ever done was to cast off the French slavery running governance of Haiti in 1791. They began their revolution, the slaves of Haiti. They won their revolution in 1803. They declared independence from France in 1804. What was happening in the United States? It was a slave government, a slave economy, and it was horrified at the newly liberated government of Haiti.

JW: The first slave revolution and the largest slave uprising since Spartacus, and it established the world’s first Black republic.

AW: So the world’s first Black republic. Even though Trump doesn’t know this, he has no idea what the history of Haiti is. Vance? I don’t think he knows it either. He called Haiti, ‘Haitia,’ in a press conference. They don’t know what Haiti is, but they participate in this long-running historical pariah name-calling of Haiti on the basis of its establishing the first Black republic in the world.

JW: Amy Wilentz – she says “Haiti is arguably the biggest mess US foreign policy has created anywhere in the world” in her most recent piece for The Nation. It’s titled “JD Vance’s Slanders Are Far From the Worst Thing the US Has Done to Haitians.” You can read it at thenation.com. Thank you, Amy.

AW: Thank you, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: The presidential election is the main political battle in America today, of course, but Trump’s followers have also been fighting four years to take over towns across the country. For that story, we turn to Sasha Abramsky. Of course, he writes regularly for The Nation. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. He’s written many books, including The American Way of Poverty and The House of Twenty Thousand Books. And his new book is out now – Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America. Sasha, welcome back.

Sasha Abramsky: It’s always a joy to be on, Jon. Thanks for having me.

JW: We think of Trump as a unique figure, but MAGA is a movement fighting for power in many places. And you have done the hard work on the ground of reporting from places most political writers never visit. For your new book, you focused on two small towns, one where the far-right succeeded in taking power, one where its campaign was defeated. But let’s start with the big picture, the rise of right-wing extremism starting with Trump’s 2016 campaign. There have been, of course, demagogues and conspiracy theorists and violent groups in America for decades, centuries. What’s different about today’s?

SA: Jon, I think what’s different about today is not so much the groups per se, because you’re quite right, there have been conspiratorial groups, there have been racist groups. What’s new about today is the speed with which information gets transferred. I think you saw that the other day on the presidential debate. You had a presidential candidate just plucking out of thin air internet rumors, particularly the idea that Haitian immigrants were going around eating cats and dogs belonging to red-blooded Americans. Well, if you have a politics of demagogy and you overlay that with social media and the speed with which disinformation can travel around the universe at this point, you have all the ingredients for a pretty catastrophic political situation, for a sort of ongoing ugliness in our political sphere. And I think that’s what’s different about today. And I think when you look at small towns and communities, the kinds that I was writing about in my book, you are seeing a sort of toxicity in local political language that really wasn’t present even 10, 15, 20 years ago.

JW: Let’s start with Shasta County, California. It’s in northern California, really closer to Oregon and Nevada than it is to San Francisco. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump carried Shasta County with 64%. But that was not very different from hundreds of other rural counties in America, and those counties were not taken over by the far right. So it seems like Trump’s election by itself was not the turning point in Shasta County. What was?

SA: Yeah, Shasta really fascinated me because it was a conservative place, always has been, or at least within living memory, has been a very conservative place, really no room for anything left of the Republican Party in its political organizations. What happened was you had, as I said, the overlaying of Trump and social media, but the thing that really, really catapulted Shasta righthood was the pandemic. And the way it played out in Shasta County was you had a public health officer called Karen Ramstrom who was trying very, very hard to abide by California’s public health mandates. She was doing her best to prevent local hospitals being overwhelmed. And she got absolutely swamped by these very, very angry, very organized, very hard right political groups that didn’t want anything to do with lockdowns, that didn’t want anything to do with mandates around masking or social distancing or eventually the vaccine.
And those groups took over local government. They launched a recall campaign against the not-quite-conservative-enough boards of supervisors members. They succeeded in recalling a man called Leonard Moty, who was the ex-police chief of Redding, was a Reagan Republican, but he wasn’t far enough right-wing for this group. So they got him recalled. He was replaced by a hard right board of supervisors member. And by 2021, the hard right was in control of the county. They had a majority on the board of supervisors, and they were basically going whole hog. They fired their public health officers, they fired a whole bunch of other government officials, and they essentially went to rhetorical war against the state of California. And this is an area that for many, many years has had these secessionist sentiments. It’s called the State of Jefferson movement, it’s this idea that these right-wing rural counties will secede from California and form their own governance.
Shasta County is very much a part of that secessionist movement. And it produced some really ugly sort of in-your-face, quite violent politics from 2020 onwards. And that was occurring at the county board of supervisors level. It was occurring on local talk radio. It was occurring outside the public health offices where lynch mobs would literally congregate, urging the execution, the hanging, the killing of the public health officers. And I thought, when I was reporting this, “What an extraordinary moment that we’ve started looking at each other as the enemy in a place like Shasta, that the middle ground has so dropped out that all you have left is anger and rage and just the noise of the internet mob.”

JW: Do these far-right groups in Shasta and elsewhere, do they understand that the liberal state they want to secede from provides unemployment benefits, Medicaid, food stamps, which thousands of county residents depend on?

SA: I think some do and some don’t. But I think the overwhelming common denominator that I encountered when I was reporting this was this sense that they wanted to be left alone. They didn’t want to be subject to state mandates. They didn’t want to feel that the big bad city of Sacramento down south was in control of their destiny. The problem was, especially during a pandemic, that response was deeply dysfunctional, because what it meant was that you had locals who were refusing to get the vaccine and they were being egged on by their elected officials. You had locals who were refusing to socially distance or to mask indoors, and they were being egged on by local officials. And four years out, it’s hard to remember just how devastating COVID was in 2020 and early 2021, but there were days in America where three, four, 5,000 people a day nationally were dying. Just this staggering number of people falling victim to this highly infectious respiratory disease.
And in a place like Shasta County, the consequences of the elected officials saying, “Don’t get vaccinated. Don’t take this seriously,” was a much higher mortality rate. So California’s mortality rate was fairly low at the beginning of the pandemic anyway compared to the rest of the country. Shasta County’s was about a third higher than the rest of California. That may not sound a lot, but what it translates to is many, many more deaths, even in a place as small in population as Shasta County. And it was needless. It was because there was so much disinformation percolating out there and rumors and so much suspicion of science and of authority.

JW: Do you think the right-wing takeover of Shasta County could have been avoided if California Governor Gavin Newsom had handled the COVID mandates differently?

SA: Looking back on the way that governments, not just in California but around the world, responded to COVID, I’m sure there are things that would be done differently, and I’m sure public health officials would tell you that. One of the most controversial things were shutting down schools. Now, unfortunately, that became a sort of political litmus test. If you were liberal, you were supposed to support shutting down schools. If you were conservative, you were supposed to oppose it. Well, there could have been a happy medium. Right from the beginning of the pandemic, we could have dealt with school closures in a different way. Especially in the state like California where there’s a vast amount of open ground and there’s usually pretty clement weather, we could have decided that we were going to take schooling outside for a few months. That would’ve, with hindsight, been a very effective way to keep the schools open and keep people safe.
But if you talk to people in Shasta County who oppose those lockdowns, it’s a sort of short leap from saying, “Well, look, I disagree with the lockdown,” to then saying, “And I think the lockdown was a conspiracy to deprive us of our liberties.” And that’s where the rhetoric loses me. I think it was perfectly legitimate to be worried about the effects of lockdowns and worried about the effects on children in particular of shutting schools. That to me is legitimate. But taking it to that next level, believing in the malevolence of all of these different actors, and then quite often embracing a rhetoric of violence in response to that, for the life of me, I don’t see how democratic discourse survives when people turn to weaponry and to languages of violence when they have a disagreement.

JW: So that’s the story of Shasta County, California where the far right succeeded. The other part of your book reports on another small town where a similar right-wing extremist movement attempted a similar takeover but were defeated, Sequim, 100 miles north of Seattle in Clallam County, Washington State. I got to say, I never heard of Sequim.

SA: Sequim is a marvelous place. It’s on the Olympic Peninsula. It’s one of the most beautiful spots within America. It’s basically lush rainforest kind of climate, and it’s in the foothills of Cascade Mountains. If you look at Sequim and you listen to the people there in a normal time, not the COVID era, not the Trump era, but in a normal time, it’s really a calm, quiet, gentle place. Something happened in 2019. They ended up with a QAnon mayor getting control of city council. And at the time, now unfortunately, it’s a dime a dozen, you can go all over the country and find people who adhere to these conspiracy theories, but back in 2019, William Armacost was the first elected official in the country, as far as I know, to explicitly say in public, “Hey, I think QAnon’s interesting. They’ve got good things to say.”
The media went crazy. People from all over the country went to Sequim to try and find out what was going on. I was one of the journalists who went up there, and it seemed to me what was happening was not so much that there’d been this massive jag rightward in Sequim politics, it was more that an awful lot of people had sat out local elections, as they do. There’s very low voter turnout around the country for local elections. It’s about one in five or one in four people. And in Sequim, the people who had sat the election out tended to be liberal, and they tended to be paying more attention to either state politics or national politics. And the result was almost in the fit of absence of mind, the residents of Sequim found themselves with this far right city government.
And like in Shasta County, the effects were immediately dysfunctional, and when the pandemic broke out, not just dysfunctional, but it had huge life consequences. Because just like in Shasta County, you had people on the ground there refusing to abide by anything the public health officer, a young doctor called Allison Berry, was recommending or mandating. And so you had this tremendously vitriolic and very unpleasant local debate. And all of the anger and rage that was occurring at the national level in the Trump era was percolating downwards. And this idyllic little community – and I misspoke when I said it was in the foothills of the Cascades, I meant it was in the foothills of the mountains on the Olympic Peninsula. But that little town in the foothills of the mountains suddenly finds itself a ground zero in the cultural wars and the political wars that are sort of wreaking havoc nationally in America.
The reason I focus so much on Sequim in my book is because it’s a small place and it’s an eminently ordinary place. My narrative really drills down and says, “Well, what happens when people stop getting on with each other? What happens when this farmer or this retiree or this local business owner suddenly starts about QAnon theories or suddenly starts recycling these rumors about Black Lives Matters, or suddenly starts cycling rumors about the public health officer being out to poison children?” Well, not surprisingly, when that kind of level of rumor starts circulating, local communities get very, very tense very, very quickly because everyone knows everyone else. And so when you start having these rumors, it’s about your neighbor or your friend or your relative, and nobody knows who to trust anymore. And Sequim really went down the rabbit hole for a couple of years.

JW: And then the liberals of Sequim put an end to the far-right-wing government. Tell us how that happened.

SA: A few dozen people by 2021 were so angry at what was going on in their little town that they organized something called the Sequim Good Governance League. This was really cross ideological. They had liberals, they had old-time hippies, they had Democrats, they had independents, but they also had quite a number of common-sense Republicans, the sort of Republicans who may have voted for Mitt Romney but were damned if they were going to support the chaos that Trump was unleashing and that Trump’s local acolytes were unleashing. So the Sequim Good Governance League started pounding the sidewalks, basically doing really old-fashioned retail organizing. They began knocking on doors. They began holding community meetings. They began going to church groups. They began talking to people on the ground about what all of this meant and how it was playing out on their streets. It took a few years. And in actual fact, some fairly good things start happening in Sequim. And they start happening quite quickly once the Sequim Good Governance League got underway.

JW: Last question: you quote a 74-year-old libertarian-leaning military veteran who ran the local talk radio station in Shasta County. He told you that hot heads have always come and gone in American politics, that COVID and Trump magnified all of the community’s divides, but eventually, he said, things will quiet down. You quote him as saying, “Like anything, if the water roils up, it settles. In the long run, things will settle down again like they always do.”
I wonder if you think that, if Trump loses the election this November, the steam will go out of the MAGA movement that’s been trying to take over local governments and school boards? Will the end of Trump be the end of MAGA as a powerful force in America’s small towns?

SA: He’s probably got a point that that level of anger is just too exhausting to keep up year-in, year-out. It’s too traumatizing, it’s too damaging to our social fabric. And sure, there’re going to be some people, there’re going to be some internet trolls. There’re going to be some political figures who thrive on that kind of anger. I mean, Donald Trump likes nothing better than keeping his audience, so the fever pitch of anger. But eventually the broader mass of the American public’s going to get bored with that. It’s a tired, tired show at this point. I think what you’re seeing with Trump is you’re seeing the last hurrah of this foul movement that he’s unleashed in America. What you’re seeing in Trump’s performances on the debate stage, on his speaker days and so on, you are seeing the performance of a tired entertainer, somebody who’s just done the same thing too many times and now really it doesn’t seem fresh, and it doesn’t seem transgressive. It just seems banal.
I think that debate the other day when he just started ranting and raving about immigrants in the crudest way imaginable, I think that debate may be a turning point and that a critical number of independent voters are going to look at that and they’re going to just say, “Look, it doesn’t matter if I’m conservative or liberal, it matters if I have the ability to look in the mirror and say, ‘Look, I voted for somebody I can hold my head up high saying I voted for.’” And after Trump’s performance the other day, I just don’t see how anyone can look in the mirror and with good conscience say that they’re happy morally with that choice. So I do think there’s a pretty good chance that if he loses this movement starts to burn out – it’s not going to happen overnight, but it certainly could start to burn out as people just realize, ‘This is too tiring. It’s too dysfunctional. It’s too ugly.’

JW: Sasha Abramsky – his new book is Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America. Sasha, thanks for talking with us today.

SA: Always a pleasure, Jon. Thanks so much.