Trump and Vance Are Using One of America’s Oldest Racist Playbooks

One of the strangest moments in American presidential campaign history has to be Donald Trump’s insistence in his recent debate with Kamala Harris that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in the Ohio town of Springfield. Of course, this racist garbage wasn’t true, but the former President and his vice-presidential pick could not help but repeat these false rumors day after day.

But as an infectious disease epidemiologist and an HIV+ scientist, what has really caught my attention is Ohio Senator JD Vance’s claim that immigrants were bringing communicable diseases, including HIV/AIDS, to Springfield, a town nestled between Dayton and Columbus in southwestern Ohio.

It’s easy to debunk these lies; there’s publicly available data at AIDSVu.org and the Clark County Combined Health District’s own webpage proving that Vance’s claims are nonsense. But why make such incendiary charges in the first place, if they are not true, particularly about your own constituents? I would assume there are plenty of other attacks to be made on their political opponents that at least are grounded in reality.

History holds a clue to what might be going on here. For generations, demagogic American politicians have linked marginalized communities—whether immigrants, people of color, or women–with infectious diseases. From the attacks on the Chinese community in San Francisco in 1900 when bubonic plague emerged in the city, and the roundup only a few years later of thousands of American women across the country under the Chamberlain-Kahn Act for ostensibly spreading venereal disease, these kinds of campaigns have happened throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, with HIV, Ebola, and Covid. Some of the most gruesome stories are largely unknown—such as the use of kerosene and a chemical called Zyklon B, made famous by the Nazis, to delouse Mexican migrant workers in El Paso from 1917 until well into the 1970s. 

In some cases, these incidents stemmed from the panic and paranoia of real outbreaks, in which infectious-disease control could act as a smokescreen for crackdowns on immigrant communities. But even the threat of disease could be weaponized to enforce political goals. Under the Chamberlain-Kahn Act, women could be arrested for any reason whatsoever; over 30,000 women were swept into detention during World War I, in a campaign that continued into the 1950s and was less about controlling sexually transmitted diseases than controlling women’s behavior and bodies.

What all these sorry tales have in common is that they are about determining who belongs here in the US, who is a “real American,” and who is an interloper. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has said, this is a “blood-and-soil nationalism that holds some Americans as more American than others. It is to say that there are some people who, on account of their origins or those of their parents and grandparents, cannot be full and equal members of the national community.” Trump and Vance’s claims go further than that: They are positioning immigrants as an imminent danger to the true Volk, the true people. In this construction, immigrants are a pathogen that must be purged, cleansed from the body of the nation.

All this should send shivers down your spine. Already, the impact of Trump and Vance’s false claims have been felt in Springfield, with hospitals, schools, city buildings, and a local university receiving bomb threats or canceling events out of an abundance of caution after other menacing e-mails.

Back in the early days of HIV, Senator Jesse Helms spewed a special kind of hatred against people living with HIV and members of the LGBTQ community. In the early 1990s, a spin-off of the activist group ACT UP decided they had had enough. They put a giant condom on the senator’s house with the words “Helms is deadlier than a virus.”

The impact of Trump and Vance’s attacks are creating a crisis in Springfield where there was none, terrorizing citizens of that small town and surely affecting their mental health, disrupting medical care, education, city services with bomb threats. HIV isn’t the problem in Springfield; it’s these two men who have decided to use a community for their own political ends and a press corps that can only wonder if it’s good politics.