John Oliver had an Emmy-winning excuse for not having anything to say about this month’s presidential debate before now, taking last Sunday off as he and Last Week Tonight won two more Emmys (for Outstanding Scripted Variety Series and Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series).
But Oliver still felt it necessary to catch his audience up on the wild, unhinged events since, including laying the blame on JD Vance for creating all of the chaos surrounding Springfield, Ohio, out of thin air.
“Far from just repeating claims he’s heard, Vance has actually helped create much of the chaos he’s now trying to exploit,” Oliver said.
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“There’ve been plenty of cat-eating jokes since” the Sept. 10 debate, Oliver said. “But I still want to talk about this, both because the chaos Trump stirred up in Springfield is ongoing, and because it feels emblematic of his campaign.”
Schools and hospitals have shuttered temporarily and repeatedly due to bomb threats. The town’s Haitian residents are living in fear. And Trump has said he wants to visit Springfield, despite the town’s Republican mayor suggesting he stay away.
Oliver said the panic is all Vance’s fault, starting with a July letter the Springfield city manager sent to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, on which Vance sits. The letter asked for federal funding to support local programs intended to combat “a significant housing crisis” as well as the need for additional services for the Haitians who have moved to Springfield in recent years.
As Oliver—and others prior—pointed out, Springfield employers recruited many of those Haitian migrants specifically to hire job vacancies that locals weren’t filling. But, Oliver continued, Vance chose to read only part of the letter in a Senate hearing the day after receiving it, focusing on the problems and leaving out the solution, and then posted a release misclassifying the city manager’s letter as a “migrant crisis” instead of a housing one.
“I guess we now know it is a mistake to expect precise wording from Vance when it comes to anything Haita (sic) related,” Oliver quipped, referring to a clip in which the junior Ohio senator mispronounced the name of the island nation.
Nevertheless, Vance’s public misrepresentation of Springfield’s request in July sparked Fox News coverage, which then spread to other media outlets, then to X and Elon Musk posts, and then to a neo-Nazi group marching through Springfield in August hoisting swastika banners, with one of the group’s leaders addressing the city council.
Then, in late July, a photo circulated supposedly showing a Springfield man walking with a goose in his hand, but “as TMZ of all outlets reported,” it was a man in Columbus with two geese injured from a car accident. Social media took the photo and instead ran with rumors of duck-napping and duck-eating, and then a woman on Facebook posted claims of abused cats and more—though she later recanted and deleted the post, the damage was done. Vance added fuel to the fire Sept. 5 when he posted footage of his July speech linking the pet-eating rumors to Haitians.
“This pet-eating panic was built on nothing,” Oliver said. Even worse, Oliver said, quoting a Wall Street Journal article from Sept. 18, Vance knew it. “It turns out not long after his first post about Haitians eating pets, his campaign actually called the Springfield city manager, who remembers Vance’s staff asked point-blank: ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’ and he said: ‘I told him no.’”
Oliver added: “So Vance knew it was a lie this whole time. But instead of just admitting that. he and his campaign have been scrambling to dig up new bulls--t evidence—all of which either bears no resemblance to the claims he’s made, or falls apart at the slightest scrutiny.”
And to literally add insult to injury, Vance also spread rumors that Haitians were spreading communicable diseases such as TB and HIV, and insinuating that an 11-year-old Springfield boy who died in a school bus accident had actually been murdered by a Haitian. The boy’s parents have pleaded for their son’s death not to be exploited, even addressing the city council the night of the presidential debate.
“The last thing we need is to have the worst day of our lives violently and constantly shoved in our faces,” Aiden’s father said on Sept. 10, chastising Vance and Trump for making it seem as though their son would encourage hatred toward their neighbors.
“That man didn’t need any of this bullshit. and neither did Springfield,” Oliver said. “They didn’t ask for attention. they asked for help. Vance is the one who wanted attention.”
Oliver said that while Vance is not good at lots of things, “it turns out he’s pretty good at parroting racist lies like the spineless dips--t that he is.”
