About last year: PolitiFact, the independent fact-checking website run by the Poynter Institute, bestowed another odious distinction on President-elect Donald Trump. The organization dubbed a statement uttered by Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance the “Lie of the Year.”
PolitiFact has christened a Lie of the Year every year since 2009, and in only two of those years did statements made by Democrats earn the top prize. In 2011, PolitiFact slammed Democrats for claiming that Republicans would vote to end Medicare, and in 2013, the organization concluded that President Barack Obama’s solemn promise—”If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan”—was plainly untrue. But in every other year, PolitiFact has singled out right-leaning purveyors of mistruths.
This year is no different. In 2024, PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year is the claim by Trump that Haitian migrants in an Ohio town were “eating people’s pets.”
“With a brazen disregard for facts, Donald Trump and his running mate repeatedly peddled a created story that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants were eating pet dogs and cats,” observes the organization.
The Republican ticket’s disregard for the facts in this case was indeed brazen. It was completely untrue that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pet dogs and cats. What happened was that various concerns about migrants supposedly hunting birds in public parks in Springfield, Ohio, got lumped together with an unrelated story of someone killing a pet cat in a completely different town. It’s a textbook example of why you shouldn’t automatically believe everything you see on social media. Trump and Vance did real harm here, and it’s absolutely fair to call them out for smearing the immigrant population of Springfield, Ohio.
But was this really the Lie of the Year?
Hellbound and Down 