Fox News’s Howard Kurtz pushed back on former President Trump’s claims about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, during an interview Sunday.
“Your famous line about Springfield, Ohio, and I take your point that 15 to 20,000 legal [Haitian immigrants] settling in that area causes a lot of friction,” Kurtz said on his show “MediaBuzz.” “But when you said, and you know it’s gone viral … ‘They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.’”
“You say [you’re] just reporting what had been said, but why not say now, ‘Well, look, that turned out not to be true,’” Kurtz continued, before Trump cut in.
The former president responded by saying he doesn’t “know if it’s true or not true,” and Kurtz later noted that the Springfield claims have “been debunked.”
Trump later remarked that “you can’t put 30,000 people into a 50,000-person town or city and expect this city to even survive or do well.”
“What they’ve done to Springfield, Ohio, is very, very unfair,” Trump said. “And, I mean, [there are] a lot of stories, there are a lot of other stories that I’ve heard that are horrible … haven’t said it. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t, but that’s a story that was reported, and I said that. Why don’t you go after the newspaper that wrote it?”
During a presidential debate against Vice President Harris last month, Trump falsely claimed Haitian migrants are “eating the dogs” in the Ohio city.
Springfield officials have previously denied that any such cases had been reported.
The Hill has reached out to the Trump campaign for comment.
