And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it has – false accusations of killing pets have become the latest issue at the centre of American political debates. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump began by making false accusations about Haitian migrants killing and eating pets in Ohio during his debate with Democratic rival Kamala Harris. However, on September 12, Democratic supporters online started making claims of their own – that Trump’s running mate JD Vance killed his family’s cat. There’s even an article from the fact-checking website PolitiFact that verifies the story. Turns out, however, the fact-checking article is fake. PolitiFact never published that article.
Social media users have a new theory about why US presidential candidate Donald Trump made false accusations that Haitian immigrants were eating pets during his debate with rival Kamala Harris. They say that it was an effort to distract from stories that Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, apparently killed his family’s cat. Pro-Democratic accounts started circulating these claims on September 12 (examples here and here). Together, these posts garnered more than 1.6 million views on X.
Social media users have a new theory about why US presidential candidate Donald Trump made false accusations that Haitian immigrants were eating pets during his debate with presidential rival Kamala Harris. They say that it was an effort to distract from stories that Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, apparently killed his family’s cat. Pro-Democratic accounts started circulating these claims on September 12 (examples here and here). Together, these posts garnered more than 1.6 million views on X.
To support these claims, these social media users published a screengrab of a Google search that brings up an article on the fact-checking site PolitiFact, which says that the cat killing story is "mostly true". The article says that in Vance's memoir, '"Hillbilly Elegy", he admitted to "running over the family pet".
In a post featuring the screengrab of the Google search results, one social media user said Vance was spreading the fake story about Haitians killing and eating pets “bc he’s trying to bury these google results deeper wtf”.
A fake Google search
It turns out that the fact-checking article doesn’t exist and the screengrab of the Google search also isn’t real.
First of all, if you search "JD Vance" and "cat" in Google, then you won’t pull up the results shown in the screengrab.
Next, there are no articles that claim Vance killed his cat on politifact.com. Moreover, the screengrab says that this accusation was made by Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. But if you search for Pritzker’s name, there are no articles that come up where he claims that Vance killed his own cat.
Our team contacted the editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, Katie Sanders. She confirmed that the site hasn’t done any articles on the claims that Vance killed his cat.
"That looks like a doctored version of a screengrab of a Google search that we included in a fact check we did about J. B. Pritzker," Sanders said.
Our team also took a look at a digital version of "Hillbilly Elegy". When we did a search for the word cat, we didn’t find any scenes where Vance describes killing the family cat.
Vance does say in the book that he owned two dogs.
Vance has also been plagued by another fake rumour about the contents of "Hillbilly Elegy". People often cite this fake quote from the book about Vance having sex with a couch.
