I visited Springfield, Ohio: The town trashed by Trump's Haitian lies

This was a lie but let’s get a little fancy and say it was an allegory. JD, being a Yale man, knows what an allegory is. DJT, being a moron, thinks allegory skin is what Louis Vuitton uses to make Ivanka’s handbags. Nevertheless, he was hypnotised by the bonfire his sidekick lit and threw a can of kerosene on top to see if it would explode. It did, and here we are. And there Springfield is - famous for all the wrong reasons.

Weeks later, the city is in recovery mode. From the bomb scares, the temporary school closures, the neo-Nazis crawling out of the sewage drains to threaten anyone who doesn’t meet the twisted standards of their Aryan wet dream. I find it difficult to write about Trump and Vance’s part in all of this so let’s talk about something more pleasant, a more uplifting vision of what America has been in the past and could be again once those two nitwits head off on their boys’ trip to Mykonos.

JD Vance (Image: free) LET’S TALK about Wapakoneta, the hometown of Neil Armstrong who as every member of Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene’s household knows played the lead role in the Deep State’s classic science fiction movie about man’s ingenuity and limitless capacity to dream big, the Apollo 11 Moon Landing. So enduringly devious has been this 1969 story that every sane person in the world now believes NASA did go to the moon. This, as any lunar enthusiast will tell you, is not the same as being wired to the moon, like Majorie and her friends.

I arrived there in the late afternoon, having been alerted by a sign to the side of the highway for the Augliazie County Neil Armstrong Airport. Something I’ve noticed on my journey across the United States is there are no rules against small towns having grand airports. In Scotland you can lay down an airstrip wherever you want but you better not call it an airport unless you’re on a Hebridean island, where airstrips on beaches get bonus points for being breathtakingly gorgeous, or have a population of at least a couple of hundred thousand. Wapakoneta is slap bang in the middle of rural Ohio. It has 9,000 residents and connecting flights to New York for as little as $235.

Wapakoneta presents a more orderly vision of America. Squint your eyes as you walk down the main street and you might believe you’ve stepped onto the set of Back to the Future, the 1950s scenes where Marty gets slapped around by Biff. Neil Armstrong would have been a friend of McFly, a smart kid from a middle-class family possessing the mid-western values of hard work and community spirit. He was born in Wapakoneta, left for a few years, and settled back in the town through his teenage years. By then he had picked up the flying bug and set his sights on being a pilot. His childhood home on Benton Street is a short drive back in the direction of the highway.

There wasn’t too much to look at. The Rotary Club has mounted a sign on the grass verge outside the house. I can’t imagine this was appreciated by the current residents, having strangers hanging around, peering through their windows while they’re eating their meals. 

Uniquely on this trip, it was impossible to tell walking around the neighbourhood there was an election going on. No lawn signs, no posters, no bumper stickers. I’d walked through different suburbs in different states and always felt a bit sad when I came across a Harris/Walz sign on one front lawn and a Trump/Vance sign right next door, knowing years of frostiness between the two households lay ahead. There was none of that discord in Neil Armstrong’s patch. An appropriate mark of respect for a hero who brought together this country to watch his one giant leap.

A mural in an alley downtown on September 16, 2024 in Springfield, Ohio. Springfield, home to a large Haitian community, was thrust into the national spotlight after former President Donald Trump accused immigrants of eating pets. (Photo by Luke Sharrett/Getty Images) 

Except there’s always one, isn’t there? I found him when I took one small step around the corner. Someone had draped their little bungalow in giant Trump flags, including one inviting passers-by to go “F*k Your Feelings” - in a family neighbourhood where elderly couples go for their morning walk, where kids cycle their bikes, on a street where a great American story took flight into outer space.

Not that Springfield is without problems. It doesn’t need a multiple bankrupt/former game show host to point out deindustrialisation and de-population has torn the economic heart out of Springfield. Just ask a local. I went to a pharmacy to pick up toothpaste and got into a conversation with Marissa at the counter. She was 28, had three young kids, and had lived in Springfield all her life. “This place was a shithole when I was kid, it’s a shithole now and it’ll be a shithole by the time my kids grow up,’’ she said.

You can see what she means when you drive around. Downtown is hollowed out. There’s uncollected garbage scattered in some neighbourhoods, and the achingly sad sight of homeless people pushing their possessions around in shopping trollies. None of this is unique to Springfield, sadly. On my travels I’ve come across communities like this in California, Nevada, Arizona, Nebraska, Wisconsin, everywhere really.

What is unique about Springfield is the influx of Haitian immigrants. According to Robinson, this started about a decade ago as the city underwent a mini-revival. Incoming manufacturing companies couldn’t find people to join the workforce so the city had to look elsewhere. In 2014, the City Commission passed a “resolution of support” welcoming immigrants to settle in the community.

A decade later an estimated 12,000 Haitians are living in Springfield, approximately 20% of the city’s population. The impact has been widely reported. Rents have gone up, pricing out long-time residents. The schools are desperately scratching around for interpreters to help assimilate a fivefold increase in Haitian students. A third of the babies born in the city’s hospitals are now Haitian, putting extra strains on an already under-funded health care system.

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It’s hard to believe that Trump and Vance have somehow stumbled to within a hundred miles of an actual truth but they have.

But the question is this, what are you going to do about it - are you going to muck in and help? Or are you going to encourage the worst instincts in the worst kind of people, divide a city, terrorise an immigrant community and the good people who are looking to help? I mentioned James McGregor in an earlier story. He is the CEO of an engineering company in Springfield and had the temerity to mention on national TV that some of his best employees were Haitian immigrants. “They’re here to work,’’ he said. His reward for this, I see in the New York Times, has been hundreds of death threats and a forced visit to the local gun store, where he broke a lifelong vow and bought a firearm to protect himself and his family. “I have struggled with the fact that now we’re going to have firearms in our house — like, what the hell?” he said.

Way to go, Donald! High five, JD!

The next morning, I got out of bed early, went to the bakers to pick up fresh bread and drove over to Snyder Park, a lovely green urban space set around Buck Creek, which runs right through the heart of Springfield. You should go there if you’re ever in town. It reminded me of Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow, another place you should go if you’re ever in town. I went there to feed the geese. Of course I did. I liked the circularity of it all. Feeding the geese as opposed to … well, you know.

Snyder Park - and its cat (Image: Lawrence Donegan) THE NEWS from Snyder Park is that the population of Canada geese is thriving. Of course. Some fool at the local Republican party office conceded Trump was talking nonsense about Haitians eating them but also said, “I’m not so sure when it comes to white ducks. There used to be a lot of ducks over at Snyder Park and they ain’t there anymore.”

This sounded like some Trump-level nonsense. Sure enough, I did some research on Canada geese - the things we all do in pursuit of a Pulitzer, right? - and it turns out they are extremely aggressive and predatory when it comes to other birds muscling into their patch. No wonder the ducks have buggered off to safer waters.

I also found out that Canada geese don’t like Aldi-brand sourdough. The only taker I had was a small, skinny ginger cat, who appeared out of a nearby bush not long after I started scattering my bread. A guy called Mike walked by with his fishing rod. There was a good spot for catching bass a little further down the creek. We watched the cat for a bit and got talking about the election. He said wasn’t sure who he was going to vote for, only that there was no way he wanted a woman as President. “I’m not sexist but I just don’t think it’s right,’’ he said. “I just feel like these male presidents in other countries would just stomp on her and I’m not here for that.”

With that, Gloria Steinem’s long-lost nephew headed off to catch a fish and I went back to the car park. When I got there I found an older guy had parked right next to me. He was sitting in the front seat, looking like he was enjoying his last cigarette. He told me his name was Jim and this was his spot every morning, a place to escape the stresses of looking after his sick mother. It was just me, him, and the ginger cat.

“He and one of his buddies live in that bush there,’’ Jim said. “I see them every day.”

“At least they’re not…. you know,’’ I said Jim looked like he could do with a smile and this was my best shot. But he just rolled his eyes.

“All that stuff was just so much……hockey puck. Everybody knows there ain’t nobody eating the cats and the ducks or whatever he says.”

Jim wasn’t much of a Trump fan but he was even less of a Joe Biden fan. (“I’m not the kind of person who hates but I really hate what he and Kamala have done, bringing all those people here.”) But more than anything he wasn’t a fan of Haitian immigrants.

“I don’t have anything against them. It’s that there’s too many of them.”

I got that. Even the Washington Post said the introduction of such a large immigrant community could have been handled better. I wondered if there was a level of immigration into the city that Jim would find acceptable. There was not.

Local man 'Jim' says he's tired of seeing immigrants (Image: Lawrence Donegan) “I just get tired of seeing them all the time. You know, they're driving better cars than we are, and wearing better clothes, eating better,’’ he said. “Nobody is comfortable in somebody else’s country, you would think. But they walk around like they own this place.”

We talked a bit longer but we didn’t really get anywhere and that was just fine. I was in town for 24 hours and Jim had been here for most of his life. I’m sure he thought only an idiot would drive all the way to Springfield just to feed the geese, and I thought I knew the well from which his views on Haitians and immigration had sprung. But I was a visitor and he was kind enough to talk to me. It was time to call a ceasefire.

We went our separate ways, Jim back home to look after his mother and me off north to Wisconsin, a long haul that gave me plenty of time to think about the twisted mind of Donald Trump. I know I called him a moron earlier but we all know he’s not, right?

Follow Lawrence Donegan at https://goodbyedonald.substack.com