By the time the Arizona Republican Party’s digital billboards urging Phoenix residents to “EAT LESS KITTENS” and “Vote Republican!” went up on Tuesday, the story they referred to had already been widely debunked.

The previous week, claims that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio, had begun circulating on social media. None of the reports had been substantiated, and local officials in Springfield — a small city where, in recent years, public services have been strained by a large influx of Haitian migrants — said they had seen no evidence that any of them were true. Major conservative media outlets had given them only fleeting attention.

But while the story has so far not proved credible, it has proved meme-able — and that has given it a life far beyond the right-wing internet.

For days, images and videos of former President Donald Trump and cats have proliferated online, delivered with a knowing wink and an understood endorsement of Trump’s hard-line immigration message. Their over-the-top imagery gives them the feel of an inside joke. A “just kidding” is implied, allowing political figures who might otherwise have hesitated to circulate debunked material to get in on it. The reality is beside the point.

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Memes Have a Regular Place in Politics Now

Memes have been a regular, if enigmatic, feature of American politics since the primordial days of social media. But the early months of the Trump-Harris race have offered a twist on this familiar phenomenon: More than once, memes that are mostly or completely detached from actual events have spilled off the internet into the three-dimensional reality of the campaign itself.

They are now on the billboards in Arizona and were, more significantly, on the debate stage Tuesday night, where Trump exclaimed: “The people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there!”

Trump’s debate remarks have themselves become a meme on the left since Tuesday, as musical remixes of his comments have ping-ponged around Instagram, TikTok and other social platforms, mocking the pet-eating claims while also prolonging their stay in the news cycle.

The attention has been unwelcome in Springfield, where tensions over immigration have flared since an 11-year-old boy was killed last year when a Haitian immigrant driving without a valid license crashed his minivan into a school bus. White supremacists have rallied in the city and denounced immigrants at local public meetings, and on Thursday several public buildings, including a school and the city hall, were evacuated after receiving bomb threats. At a City Commission meeting on Tuesday, the boy’s father, Nathan Clark, called Trump and JD Vance, his running mate and Ohio’s junior senator, “morally bankrupt” for using his son’s death for “political gain.”

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Some Republicans have questioned whether the attention to Springfield is even to Trump’s benefit.

“The GOP is getting distracted by these stories that are just not true,” said conservative commentator Erick Erickson, who argued that the pet panic was obscuring more substantive discussions about immigration. “You could have had actual conversations about what was happening,” he said of the debate. “The problem was not people eating pets.”

Yet, Trump’s politics have long been deeply intertwined with meme culture, and he and his allies have fervently embraced the Springfield memes as a means of keeping one of his central campaign themes, immigration, at the front of the campaign’s coverage.

“It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false,” Vance, who was one of the first prominent figures to amplify those rumors last week, wrote in the first of a pair of X posts on Tuesday night. He went on to air broader complaints about the impact of immigration on Springfield and to highlight Vice President Kamala Harris’ past support for granting asylum to Haitian migrants.

“In short, don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots,” he wrote. “Keep the cat memes flowing.”

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Some Memes are Believable AI Images

And they have. Most have been images and videos with the telltale uncanny sheen of artificial-intelligence image-generating programs. Some are baldly racist, like the image of Trump with a kitten under each arm, running from a pair of shirtless Black men. Others tend toward the absurd, like the picture of the former president in the cabin of a private jet filled to capacity with kittens and ducks. (There were also unsubstantiated reports of waterfowl being taken in Springfield.)

The kittens have spread across the social media feeds of conservative influencers, state Republican parties, Republican-led congressional committees and Trump himself. In a Truth Social post hours before taking the stage in Tuesday night’s debate with Harris, the former president uploaded an AI image of a platoon of cats in tactical gear and MAGA hats, cradling military-style rifles.

For years, meme politics of this sort have been a more natural fit for Republicans than for Democrats. Trump’s mix of right-wing politics, trolling and taboo-shattering transgression during his 2016 campaign fit neatly with the discontent and prankish instincts of the internet’s wilder fringes.

“We love our meme-makers,” Alex Bruesewitz, a Trump campaign adviser, said in a statement. “Meme-makers are truth-tellers, unlike the liberal mainstream media, and the left can’t meme.”

But Democrats have begun to close the meme gap this year, aided by the enthusiasm and atmosphere of improvisation that has attended Harris’ candidacy. The vice president arrived at her nomination amid a torrent of “brat” and coconut memes, which tried to recast her often-stiff malapropisms as evidence of a freewheeling sensibility akin to the internet’s own.

And they, too, have allowed the memes to become bigger than internet jokes, blurring the line between satire and misinformation.

Within minutes of Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate on July 15, an anonymous account on X claimed that Vance’s book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” includes a passage in which he describes having sex with a couch. The joke — which the X account had obliquely identified as a joke from the beginning — went rapidly, explosively viral, enough so that its creator soon made the post private. But the meme was swiftly embraced by the Harris campaign.

“JD Vance does not couch his hatred for women,” the campaign’s official X account posted later that month.

In his first rally speech as Harris’ running mate in August, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota told a crowd in Philadelphia that he could not wait to debate Vance — “if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.” As the crowd laughed, Walz added with a wink: “You see what I did there?”

The couch’s status as a satirical meme might have made it easier for the sort of Democratic politicians who sternly denounce disinformation campaigns to repeat it. The meme’s virality made it part of the political conversation — a status ratified by an Associated Press article debunking the joke, which the wire service later retracted.

Walz dropped the couch joke from his speeches after his first mention of it in Philadelphia. Trump, by contrast, posted five Springfield cat memes in the space of an hour on Thursday on his Truth Social account.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Charles Homans/Kenny Holston
c. 2024 The New York Times Company