Donald Trump: SIFTed

Did you watch the ABC 2024 presidential debate?

I did; here’s an analysis through SIFT-based lateral reading of a claim made by the former president. The candidates made many claims throughout the night; some were misleading, Trump positing that he had nothing to do with Project 2025 (though his policies and administration were the groundwork for the campaign). Some were unable to be verified because they depend on the future, like Harris’ declaration that Trump would sign a national abortion ban (his views on abortion are murky). One of the claims rose to the level that necessitated my further evaluation.

The claim by Donald Trump: In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats.

Donald Trump said that the people who came in, i.e., immigrants to Springfield, were eating the neighborhood cats and dogs. This is an extraordinary claim made by the former president that would be damning to the perception of immigrants in the United States. It can be a dangerous claim, too. People are protective of their pets; what happens if they associate a particular person via visual heuristics with an immigrant and conclude that this person is a threat to their furry loved ones? A lot is on the line here, so we must be accurate. At that moment, the moderator said ABC had talked to the city manager and found no evidence of Trump’s claims. That also draws suspicion: are they immediately shutting down the claim because it is damaging to perpetuate or because it is damaging to a partisan view? This applies both ways in either case, so we ought to investigate it.

I was skeptical of the claim; I think it is, at best, incredibly misleading, if not completely fabricated.

I started by asking if the claimant was immediately trustworthy, or could we completely write off the former president as a liar. Well, as the president, he has access to a lot of information, but he is also a politician, so we cannot immediately ascertain the veracity through his motives.

But his ethos, good or bad, is kind of irrelevant when you think about it. We want to say it is not true or is so because he is Trump, but we are human, prone to make errors or be right despite their reputation. So, it doesn’t matter if Trump has a bad record; the claim can be false according to his reputation or true despite it, and the statement stands on its own. So now, how do we approach the claim? I decided to use lateral reading.

S

We start, funny enough, by stopping. Stop reading with intent to share so you can digest the information before you spread falsehoods. This is a portion of the SIFT method that we will partially weave in to better determine whether the claim is likely true or false. The S, Stop, allows you a clear head so you can go further to the next letter.

I

I present the next step: Investigate the source. Summary perception of the source has been made available via your favorite essay tool, Wikipedia. We take a few keywords (namely the claimant + their claims + Wikipedia). In this case I searched Donald Trump immigrants eating cats Springfield Wikipedia; The results are below.

Immediately, the top result of Google’s SERP was Wikipedia, which had a page called Springfield, Ohio, with the cat-eating hoax. The page has an immense number of citations according to the page’s content page. According to their wiki, the claims being made are merely being amplified during the debate. Springfield officials stated there are no credible reports or evidence to support the claims made. This could be enough to conclude, but I am not satisfied. I doubt anyone will believe it if you simply link to Wikipedia, so we need to find the media that convinced the presidential candidate.

Upon further reading on the wiki page, we find there is a specific event that is being referenced on the stage: a video, and one in Canton, Ohio, not Springfield. I figured if we investigated the cat video being circulated, then we could see if there is an instance of an immigrant (a Haitian one, according to the Wiki page’s conspiracy) eating a cat at all. This would determine if claims were misleading by overgeneralizing a population, false by omission of key details (that the perpetrator was not an immigrant), or fabricated whole cloth with no materials to reference.

F

To find the right materials, we can use Wikipedia’s sources (if they’re credible ones). In essence, our next step is to find better coverage (the F in SIFT). If we do not use the linked sources at the bottom of the wiki page, we start a new search. Repeating the claims made by our claimant (Trump) in new SERPs, we find an article by the Canton Repository, a news site that matches the city where the unscrupulous act actually took place. The main points of the page were shown in the page, but are summarized by this:

• The video falsely claims the woman pictured is a Haitian immigrant in Springfield
• The Springfield City Manager stated there is no evidence of this occurring to cats or any other pets in Springfield by Haitian immigrants.
• The woman pictured, Allexis T. Ferrell, pleads not guilty by insanity in the ongoing court case against her

T

Further, if we decided to Trace each claim back (the last of our SIFT steps), we could finally find the original reports of the Canton woman who killed and ate a neighborhood cat.

This report, on the same website fact-checking Trump’s claims mentioned above, is dated August 17th, 2024, the day after the bodycam footage of the event was marked for.

I noticed that this page was edited on September 12th, so I used the Internet Wayback Machine to ensure I had, beyond doubt, evidence that was unobstructed.

The site allowed me to see earlier saved versions of the website, corroborating the version of events presented with only updated bodycams and the response from the police being added in the later version.

To me, this investigation is over. The claims that Trump made can only be true based on this evidence if you believe that the Canton resident is secretly a Haitian immigrant, and everyone has been lying about it since the beginning of the police reports.

So, in summary, Trump’s claims are completely bogus, based on false premises; he is the former president of the United States, perpetuating misinformation on a national stage and somewhat international setting. It is embarrassing to accidentally spread falsehoods, and unacceptable to purposefully do so. Now you know how to attempt discernment, I hope you’ll take on the responsibility of actively participating in checking before you post. 

-peyton