Unless you are very into politics or watch a lot of cable news, you’ve probably never heard of U.S. Sen. Bill Hagerty. I do this for a living and even I had to double-check that he represents Tennessee.
Hagerty very infrequently pops up on cable news, usually Fox News or Fox Business Network where he calmly says his piece and, like almost all Republicans in Congress, tolerates or even supports Donald Trump’s worst tendencies. After all, to be a Republican representative or senator in good standing, you must – at a minimum – not cross the former president. For good measure, you may even lend credence to his lie that the 2020 election was stolen, which Hagerty has.
On Wednesday, the senator walked onto the set of CNN’s The Source, where Kaitlan Collins asked a question that, for a normal politician in a normal political party, would be a layup. Unfortunately for Hagerty, her query was about a baseless claim Trump made during his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris the night before.
Trump decided that a debate watched by more than 67 million people would be the perfect venue to puke up a half-cooked rumor pushed by far-right social media accounts claiming Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio are stealing people’s pets and eating them.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he alleged. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”
Trump was fact-checked by ABC News’s moderators in real-time, a development that annoyed Republicans such as Hagerty. Officials in Springfield said they have no reports of any such ghoulishness. Trump’s running mate JD Vance claimed that his office has received calls claiming migrants are stealing people’s pets, which makes sense because the first thing you should do if your pet is stolen is call at least one of your U.S. senators instead of the police.
About 24 hours after Trump face-planted in the debate, there was Hagerty on CNN complaining that the moderators “were fact-checking him right, left, and center” while “never fact-checking her.”
One reason Trump may have been fact-checked so much was the fact that he made at least 33 false claims during the debate to Harris’s one. Not only did he make false claims, but he made wildly false claims, including his allegation that some states allow babies to be aborted after birth and his insistence that “everybody” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. Those lies are nothing new for Trump, but he managed to add a fresh one to his already towering silo of bullshit – the aforementioned migrant nonsense.
Thankfully, Collins couldn’t resist and brought up Trump’s migrant smear to Hagerty, which resulted in this exchange:
COLLINS: One of the fact checks, though, had to be about the Haitian immigrants. Do you believe that he should not have waded into that, given officials in that city say there’s no evidence of it?
HAGERTY: Well, he talked about evidence. I’ve heard conflicting reports. There’s conflicting evidence. There’s a lot of information on the internet that this is happening. But here’s the real problem–
COLLINS: Yeah, but no real, credible evidence from the people running the city.
Hagerty cut bait and pivoted to Republican talking points about immigration and the border. The segment moved on, but the self-beclowning was already done.
“There’s a lot of information on the internet that this is happening.”
And there you have it. A U.S. senator – a Vanderbilt University Law School graduate, no less – on national television citing “the internet” as his source to explain why the leader of his party just might have a point when alleging that illegal aliens are eating cats.
The Republican Party is beyond parody at this point.
Watch above via CNN.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
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