“I saw people on television” said the baseless and xenophobic criminal, “A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it,” he insisted. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Trump and his allies have seized upon the conspiracy theory—which mainly targets Haitian immigrants—in recent days, with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), X owner Elon Musk, and the House Judiciary GOP amplifying it with the help of cat memes.

“President Trump will deport migrants who eat pets,” a Trump campaign account said on social media on Monday. “Kamala Harris will send them to your town next. Make your choice, America.”

The theory appears to have originated from a handful of viral social media posts, including a Facebook commenter who said that a cat belonging to a friend of a neighbor’s daughter had been found hanging from a tree.

There is no truth to the claims, however. A spokesperson for the city of Springfield told CBS News on Tuesday that there had been “no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused” by immigrants.

Springfield’s police department told the Springfield-News Sun that it had received no reports related to the matter.

The White House similarly pushed back on the “dangerous” claims earlier on Tuesday.

“This kind of misinformation is dangerous,” national security spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday. “Because there will be people that believe it, no matter how ludicrous and stupid it is. And they might act on that kind of misinformation and act on it in a way where somebody can get hurt so it needs to stop.”

So then Donald Trump called for ABC News to be shut down during a rant about the way he was treated by the network during his presidential debate against Kamala Harris.

The former president called into Fox & Friends on Wednesday morning to complain that he’d faced a “rigged deal” with the debate, with moderators “correcting everything” he said while “not correcting with her.” Asked why he felt moderators hadn’t corrected Harris in the same way, Trump answered: “Because they’re dishonest.”

“I think ABC took a big hit last night,” he continued. “To be honest, they’re a news organization—they have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.”

Trump used the interview to repeatedly complain that the debate was “three-to-one,” meaning he felt that moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis were on Harris’ side against him.

“The press is so dishonest in this country, it’s amazing,” Trump said. “Now, I didn’t mind because frankly I was pretty sure that’s what they would do. CNN was much more honorable—the debate we had with Biden was a much more honorably run debate.”

The CNN moderators in June notably did not fact-check or question statements made by Trump or Biden during that event, as per agreed rules.

Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt cited a report from Media Research Center—a conservative group which describes itself as dedicated to combating “falsehoods and censorship” in the news media in order to “preserve America’s founding principles and Judeo-Christian values.” The report, which was covered by right-wing outlets including Breitbart and the Daily Wire, claimed Muir’s show, World News Tonight, was unfairly biased against Trump and in favor of Harris.

The show then aired a compilation of what Earhardt described as the “lies” Harris told about Trump during the debate, including her statements that Trump “plans on implementing” Project 2025 and “will sign a national abortion ban” if he returns to the White House.

The montage also included Harris paraphrasing Trump’s comment about there being “very fine people on both sides” of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—Trump later said at the same 2017 press conference that neo-Nazis and white nationalists should be “condemned totally.”

It further showed Harris saying during the debate that Trump has said “there will be a bloodbath” if “the outcome of this election is not to his liking.”

“‘Bloodbath’ was referring to the economy,” Trump said after the compilation ended. “Everybody loved the term, because as soon as they heard the word—it’s sort of a vicious word.”

He also said that the full context of his quotes on Charlottesville make it clear that what he’d said was “absolutely perfect.”

“ABC News knew that, everybody knew that, frankly,” Trump said. “I think they lost a lot of credibility.”

Members of the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board on Wednesday gave former President Donald Trump decidedly poor marks for his debate performance against Vice President Kamala Harris.

In a reaction roundup, many of the editors slammed ABC News for what they claimed was a biased moderation of the debate that saw Trump get put on the defensive for much of the night.

Editor Barton Swaim gave a similarly scathing review of Trump's debate.

"As for Mr. Trump’s presentation Tuesday night, it was terrible," he contended. "He let Kamala Harris provoke him to anger, ranted about the 2020 election, constantly interrupted his own assertions, and failed to capitalize on obvious vulnerabilities. Mr. Trump was handed an opportunity to call attention to Ms. Harris’s many and dramatic policy reversals, but he spoke in circumlocutionary fragments."

Editor Kyle Peterson, meanwhile, singled out the moment where Harris mentioned Trump's rally crowds as the point where the debate went off the rails for the former president.

In fact, he notes, it was shortly after that where Trump began ranting about false claims of Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio and then ranted about World War III, purportedly fraudulent FBI statistics, and the January 6th riot at the United States Capitol building.

"What of this is supposed to reassure suburbanites who worry that Mr. Trump is too erratic to put back in the Oval Office?" he asked.

Nevertheless, Trump claimed the evening had gone well for him. “I’ve been told I’m a good debater,” he said. “I think it was one of my better debates. Maybe my best debate.”