Donald Trump Jr. Piles on With Racist Comments About Haitians

Amid fallout from Donald J. Trump’s debunked claim about immigrants from Haiti stealing and eating people’s pets in a small Ohio city, the former president’s oldest son weighed in with his own aspersions on Haitians.

Donald Trump Jr. suggested on Thursday that Haitian immigrants were less intelligent than people from other countries, and claimed that there was demographic evidence to back this up. He provided none.

“You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average I.Q. — if you import the third world into your country, you’re going to become the third world,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Charlie Kirk on Real America’s Voice, a conservative broadcasting network. “That’s just basic. It’s not racist. It’s just fact.”

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Mr. Trump has emerged as a key campaign surrogate for his father. A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Both Trumps have recently advanced the debunked claim that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio. On their social media accounts, they have each posted memes of cats and dogs, nodding at the false claims and implicitly reminding people of the Trump campaign’s hard-line immigration stance.

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In the aftermath of the debate, there were a number of bomb threats in Springfield, closing its City Hall, schools and a motor vehicles office.

Mr. Trump’s fixation on Springfield drew a heated rebuke on Friday from President Biden, who noted that Haitian immigrants were “under attack in our country right now” and who appeared to denounce Mr. Trump without naming him.

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