When my family moved back to the United States from East Africa in the mid-1980s, one might have thought it was a peak time of compassion for people suffering in faraway places. A glittering group of music superstars had recorded “We Are the World,” a smash hit charity single to raise money and awareness for the victims of a brutal famine that had gripped my mother’s home country, Ethiopia.

But when I told my new grade school classmates of my origins, I was met with cruel taunts. I was awfully fat for an Ethiopian, one said with a snigger. Must be nice to be able to have access to so much food, another joked. At the time, this was puzzling and upsetting — I had moved from Kenya, not Ethiopia, to my father’s home state, Minnesota. But the facts didn’t matter. These unkind remarks did the job the bullies hoped they would: They made me feel like an alien, an unwelcome stranger.

We live in even crueler times now, with humanitarian catastrophes unfolding on several continents, but the response of the wealthy world has been to demand tighter borders and higher fences. There is no blockbuster charity single raising money for starving refugees from the civil war raging in Sudan. And now, the cruel taunts come not just from schoolyard bullies and cranks on the political fringes, but from the lips of a man who stood on the presidential debate stage on Tuesday, a former president who once again has a coin-flip shot at regaining the most powerful office in the world.

And so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by that lowest of moments at the debate, when Donald Trump repeated a vile, baseless claim that Haitian immigrants were killing and eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio. This allegation appears to stem from viral social media posts and statements at public meetings. It was picked up by some of the most rancid figures at the fringe of the MAGA-verse, then quickly hopscotched from there to a social media post by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and finally to the debate stage, sputtered by Trump himself.

There is a temptation to treat this as yet another Trump rant, a disgusting lie about immigrants like the ones he uttered as he began his presidential bid in 2015, describing migrants crossing the border with Mexico as rapists and criminals. He’s done it time and again since. He is the master of exaggerated and fabricated claims against the boogeymen, a skill he has used for decades to polarize public opinion and raise his profile and power at the expense of others.

But there is something particularly insidious about this claim, uttered at this time, from that stage. Food and pets are, to use a Freudian term, highly overdetermined symbols in our political life. They are capable of receiving and holding a multiplicity of very potent meanings, transmitting deep messages about identity and belonging.

What you eat is an instant way to communicate the most basic forms of human connection. There’s a reason American political rituals cluster around cookouts, clambakes and fish fries. The human need for sustenance — food and water to feed the physical body — is universal. But what is also universal is the meaning food carries. Everyone has a personal version of Proust’s madeleines, a food that immediately and ineffably names who you are, where you come from, the culture that made you. Food is a powerful signifier, of both belonging and exclusion.

Relishing the native foods of different states is a staple of the campaign trail. Doing it right — Tim Walz knowing what a Nebraskan Runza is — comes off as wholesome. Doing it wrong — eating pizza with a fork — earns derision. Liking the wrong things — Barack Obama’s complaint about the price of arugula at Whole Foods comes to mind — signals being out of touch with “ordinary Americans,” whatever that means.

Meanwhile, pets, in politics and in life, are the ultimate humanizer. Richard Nixon invoked his family’s cocker spaniel, Checkers, in his famous speech aimed at beating corruption allegations and saving his bid for the vice presidency in 1952. Presidential pets become celebrities in their own right, from Franklin Roosevelt’s beloved Fala to Bill Clinton’s loyal chocolate lab, Buddy, who seemed to be his only friend in the brutal days of his investigation and ultimate impeachment.

Even relatively mild mistreatment of a pet is political poison: Mitt Romney was widely mocked for admitting that he had taken his family dog, an Irish Setter named Seamus, on a 12-hour family road trip in a crate lashed to the roof of the car. It reinforced the notion that Romney, a very wealthy former management consultant, was cold and unfeeling. And don’t get me started on Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, who seems to have tanked her chances of being named Trump’s running mate by admitting in a memoir that she had shot her dog Cricket in a gravel pit because, among other sins, the dog annoyed her on a hunt.

And so it cannot be an accident that these resonances have been fused in an allegation against Haitians, a people who have long stood in for a kind of universal other in America — a completely racialized symbol of dark, chaotic forces that must be held at bay by the forces of white civilization.

There is a long and grim tradition of demonizing Haitians in the United States, one that cannot be separated from Haiti’s heroic history. It became the first Black republic in 1804 after its enslaved peoples rose up to expel the European colonists who had put them in chains. Their success so shook the United States, a nation dependent on slavery for its wealth, that the American government embarked on a ruthless campaign of isolation and manipulation of the young nation of Haiti. The legacies of those policies have lingered to the present.

Indeed, even as it has offered temporary protection to some Haitians who have fled the extraordinary violence currently plaguing Haiti, the Biden administration has continued the long, bipartisan American tradition of deep hostility toward Haitians seeking safety from violence and starvation: It has deported at least 20,000 Haitians since 2021 despite the bloody, politically motivated gang warfare that has engulfed the country. In 2021, videos emerged of border agents on horseback menacing many of the thousands of Haitians at the U.S.-Mexico border, pelting them with epithets. This wild new fiction, combining foodways with pets, seems almost precision engineered to dehumanize Haitians.

You can tell how powerful this type of slur is by how quickly and vociferously it has animated so many on the right. Figures who flirt with the mainstream have eagerly jumped into the fray. The conservative culture warrior Christopher Rufo has offered a $5,000 bounty for anyone who can find proof that a Haitian immigrant had in fact eaten a cat. It is not hard to imagine how this could quickly escalate into vigilante violence against Haitians in America. On Thursday, city officials in Springfield, most of whom have pushed back against the false allegations, said they had received bomb threats, prompting the evacuation of city buildings.

Over the past few weeks, as the euphoria of replacing the oldest ever presumptive nominee for the presidency with a younger and more vigorous candidate has worn off, I’ve realized that something about the strategy of calling Trump weird has never quite sat right with me. Yes, he cuts a comical figure, with his blotchy orange complexion, his vertiginously cantilevered hairdo, his goofy dances, his bizarre obsession with Hannibal Lecter. It has also been a welcome path to sidestepping the tiresome debates over what it means to “normalize” Trump rather than treat him as a wild aberration in American politics, something that has become harder to justify given that he won the presidency and could quite possibly win it again in November.

But the past few days have convinced me that as much as we might want to laugh in the face of his absurdity, Trump is not weird. He is far more sinister and dangerous than that. And disbelieving laughter could, I fear, blind us to moments when truly unacceptable lines are crossed.

Kamala Harris seemed to sense this in the debate. When asked in an interview with CNN about Trump’s questioning of her Black identity, she was widely praised for shrugging it off as an irrelevant question and refusing to make her candidacy about identity. But when she was asked about it again on the debate stage, I was glad that she took a different tack. She did not speak about herself; instead she used the question to highlight Trump’s decades-long history of vile racism, from his discrimination against Black tenants in his apartment buildings to his demonization of the Central Park Five.

Trump may be diminished. But in his elevation of something akin to blood libel against a group of blameless legal immigrants who came to America from their strife-torn nation in search of a better life through hard work, like so many immigrants to our shores before them, he has proved himself a dangerous and malevolent figure whose menace must be confronted and defeated, fully and frontally, in this election.