Perhaps the worst moment of the presidential debate for Donald Trump was when he started ranting about the alleged epidemic of pets being kidnapped, murdered and eaten. “In Springfield, they eat the dogs, they eat the cats, they eat the pets of the people who live there,” he screamed wildly.

ABC anchor David Muir noted gently that the Springfield city manager had reported nothing of the sort. “I’ve seen people on TV,” Trump replied weakly. “People on TV say, ‘My dog ​​was kidnapped and used for food.'”

The term Presidential has always been elastic, and in the Trump era its meaning has been stretched as much as a pair of pants worn for a week by a man who is 20 pounds too much for them. Yet even by the bloated standards of the times, Trump’s claim about the dogs was odd, ridiculous, and the opposite of presidential.

There is poetic justice here. Trump is the victim of the closed information ecosystem that enabled and sustained his political career.

The conservative movement was built on the premise that the main organs of knowledge – journalism, academia, science – were hopelessly and even deliberately libertarian. In response to this belief, the right created its own bubble in which only a claim originating within the movement itself can be considered true. Julian Sanchez once called this “epistemic closure,” meaning that the movement’s beliefs are not open to outside correction.

The lie that immigrants eat pets in Springfield, Ohio is a classic example of this method in action. The story originated on white supremacist websites that relentlessly promote the idea that non-white immigrants are dirty and dangerous. It quickly found its way from the far right into mainstream conservative outlets. Republicans seemed to think the idea provided them with an effective meme.

JD Vance, a key bridge between the Republican Party and elements of the radical right activated by Trump, played a key role. “Reports say the pets were kidnapped and eaten by people who were not supposed to be in this country,” Vance tweeted.

When reporters discovered that the story was baseless—the closest thing to a factual basis was apparently a woman in another city, Canton, who is not Haitian, who was arrested for killing a cat—Vance had a telling change of heart. “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false,” he acknowledged. But then he insisted that other facts about immigration were true. (“That local schools have struggled to keep up with newcomers who don’t speak English. That rents have risen so fast that many families in Springfield can’t afford a roof over their heads.”) And so he urged his “fellow patriots” to continue to spread the animal-killing lie:

This was a familiar mood on the right, a complacent indifference to the truth. The liberals would whine and they would win.

And that’s exactly what seemed to happen in the short term. The wild story spread and was gleefully repeated by his Republican colleagues in Congress. Inevitably, it found its way onto Trump’s media program. And while Trump’s moderators certainly hadn’t instructed him to talk about kidnapped and eaten pets, they couldn’t get it out of his muddled mind.

And there he was, in front of the entire country, repeating a ridiculous story and insisting that it must be true because people on television told it. He sounded more like a drunken adult or a stupid child than a credible leader of the free world.

Politics, like life, is not a morality play. Virtue is not always rewarded and sin is not always punished. But in this case, justice prevailed. The conservative fever swamp that insulates the Republican Party from reality and renders it incapable of governing effectively has trapped its own candidate in a lie so obviously wild that it exposed his unfitness for the country.