'Don’t eat cats and dogs': Germany takes a jab at Trump in official response to debate claim

ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis weren't the only ones fact-checking former President Donald Trump's claims at Tuesday night's debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

In one moment toward the end of the debate when the two candidates were discussing climate change, Trump claimed that Germany abandoned its plans to develop clean energy infrastructure. When arguing in favor of more fossil fuel extraction, the former president insisted that "within one year, [Germans] were back to building normal energy plants."

Berlin was apparently watching the debate, and its foreign office posted a response to the former president's claim about its energy plans from its official X (formerly Twitter) account. And the G7 country even included a reference to one viral moment in the debate.

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"Like it or not: Germany’s energy system is fully operational, with more than 50% renewables. And we are shutting down – not building – coal & nuclear plants. Coal will be off the grid by 2038 at the latest," Germany's foreign office tweeted. "PS: We also don’t eat cats and dogs."

The latter part of the post is a reference to a debunked claim by Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who insisted with zero evidence that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were kidnapping and eating pets. Debate moderator David Muir reminded Trump when he repeated the claim that the Springfield city manager has stated for the record that there is no reason to believe that residents' pets are being eaten.

In a Wednesday report, Politico's European desk reported that Germany has steadily been lessening its dependence on fossil fuels in recent years, though it was forced to keep several coal-powered electricity plants online due to Russian President Vladimir Putin's war on Ukraine (Germany imported natural gas from Russia prior to cutting off trade with the Putin regime in response to the war). Germany also had to restart several other coal-burning power plants to meet national energy demand in 2022.

"While it’s not clear what Trump means by a 'normal power plant,' no new coal-fired plants are being built in Germany — although the government has abandoned its original 2030 deadline for phasing out coal in order to shore up its energy supplies," Politico reported.

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The debate is being largely received as a significant win for Harris and a bad night for Trump. While the former president frequently walked into traps set by Harris to get distracted by jabs she made about his campaign rallies and how he was perceived by world leaders, she also was able to articulate her own policy goals on a variety of issues — something she's been criticized for in the recent past.

During one particularly revealing exchange about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), Harris laid out how she wanted to expand the law to include additional benefits and cover new groups of Americans. When moderators asked Trump — who is in the middle of his third presidential campaign — if he had come up with an alternative to Obamacare, he only said he had "concepts of a plan." The New Republic's Michael Tomasky opined that this was the "worst, dumbest sentence" uttered by the ex-president on Tuesday night.

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Click here to read Politico's full report.