President Trump has been reading the poem, "The Snake," at rallies since 2016. Saturday night in Vandalia, Ohio, he gave it a dedication for the first time.

"I dedicate this to Springfield, Ohio," he told a packed gym at Vandalia-Butler High School, about 25 miles from the town in question. "They went through hell."

Then he read it. A tenderhearted woman finds a half-frozen snake on the path. She takes it home, warms it by the fire and nurses it back to health. The snake bites her. When she asks why, it reminds her she knew exactly what it was when she let it in.

Then he gave the update Springfield had been waiting on.

"It didn't work out too well," Trump said. "And they're being removed."

Springfield is a factory town of about 58,000. Over a few short years, city officials estimate, as many as 15,000 Haitians arrived. Most came under the Biden administration's Temporary Protected Status program, and Washington never asked the people already living there whether their town could absorb a population surge of roughly 25 percent.

It couldn't. Springfield City Schools ended up with more than 1,600 students who didn't speak English. Hospitals were flooded with new patients, and waits at doctors' offices stretched out. Crashes rose as thousands of new drivers who had never driven on American roads took to the streets. Gov. Mike DeWine had to send in Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers to help with traffic, along with $2.5 million to keep up with the medical demand.

When residents said out loud that their town was buckling, national reporters showed up in 2024 to explain to them that they were racists.

The word everyone skipped over was "temporary." Haiti's TPS designation expired this summer. On August 5, a federal judge lifted the stay that had kept the Trump administration from ending protections for more than 330,000 Haitians nationwide, including more than 26,000 in Ohio. More than 470 people were deported to Haiti between August 20 and September 17.

So when Trump said "they're being removed," he was describing something that has already started.

The poem was half the reason he came. The other half is on the November ballot.

Ohio went for Trump by 11 points in 2024. Sen. Jon Husted was appointed to the seat JD Vance left when he moved into the Naval Observatory, and now he has to win it in a special election. Husted's opponent is a familiar name: Sherrod Brown, who lost his own Senate seat to Bernie Moreno two years ago and wants back in through a different door.

Moreno was on stage in Vandalia, a few feet from the man trying to undo his win. So were Husted, Rep. Mike Turner and Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor.

"They threw him out of the Senate once before," Trump said of Brown. "He's horrible."

Polls have the race within a point or two. Control of the Senate could ride on it, and Trump knows his voters sometimes stay home when his name is missing from the ballot. He told them how to handle that: "Just pretend that I'm running. When I run, we win."

Media coverage of the rally will focus on the poem. Expect the words "inflammatory" and "divisive" before the weekend is out. Those same outlets spent 2024 telling Springfield its schools, hospitals and roads were fine.