If a guy sitting next to you on the subway announced that he would rather die by electrocution than by shark or suddenly slipped into a pirate accent and shouted, “Never fight uphill, me boys!” you’d find another seat as soon as possible. Yet somehow, we have become accustomed to hearing such bizarre non sequiturs from a guy who stands a very good chance of being reelected to the presidency.
Still, no one anticipated that Donald Trump would offer this extended praise for Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer, at a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, this weekend:
Silence of the Lamb! Has anyone ever seen the Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? Excuse me, I’m about to have a friend for dinner as this poor doctor walked by. I’m about to have a friend for dinner. But Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations. The late, great Hannibal Lecter. We have people that are being released into our country that we don’t want in our country.
It’s a bit hard to believe this is from an actual rally, not a Saturday Night Live sketch, until you see the words coming out of Trump’s mouth:
You might guess the former president was rambling about the 1991 Jonathan Demme film because he happened to see it on TV last night; he got distracted, then returned to his talking points about people “we don’t want in our country.” But that’s not what happened. Trump brought up Hannibal Lecter to demonize migrants.
Confused? So is Trump.
As the New York Times explained, the Lecter comparison has actually “become a staple of his stump speech.” People are only picking up on it now because “in Wildwood, he spoke on the 1991 movie longer than he generally does.”
Just before bringing up the fictional cannibal, Trump claimed foreign countries are “emptying out their mental institutions into the United States, our beautiful country.” He added that “now the prison populations all over the world are down” but that “they don’t want to report that.”
Indeed, journalists don’t want to report Trump’s often-repeated claims about criminals and mentally ill people flooding into the U.S. because they’re not true. And the way Trump invoked Lecter actually undermined his (false) point.
Trump wanted to stir up fears about migrants, so he compared them to one of the greatest movie villains of all time. Is Lecter terrifying? Sure. But by the end of The Silence of the Lambs, he has escaped from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and is stalking his next victim in the Bahamas. So Trump was actually citing an example of America “emptying out” its prisons and mental institutions into a foreign country.
Plus, he is clearly a big fan of Lecter. Back in October, Trump said at an Iowa rally, “Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he?” Trump explained that he loves the psychopath because he’s a big MAGA man.
“You know why I like him? Because he said on television on one of the — ‘I love Donald Trump.’ So I love him. I love him. I love him,” Trump said.
It seems Trump mixed up the fictional character with Anthony Hopkins, the actor who portrayed him in The Silence of the Lambs. And as HuffPost explained at the time, Hopkins and all the other actors who have played Lecter actually hate Trump:
Hopkins has not publicly supported Trump, and neither have other actors who have portrayed Hannibal Lecter, including Mads Mikkelsen and Brian Cox, the latter of whom called Trump “such a fucking asshole” and “so full of shit.”
But regardless, in New Jersey, Trump was clearly talking about the fictional guy who eats people. And he said the serial killer is “great” and deserves our “congratulations.” If Hannibal Lecter is such a “wonderful man,” shouldn’t we be welcoming him back into our country?
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