Former President Donald Trump gave an explanation for why he continues to bring up Hannibal Lecter—the fictional serial killer played by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs—at his rallies.
“You know when I go Hannibal Lecter, you know what I am talking about,” Trump told the crowd in a bizarre town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, on Monday. His latest mention of the cannibal serial killer came after he was asked a question about what he would do to bring down inflation.
The Republican nominee also expressed anger at the media for highlighting the reference to the fictional character. “It’s a way of demeaning, they say ‘Hannibal Lecter, why would he mention [Hannibal Lecter]?’ Well you know why—because he was a sick puppy, and we have sick puppies coming into our country.”
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Trump said he was referring to his frequent claim that migrants crossing the southern border were coming from “mental institutions and insane asylums.” “I figure that’s better than wasting a lot of words, you just say, ‘Hannibal Lecter, we don’t want him,’” he added.
The former president has made the claim before, including during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, but there is no publicly available data backing it up. On Monday, he added of the Lecter reference: “I do it for a lot of reasons, but I do it because we are allowing some very bad people into our country, and they’re coming as terrorists,” Trump said, quickly moving on to bragging about the endorsement he received from the Border Patrol union last weekend.
In her debate against Trump last month, Harris specifically referred to Trump’s frequent mentions of Lecter while inviting viewers to attend one of his rallies.
“It’s a really interesting thing to watch,” Harris said. “You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter, he will talk about ‘windmills cause cancer,’ and what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer, said his references to Lecter are a way of “upping the ante” of his attacks on migrants. It’s “not just criminals, rapists, which Trump has already used starting in 2015 … but let’s get cannibal in the mix,” Blair told The Washington Post.
