At his first campaign rally since Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, former President Donald Trump spoke at length about his new opponent, Hannibal Lecter, and even took a moment to mock political commentators who said the Republican nominee would become “nice” after his attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“You know, I was supposed to be nice. They say, something happened to me when I got shot—I became nice. And when you’re dealing with these people—they’re very dangerous people—when you’re dealing with them, you can’t be too nice. You really can’t be. So if you don’t mind, I’m not going to be nice. Is that ok?”
The crowd let out a cheer in response.
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At the speech in Charlotte, North Carolina, Trump also unveiled a new nickname for his opponent—Lyin’ Kamala Harris—already seeming to back away from the “Laffin’ Kamala” moniker he debuted earlier this week.
While continuing to mispronounce Harris’s first name, he blamed the leaders of the Democratic Party for forcing President Joe Biden out of the race.
“The leaders of the Democrat Party—in a very un-democratic move—the bosses, they said ‘either you get out or we’re going to throw you out using the 25th Amendment.’ That’s what happened. You know that.”
Trump also mocked Harris for failing the California Bar Exam. The former California Attorney General did fail the bar on her first try—but California’s bar is notoriously difficult. The current pass rate in 2024 is only 34%, according to data from the California State Bar. The pass rate for the two exams administered in 1990, when Harris was admitted, were 45% and 58%.
Trump repeated his bombastic claim that countries are sending patients from “mental institutions and insane asylums” to cross the southern border—a claim he has never provided evidence for. He then repeated another strange tangent about Hannibal Lecter, the iconic fictional character that Trump has brought up in a number of past rallies.
“They say, ‘why would he mention Hannibal Lecter? He must be cognitively in trouble.’ No, no, these are real stories. Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs—a lovely man, he wants to have you for dinner.”
He also spoke about his vice presidential nominee, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, but seemed confused about the contents of his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“He wrote the great book on workers—about how workers were being horribly taken advantage of. Became a movie, big best-selling book, became a great movie, actually,” Trump said.
Vance’s book is primarily a first-person narrative about his own life in rural Kentucky and Ohio, as well as his time at Yale Law School.
