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Donald Trump has fully collapsed the line between real life and Saturday Night Live sketch. On Thursday night, he performed his “late, great Hannibal Lecter” bit during his record-length acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.
Minutes after praising the illegal immigration chart that he credits with saving his life during last weekend’s assassination attempt, Trump went off on another tangent that was not in his prepared remarks.
“You know, the press is always on me because I say this,” Trump began. “Has anyone seen Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner. That’s insane asylums, they’re emptying out their insane asylums.”
Trump often rambles about Hannibal Lecter during rallies to vilify immigrants. Somehow, it makes even less sense in context. The general idea is that he wants voters to picture one of the scariest movie villains of all time when they think about migrants. But the reference is wrong in just about every conceivable way. There’s no evidence that foreign countries are “emptying their mental institutions” into the U.S., as the candidate often claims. Trump seems confused about whether Hannibal Lecter is the name of the character or the actor who played him. Trump has claimed that an unspecified actor who played Lecter is a big MAGA guy, but they all hate him. Trump usually references the “late” Hannibal Lecter, but the character does not die in any of the book, TV, or film adaptations. And at the end of The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter has escaped from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane to the Bahamas. So it’s really a story about the United States foisting its inmates on foreign countries.
It’s easily one of Trump’s most incoherent rally rants, which is really saying something, as he’s also taken to rambling about whether he’d rather die by shark or electrocution. And now it’s something that an actual presidential candidate has said on stage during a convention speech. And he appears to be winning! Silence of the Lambs has nothing on the terror of simply living in through the 2024 presidential race!
