Ex-president praises ‘wonderful’ Hannibal Lecter during rally
Donald Trump on Saturday praised the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter “as a wonderful man” before segueing into comments disparaging people who had emigrated to the US without permission.
The former president’s remarks at a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, as he campaigns to retake the White House from Joe Biden in November’s election were a not-so-subtle rhetorical bridge exalting Anthony Hopkins’s cannibalistic character in the 2001 film The Silence of the Lambs as “the late great” while simultaneously condemning “people who are being released into our country that we don’t want”.
Trump delivered his address to an estimated crowd of about 80,000 supporters under the shadow of the Great White rollercoaster in the 1950s-kitsch seaside resort 90 miles south of Philadelphia.
Among other comments, as he has done before, he lied about having “been indicted more than the great Alphonse Capone”, the violent, Prohibition-era Chicago mob boss.
Trump has spent the last year facing four indictments on more than 80 criminal charges for alleged attempts to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election he lost to Biden, retaining classified materials after his presidency and hush money payments to an adult film actor that prosecutors allege were illicitly covered up.
The trial over the hush money is set to enter its fourth week today.
Trump used the occasion to call the charges against him “bullshit”, with spectators then chanting the word back at him.