Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Amazon, Getty
Donald Trump’s “late, great Hannibal Lecter” routine may be his most breathtaking incoherent rant. Yes, he has claimed that magnets don’t work underwater, and musing about whether he’d rather die by shark or electrocution is a regular part of his stump speech. But Trump’s tirade about the fictional serial killer stands apart for several reasons. First, it is exceptionally weird. Second, it is profoundly wrong on multiple levels. And third, Trump thinks it’s so smart and funny that he will not stop repeating it.
Critics say the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs “teeters on the edge between psychological study and all-out horror.” The same is true of the presidential tirade it inspired. On a basic level, we know the awful truth about what Trump is doing: He’s demonizing migrants. But since the Republican National Convention, people have been dropping wild theories about why Trump is going about that nefarious goal by heaping praise on a make-believe cannibal.
After a harrowing deep dive through old Trump-rally speeches and xenophobic Tucker Carlson clips, I believe I have come as close as one can to explaining the origins of this bizarre bit. But be warned: Somehow the more you learn, the less sense Trump’s latest obsession makes.
On October 8, 2023, HuffPost reported that Trump “ate up alleged support from ‘Hannibal Lecter’ in a terrifying slip-up at an Iowa rally.” Trump’s remark had been spotted by the X video clipper @Acyn:
The story was not picked up widely, probably because it was published the same day that Hamas attacked Israel.
But the media eventually got another shot at the story, as it actually wasn’t a one-time slip-up. The Hannibal Lecter bit received widespread attention months later when Trump said this at a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, on May 11, 2024:
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.
By this point Lecter had already become a regular part of Trump’s rally routine; the Wildwood performance just stood out because it was nuttier than usual, as the New York Times explained in May:
Throughout his campaign this year, Mr. Trump has frequently brought up Hannibal Lecter, once calling him “legendary” and another time referring to him as a nice fellow. In Wildwood, he spoke on the 1991 movie longer than he generally does.
The idea that Trump started connecting migrants to Hannibal Lecter because he did not know that there are two meanings of the word asylum — protection a nation grants to political refugees or an institution for mentally ill people — has been gaining traction on social media:
It’s a good theory, but it doesn’t make much sense when you look at the context of Trump’s remarks.
Trump didn’t just suddenly start ranting about the greatness of Hannibal Lecter one day. As with many other Trump bits, it evolved from a somewhat relevant aside into the unhinged praise for the cannibal killer that we see today.
In early 2023, Trump began claiming, with no evidence, that unspecified South American countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions into the United States. As you can see in the example embedded below (and in these other clips from January and February), Trump initially stuck to the term mental institutions:
Over the next few weeks, Trump started embellishing this bit of his stump speech with an aside about how these institutions are so bad that only the “politically incorrect” term insane asylums could accurately describe them. During his speech at CPAC in March 2023, he illustrated this point with a brief reference to Silence of the Lamb [sic]:
They’re emptying out their prisons, and you’ve heard me say that, but they’re also emptying out their mental institutions. And, to use a strong couple of words, insane asylum. Insane asylum! That’s where — anybody see Silence of the Lamb? That’s where they come from, insane asylums. That’s a stronger word than a mental institution.
A year later, at CPAC in March 2024, Trump name-dropped Hannibal Lecter, possibly for the first time. This didn’t get any attention because he didn’t say anything about the villain; he just shouted his name and continued ranting about illegal immigration:
We have millions and millions of people, and they came from prisons and jails. They came from mental institutions and insane asylums. No, they’re not the same thing. An insane asylum is a mental institution on steroids. It’s Silence of the Lambs, okay? You know, Hannibal Lecter! They’re all being deposited into our country and then you have terrorists, and then you have drugs, and then you have human traffickers.
Yes. Here’s an example of him describing how asylum applications work, and his plan to end “endemic abuse of the asylum system,” in November 2018. Trump said:
The biggest loophole drawing illegal aliens to our borders is the use of fraudulent or meritless asylum claims to gain entry into our great country. An alien simply crosses the border illegally, finds a Border Patrol agent, and using well-coached language — by lawyers and others that stand there trying to get fees or whatever they can get — they’re given a phrase to read. They never heard of the phrase before. They don’t believe in the phrase. But they’re given a little legal statement to read, and they read it. And now, all of a sudden, they’re supposed to qualify. But that’s not the reason they’re here. This merely asserts the need for asylum, and then often released into the United States, and they await a lengthy court process. The court process will takes years sometimes for them to attend.
Obviously Trump did not write this, or any other speech about the intricacies of the asylum process, on his own. But it’s quite clear that he doesn’t think “asylum” means migrants are trying to sneak into America’s mental institutions.
No. The most awful thing about the Hannibal Lecter rant is that the underlying point Trump is making is false; he’s just trying to gin up fears about migrants.
In early 2023, FactCheck.org and CNN extensively researched Trump’s claim about foreign countries emptying out their mental institutions. Neither outlet found any evidence to support it. CNN even asked the Trump campaign for supporting evidence, and they failed to provide it:
Trump’s campaign was unable to provide any evidence of the existence of a news story about a no-longer-busy doctor at a South American mental institution – and the campaign also failed to provide any evidence that South American countries are emptying mental health facilities to somehow send patients into the US. Representatives for two anti-immigration organizations told us they had not heard of anything that would corroborate any of Trump’s story, as did three experts at organizations favorable toward immigration. CNN’s own search did not produce any evidence.
Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, told FactCheck.org, “As far as I can tell, it’s a total fabrication.”
“It’s hard to prove a negative — nobody’s writing a report saying ‘Ecuador is not opening its mental institutions’ — but what I can say is that I work full-time on migration, am on many coalition mailing lists, correspond constantly with partners in the region, and scan 300+ RSS feeds and Twitter lists of press outlets and activists region wide, and I have not seen a single report indicating that this is happening,” he told the outlet.
Fidel Castro did send people from mental institutions to the United States — but this happened decades ago, and the Cuban dictator did not send “millions” of people.
When CNN asked the Trump campaign for evidence to support his claim, one of the articles Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung supplied was a 1983 Washington Post article about the Mariel boatlift of 1980. Per CNN:
Cheung did cite a report that late Cuban despot Fidel Castro included mental health patients in the Mariel boatlift of 1980 (they made up a small percentage of the people involved in the boatlift), but that was 43 years ago; Trump’s stories have all been present-tense claims about events purportedly happening during Biden’s presidency.
So why is Trump conflating this historical event with the current situation at the southern border? As The Wall Street Journal explained in 2017, the Mariel boatlift “is at the center of an unresolved, sometimes bitter argument among economists, hinging on a basic question: When foreigners come to the U.S., does their presence drive down the wages of native workers?” That year a Harvard professor published a study claiming that the Mariel boatlift did hurt American workers. While other scholars disagreed, many Trump allies began citing the 1980 incident in their anti-immigration arguments.
Here’s Tucker Carlson discussing the Mariel boatlift on his now-canceled Fox News show during a September 2022 segment in which he claimed the white-supremacist “great replacement theory” is a “statistical fact”:
Probably, but at times it doesn’t seem like he does. At his October 2023 rally in Wildwood, he mused, “Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he?”
No, though Trump thinks he is. At the same New Jersey rally, Trump explained that he loves the actor who played the psychopath because he’s a big MAGA guy.
“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.
Trump was probably referring to Sir Anthony Hopkins, who won an Academy Award for playing Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. But the nicest thing Hopkins has said about Trump is that he’s indifferent to him. Here’s an excerpt from a 2018 profile in The Guardian:
“Ask me more questions!” [Hopkins] says. He doesn’t want to waste time sitting around while the photographer sets up. We talk animals. He and Stella collect stray cats and dogs. We talk politics. He doesn’t care about Trump; he doesn’t vote. He takes a widescreen approach to politics, because focusing on the detail makes him too unhappy. “I don’t vote because I don’t trust anyone. We’ve never got it right, human beings. We are all a mess, and we’re very early in our evolution.
When Deadline informed Hopkins in July 2024 that his most famous character has become a Trump-rally staple, he just laughed:
DEADLINE: I have to mention your one of your greatest characters, Hannibal Lecter …
HOPKINS: Why?
DEADLINE: Because he’s come up a lot during this election campaign here in America with Donald Trump speaking about him at his rallies as if he’s a real person.
HOPKINS: As if he is real?
DEADLINE: Yes.
HOPKINS: [Laughs] I didn’t know that. [Laughs again.] Hannibal, that’s a long time ago that movie. God, that was over 30 years ago. I’m shocked and appalled what you’ve told me about Trump.
None of the other actors who have played Lecter — Brian Cox, Mads Mikkelsen, Aaran Thomas, and Gaspard Ulliel — have publicly said anything positive about Trump. In fact, in a 2022 Deadline interview, Cox pointed to the former president to explain the “disappointment in the human experiment” that he shares with his Succession character:
COX: Of course, there are overlaps. There’s bound to be overlaps. I mean, the similarity between me and Logan Roy is that we do share the disappointment in the human experiment.
DEADLINE: What do you mean?
COX: I mean when you get to my age, you look back and you say, “It’s a f*ck-up.” Especially if you’ve lived through of four years of Trump. You go, how the f*ck can this country vote for such a f*cking asshole? And yet, this part of this country will, you know, adore him. What is it they adore? What is it they want? And how disappointing that is. So I feel that disappointment in the human experiment.
It’s unclear. Trump has praised Lecter extensively, calling him a “wonderful man” who deserves our “congratulations.” But this actually undercuts Trump’s point. If foreign “insane asylums” are harboring “great” people like Hannibal Lecter, why wouldn’t we want them in our country?
No. Although Trump often refers to him as the “late” Hannibal Lecter the character does not die in any of the books or TV or film adaptations. All of the actors who portrayed Lecter are alive except Gaspard Ulliel, who played the lead role in the 2007 prequel film Hannibal Rising.
Nope! In the last scene of The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter has escaped from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and is stalking his next victim in the Bahamas. The film doesn’t illustrate the threat we face from illegal immigration; it’s a story about the United States unleashing its most dangerous inmates on a foreign country.
No — quite the opposite, in fact. As Trump himself complained at a rally on July 31: “They’re always saying, like, ‘He mentions Hannibal Lecter. It doesn’t make sense.’ No, it makes a lot of sense!”
This post has been updated. It originally said all of the actors who portrayed Lecter are alive. Sadly, Gaspard Ulliel died at 37 in a 2022 skiing accident.
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