Trump Credits Hannibal Lecter With Election Win in Bonkers Rally-Style Speech
Why is everybody still banging on about ascendent tech-broligarchy, impending trade wars and the disinformation-fuelled rise of neo-fascism, when the real threat to US national interests is a fictional Lithuanian cannibal prowling the night somewhere out in America’s borderlands?
Yes folks, Hannibal Lecter’s back, featuring prominently in a speech Donald Trump delivered on Sunday morning at a Turning Point Action Conference in Arizona, marking his first rally appearance since winning the presidential election earlier in November.
“We had some pretty good ads, right?” the Republican president-elect told the crowds. “We’ve explained what these people have done, right? I mean they’ve destroyed our country. Who would let millions of people pour in from prisons and jails and mental institutions and, I always say, insane asylums. You know, the press gave me a hard time because sometimes I’d use the word, a name, Hannibal Lecter.”
Much like the iconic (and totally imaginary) villain’s motives, Trump’s infatuation with the psychotic killer had throughout his election campaign defied all rational explanation, as well as, more often than not, any semblance of common sense.
Last October, he told his supporters at an Iowa rally that he liked Lecter “because he said on television, ‘I love Donald Trump’,” leading some commentators to speculate that Trump had potentially confused actor Anthony Hopkins, who portrayed the cannibal in several adaptations of the Thomas Harris novels, with John Voight, who’s never played Lecter but has, in the past, backed the Republican leader.
Amid various other campaign-trail mentions, Trump also famously referred to the fictional killer as “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” during a Missouri rally appearance, despite the fact the character does not in fact definitively die in any of the books, films or series that make up the Harris canon.
For just the briefest of moments during Trump’s latest address, it looked as if we were at last, finally, going to get to the bottom of all this. “They’d say, ‘why does he mention Hannibal Lecter? That has nothing to do with it’,” as the president-elect told the crowds.
“I mean, are they stupid?”, he added. “The fact is that, we don’t want Hannibal Lecter, you know what that is, Silence of the Lambs, we don’t want Hannibal Lecter, Dr. Hannibal Lecter in our country, do we, huh?”
He then went on, “And you know what happened when they went to the voting booth, or, unfortunately, if they signed their mail-in ballot, but we get by, we gotta change all of that stuff, we gotta have great, fair, confident elections. But when they went into the booth and they signed their ballot they said, hmmmm, Hannibal Lecter, that’s a bad guy, we don’t want him here.”
“They knew that, they didn’t like that, they didn’t like that I used him, because it’s a very good example, it’s incredible, incredible, what they do,” as Trump concluded his ruminations. “We need borders, we need fair elections, and we need a free and fair press, and we’re gonna try getting all of them.”
So in short: yeah, mysteries continue to abound.
