Margaret Hartmann did a deep dive on why Donald Trump keeps talking about the ‘late great Hannibal Lector’
A SERIES OF SPEECHES CONTINUED EVOLVING UNTIL..
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.
This seems to be as good as an origin story .. we even tried Newspapers.com, anything where we can find Trump talking about SILENCE OF THE LAMBS in the 1990s.. anything where he saw the movie and praised it.
Nothing..
No luck…
Somehow it just popped into a speech and has become something uttered forever into history books.
And so it is born.