Now that Democrats have coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris as their presumptive nominee in the 2024 election, the party has been free to use a line of attack on Donald Trump that he and Republicans had leveled at President Biden: He’s too old, he’s in cognitive decline, and he’s lost touch with reality.
A normal candidate might try to counter those claims by staying on message and avoiding any mention of mental asylums. Trump is apparently uninterested in such a strategy, and has therefore continued to include a puzzling shoutout in his stump speech after first adding it to his rally routine last year. When he gets on the topic of migrants, he consistently ends up talking about Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the fictional cannibalistic murderer featured inthriller novels by author Thomas Harris and their various film and TV adaptations, including the Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
How did Trump end up name-checking Lecter as part of his pitch to the MAGA base? Responding to a request for comment on the matter, campaign communications director Steven Cheung replied, “President Trump is an inspiring and gifted storyteller and referencing pop culture is one of many reasons why he can successfully connect with the audience and voters. Whereas, Kamala [Harris] is as relatable as a worn-out couch.”
Absent any further explanation, a forensic review of the former president’s speeches over the past year is in order. What’s clear is that this all began with a simple misunderstanding — or several.
July 2023: “That’s like ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff.”
Speaking at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania on July 29, 2023, Trump alluded to the film that had introduced Lecter to millions of moviegoers. “People are pouring across the border now, disease-ridden people,” he warned the crowd. “And I said it, I said it over and over: people from mental institutions, from insane asylums,” he claimed, falsely. “That’s like Silence of the Lambs stuff. But they’re coming in to our country.”
Trump had repeated “insane asylums” line enough by then that various media outlets had already debunked it, but the nod to The Silence of the Lambs seemed to be an ad-lib. Moving past this brief aside, the former president did not embark on a digression about Lecter himself. But, as we shall see, the iconic villain would eventually take the spotlight in Trump’s rants on border security.
October 2023: “You know why I like him? Because he said on television, ‘I love Donald Trump.'”
As legal prosecutions of Trump got underway in New York and Georgia last year, many commentators joked about the idea of Trump being confined to the kind of glass prison cell Dr. Lecter inhabits for most of The Silence of the Lambs, or muzzled and straitjacketed as the character is when police are transporting him elsewhere. But Trump himself did not mention Lecter until two rallies in Waterloo and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Oct. 7, that mainly focused on his economic policies (with some shots at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, then his rival in the Republican primaries).
At the earlier event in Waterloo, Trump launched into his usual anti-immigration rhetoric and spoke about a supposed “invasion” at the border. “Think of it, the people coming in, think of it,” he said. “They’re from prisons and jails.” He went on to claim that migrants are “from mental institutions and insane asylums, noting that “an insane asylum is like Silence of the Lamb [sic] stuff. That’s serious stuff. That’s Hannibal Lecter. How good an actor was he? How good an actor was he? Did he play a good role, right? But insane asylums, they’re emptying them out.”
Later, in Cedar Rapids, going off-script after describing migrants as “vicious,” Trump recalled, “I said, that’s Silence of the Lamb [sic]. You know what that is? Has anybody seen Silence of the Lambs? Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he? You know why I like him? Because he said on television, or one of the — ‘I love Donald Trump.; So I love him, I love him.” Trump went on to joke that even if he were the “worst” actor, “I’d say he was great to me.”
Anthony Hopkins, who won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the performance Trump described, had neither endorsed nor professed his love for the former president. It’s possible, as some have speculated, that Trump had confused Hopkins with Jon Voight — a conservative actor close in age, with a passing resemblance — who vocally backed Trump’s 2016 run and said in a red carpet interview days after the Republican’s stunning upset victory, “I worked very hard for him. I love Donald Trump.”
But, since Trump appeared to recall neither man’s name, he wound up with a sound bite that suggested he thought Hannibal Lecter was the name of the actor in the film, and a fan of his.
November 2023: “We got him coming into this country now.”
Throughout October, Trump went on invoking Hannibal Lecter when stoking fears of migrants crossing the border, often noting that his campaign staffers had specifically asked him not to use the term “insane asylum” before segueing into the question “Did anybody ever hear of Hannibal Lecter?” (At a rally, in Sioux City, Iowa, he followed this up this question by observing: “The young people didn’t. The young ones didn’t. They don’t want to hear about Hannibal.”)
In a Houston rally in November, Trump called for mass deportations, again said he had been warned not to use the phrase “insane asylum,” and again used it as a jumping off point to ask if the crowd was familiar with Lecter. “Anybody ever heard of the wonderful Hannibal Lecter?” Trump asked. This time, he struck a less amused tone. “We got him coming into this country now, because other countries are dumping their people from mental institutions and insane asylums.”
Suddenly, the Lecter citations were far more ideological than Trump misremembering which Hollywood stars had said nice things about him — this would be the boogeyman to bolster his claims about Central and South American nations turning mentally unstable people loose. Which, again, are baseless.
December 2023 – April 2024: “Hannibal Lecter… they’re all being deposited into our country.”
Through the end of the year, as he prepared to dominate the 2024 Republican primaries, Trump implied to his crowds that without tighter border controls, Hannibal Lecters from foreign nations would infiltrate the country and wreak havoc on ordinary citizens. At a Jan. 16 rally in New Hampshire, this scenario grew more implausible still, with Trump saying it was “not just in South America” that dangerous individuals had gotten out of mental hospitals. “They’re closing them up all over the world, in Africa, in Asia, in Europe and the Middle East,” he blustered after saying of insane asylums, “That’s Silence of the Lambs. That’s Hannibal Lecter.”
Trump tried the material out on a bigger audience, too, when delivering remarks at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland. “We have a new category, migrant crime,” he said during a 90-minute speech. “And it’s going to be more severe than violent crime and crime as we knew it.” The candidate next declared, “An insane asylum is a mental institution on steroids. It’s Silence of the Lambs, okay? You know, the — Hannibal Lecter! They’re all being deposited into our country.”
While the bit regularly failed to get much of a reaction from people sitting through his rambling monologues, it was now obvious that Trump felt comfortable naming the cannibal psychiatrist in primetime. The Lecter comments began to make headlines, and from there, they only got more ridiculous.
May 2024: “The late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
On May 11, Trump visited Wildwood, New Jersey, and debuted a more exaggerated version of his Lecter riff. This time around, it felt as if he had just rewatched The Silence of the Lambs and had more narrative detail to draw upon.
“Has anyone ever seen The Silence of the Lambs?” Trump asked the crowd once he had started in on his false “insane asylums” migration claims. “The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’s 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.”
In one fell swoop, Trump had latched on to one of the film’s most memorable lines (“I’m having an old friend for dinner”) and invented a catchphrase of his own — “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” — to go with it. Nobody could say for sure whether Trump believed Lecter, the character, had died (he doesn’t in any of the books or movies that feature him), or that Hopkins had (the actor, 86, remains in good health, while Brian Cox and Mads Mikkelsen, two other actors to play the character, are alive and well; it’s also extremely unlikely that Trump is familiar with the obscure prequel Hannibal Rising, whose French star, Gaspard Ulliel, died in a skiing accident in 2022). Maybe he just liked the rhyme.
In any event, the confusion around Trump’s views on Lecter created an entire media cycle, causing a reporter to shout “Why Hannibal Lecter?” at him outside the Manhattan courthouse where he was tried and convicted for falsifying business records. Meanwhile, Saturday Night Live kicked off its season finale with a sketch about Trump considering who to add to his ticket as vice president — with Lecter himself one among several unappealing options.
June 2024: “If he suggests, ‘I’d like to have you for dinner,’ don’t go.”
By this summer, Trump had found a groove with the Lecter moments, and they grew increasingly detached from the “insane asylums” talking point that had inspired them in the first place. In most cases, he appeared to simply enjoy imagining the cultured and witty serial killer stalking his victims, and reliably described him as the “later, great Hannibal Lecter,” even warning supporters in Chesapeake, Virginia, “If he suggests, ‘I’d like to have you for dinner,’ don’t go.”
And, because outlets could now report that he was praising Lecter as “great” and “wonderful” — sarcastically or not — Fox News had to run defense, with anchors calling the story a “hoax” and arguing that Trump was “just playing around.” Trump, too, set about criticizing the reaction from “fake news” sources. “‘Oh, he likes Hannibal Lecter,'” he said, mocking media outlets during a keynote speech for the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s 2024 Road to Majority Conference on June 22. There was a smattering of laughter from the conservative Christian activists in attendance. “No, they’re crazy,” Trump added.
July 2024: “These are real stories.”
The Lecter habit had at last gone so viral that a Deadline interviewer asked Anthony Hopkins about it in an article published in mid-July. The actor, who had had no idea Trump was mentioning his character on the campaign trail, was perplexed. “As if [Lecter] is real?” he asked, and laughed. “I’m shocked and appalled what you’ve told me about Trump,” he remarked.
But if Trump’s aides and speechwriters cautioned him not to bring up Hannibal Lecter at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July a few days after he survived an assassination attempt, he did not listen.
On July 18, delivering the longest ever presidential nomination acceptance speech by a candidate in the modern era — breaking his own 2016 record — Trump spoke for a tedious and unfocused 93 minutes, hitting the same notes as in his rally program. When he got to the usual doomsaying about migrants from foreign “insane asylums,” Trump took a beat and returned to his favorite subject. “You know, the press is always on me because I say this: 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. And terrorists are coming in at numbers we’ve never seen before.”
All month, Trump tended to introduce the figure of Dr. Lecter — “a lovely man” — by noting that the press would respond with bafflement and alarm, as they had been for months. He was altogether defensive at a rally following the RNC in Charlotte, North Carolina: “You know, they go crazy when I say ‘the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” he said. “They say, ‘Why would he mention Hannibal Lecter, he must be cognitively in trouble?’ No, no. These are real stories. Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lamb [sic].” In St. Cloud, Minnesota, he came up with another twist on the formula, singling out a specific person in the audience and joking that Lecter would eat them. “He’d love to have you for dinner,” Trump said, pointing. “You, right there.”
Political observers outside the MAGA faithful still want to understand the connection Trump keeps making between the border issue and The Silence of the Lambs. Some have wondered on social media whether Trump initially conflated the term “insane asylums” with the concept of “asylum seekers” — that is, migrants fleeing persecution and human rights abuses in their own countries. The Trump campaign’s description of the GOP nominee as “an inspiring and gifted storyteller” neither confirms nor dispels this theory. But perhaps it’s not so surprising that Trump and his followers identify more with the murderous doctor than the FBI agents who locked him up. After all, Lecter didn’t raid Mar-a-Lago.
Update July 30, 4:34pm ET: This story has been updated to include comment from the Trump campaign.
