Normally the appearance of a ranting lunatic on a boardwalk in New Jersey would not be worthy of comment. Everyone just gives him a wide berth and goes about their day eating cotton candy and buying cheap t-shirts. Eventually the lunatic maybe wanders onto the sand and passes out in the shade of the boardwalk, or he gets in his car and drives home to Philadelphia to resume his daily life of drinking and yammering incessantly about the Eagles.
But this past Saturday the boardwalk lunatic profanely hollering about hoaxes and conspiracies and Joe Biden’s Gestapo and Muslims and immigrants and how much he loves fictional cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter was Donald Trump. Which meant that instead of side-stepping on the way to the sunglasses stand, several thousand people had stopped and gathered around the boardwalk to pretend the incoherence spewing from the lunatic’s mouth hole made perfect sense.
Yes, Hannibal Lecter appeared in Trump’s rally speech this weekend, and not as a cautionary tale about being careful when choosing a psychiatrist. Rather, it was part of a bizarre rant about other nations emptying their insane asylums and sending all the patients to America, which they have turned into a crime-ridden hellhole. Or something:
“The mental institution population is down because they’re taking people from insane asylums and from mental institutions. You know what the difference is, right? An insane asylum in a mental institution on steroids. … Has anyone ever seen Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’s a wonderful man. He oftentimes would 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.”
Irony alert: Hannibal Lecter was an immigrant. In Lecter lore, he was an orphan descended from Lithuanian nobility who emigrated to America as an adult to study medicine at Johns Hopkins. And as a brilliant white rich European doctor, he is exactly the sort of immigrant that Trump and the racist architects of his immigration policy like Stephen “Stupid Nosferatu” Miller insist they want more of while they put strict limits on anyone from a country with where the majority of the population has a skin color even a shade darker than beige.
In other words, Trump’s stupid immigration policies would not have kept Hannibal Lecter from entering the country before he killed a Baltimore Symphony flautist for playing badly, and then served him to members of the board of the Philharmonic Orchestra. As one does.
But none of that is why Trump mentioned Hannibal Lecter. He brought up Lecter just as an example of the types of patients who live in insane asylums. Which would indicate he thinks other countries are sending waves of cannibal serial killers across the border. Which, like every other thought he has ever had in his cramped and miserable existence, is incredibly stupid.
The Lecter line got a fair amount of press, but it is not the first time Trump has used it. We found he mentioned it during a rally in Reno in December, a speech in New Hampshire in January, this year’s CPAC, and an interview with wingnut “journalism” outlet Right Side Broadcasting in March. As ever with Trump, he says so much crazy shit that sometimes he has to say something half a dozen times in public before lots of people notice.
Trump also used his speech to hit some of his other regular notes, such as complaining he’s been indicted more than Al Capone (which of course says more about Trump than it does America’s justice system in 1931), accused Joe Biden of being “surrounded by fascists” in the White House, and whatever the hell this is:
Trump at one point told the crowd: “Let’s talk about hot dogs, I just had one actually,” before he went on to discuss inflation.
Someone probably told Trump the price of a hot dog at Yankee Stadium has gone up this season and that factoid got all jumbled up in the bubbling stew of DDT, lead paint, and liquefied possums that exists where his brain should be.
Maybe Trump’s beef with Lecter — pun intended — is that the good doctor got caught? Dude should have run for president if he wanted to get away with it.
[Washington Post / Politico / YouTube]
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Did you hear about the cannibal that ate a charismatic Christian?
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He threw up his hands.
Thank you! I'll be here all week!
Every single fucking day for the last 2 years, I've been asking myself the same damn question:
How is this leaking colostomy bag still tens of thousands of votes in a handful of swing states from cheating his openly corrupt ass back into the White House?