Hannibal what now?
Trump has a new fixation: Hannibal Lecter. Makes sense.
Trump mentioned Hannibal Lecter again last night, during a rally in North Carolina. During a rambling tangent about immigrants, Trump said: “They’re coming from everywhere. They’re coming from all over the world, from prisons and jails, and mental institutions and insane asylums. You know, they go crazy when I say, ‘The late great Hannibal Lecter,’ OK? They say, ‘Why would he mention Hannibal Lecter? He must be cognitively in trouble.’ No no no, these are real stories. Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lamb [sic]. He’s a lovely man. He’d love to have you for dinner.”
These stories really are stories, yes, but that doesn’t make them true accounts of real people. Why would Trump keep mentioning a fictional murderer?
Trump said more or less the same thing during his speech at the Republican national convention last week. And several times before that, stretching all the way back to May.
As…one does?
Trump’s unending Hannibal references are so overwhelmingly confusing that it has sent the internet running to the hills in search of something, anything, that might explain why the next potential president of the world’s biggest superpower keeps repeating the same baffling non-sequitur every time he gets near a microphone.
Wellll there’s your answer right there. He’s both stupid and ignorant, so he gets stupid ideas and then he sticks to them. There’s no more to it than that. He’s every boring gasbag who thinks he’s funny you’ve ever sat next to on a bus or at a dinner. That’s all.
This isn’t new.
Some of Donny’s more bizarre ramblings (women duct-taped in vans?) were plausibly understood as him channeling some movie he had seen.
What’s new is his inability to frame a narrative that his base can connect to.
I think I preferred the shark/battery digression.
Trump has the attention span of a goldfish, so his chain of “reasoning” is this (internal monologue in italics):
These immigrants are very bad criminals. The worst. Who’s the worst criminal I can think of? Someone really really bad? Oh, I know!
Hannibal Lecter That’s who they’re sending over. People like the late, great, Hannibal Lecter. Oh, there’s a really funny joke about him!
Hannibal Lecter is a great guy! He’d love to have you for dinner! Because he’d eat you! It’s funny because it means two different things!
Weirdly enough, Trump falling in love with a lame dad joke like “Hannibal Lecter would love to have you over for dinner” is maybe the most normal thing about him.
He asks the audience how many have seen the movie, not how many read the novel. Such is his contempt. I’m sure he was applaused bigly by his fellow illiterati.
By his reported consumption of TV, is he perhaps Chauncey “Chance” Gardener without the charm and naivete?
“I like to watch TV”
You’re assuming he knew there was a novel to begin with.
I was assuming exactly the opposite NB. ;)
I don’t understand the point of mentioning Hannibal Lecter. At all. It doesn’t illustrate anything. And he says, “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” as if (1) Hannibal Lecter is an actual person, and (2) there was anything in the [entirely fictional] moral character or notable deeds of Hannibal Lecter that could possibly be considered admirable, or worthy of emulation, or “great.” Is the point that DJT wishes he were a serial murderer? That he wants to terrorize people as much as HL? That he wants everyone to be afraid of him? What? I don’t get it. All that those repeated Hannibal Lecter references do is make me wonder if DJT is as nuts and detached from reality as those remarks make him seem.
Maddog, after watching a clip of what he was saying (yuck, I know), it looks like he’s trying to demonize all immigrants as Hannibal types, released from prisons and asylums in order to ruin American society. It’s basic fearmongering, but with Trump’s typical incoherency.
Trump himself said above:
And I say, give credit where it’s due. Sometimes Trump speaks the truth. Well, sort of, and In his own way; inimitable or otherwise.
Why not insinuate that they’re all gang members? Or is that too logically coherent?
Having been raised in the central valley of California, with the Mexican migrant farm workers and the descendants of Chinese immigrants who were a big part of the work force that built the railroads and the levee system in the Sacramento – San Joaquin delta in the late 19th and early 20th century, I have a somewhat different perspective on immigrants, documented or not. All things being equal (based on economic and opportunity factors), it doesn’t make sense to see any nationality or race of people having a significantly higher proportion of criminals than any other. Sure, laws vary by region, as do economies, but to portray groups of people as inherently prone to criminality than any other is not only racist, it’s dehumanizing. Trump doesn’t have the intelligence to understand this, so he promotes this othering of people to whoever he thinks is as xenophobic as he is, or whoever is ignorant enough to believe his chowderheaded drivel.
Trump gives the unintelligent, xenophobic chowdwerhead community a bad name.
Chauncey Gardener wasn’t malevolent. A better comparison, I think, would be Lonesome Rhodes (if the reference isn’t familiar, watch A Face in the Crowd
Iknklast, agreed, which is why I wrote “…without the charm and naivete?”.
Thanks for the recommendation, with only 2 episodes of Presumed Innocent left I was wondering where to look next.
There aren’t any really good comparisons for Trump, at least none that I can think of. He’s pretty much sui generis. There are plenty as evil and ruthless, but the stupidity and absurdity and grotesquery are hard to match.
Might I recommend the book “Being There” over the movie, although the movie was certainly quite well done. Chance was a person swept into circumstances he didn’t understand and didn’t try to control; all of that was other people interpreting his simple statements as profundity.