Trump takes bizarre turn as he ratchets up racist rhetoric against migrants

Reaching for racist rhetoric bizarre even for him, Donald Trump compared undocumented migrants to the US to Hannibal Lecter, the serial killer and cannibal famously played by Sir Anthony Hopkins in the Oscar-winning 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs.

“They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums,” the former president and probable Republican presidential nominee claimed in an interview with Right Side Broadcasting Network on Monday. “You know, insane asylums, that’s Silence of the Lambs stuff.

“Hannibal Lecter, anybody know Hannibal Lecter?”

To laughter from the audience at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump added: “We don’t want ’em in this country.”

Trump has made such statements before, including in his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland last month. As framed to Right Side, they were the latest piece of extremist and dehumanizing invective from a candidate seeking to make immigration a core issue of the 2024 presidential campaign.

Trump has a long history of such racist statements, having launched his successful 2016 presidential campaign by describing Mexicans crossing the southern border as rapists and drug dealers.

His liking for Lecter led him to claim, at a rally last October, that the actor who played the character “said on television, ‘I love Donald Trump’, so I love him.’”

Hopkins has not publicly said he loves Trump. In 2018, he told the Guardian: “I don’t vote because I don’t trust anyone.” Brian Cox, another actor to have played Lecter onscreen, has called Trump “such a fucking asshole” and “so full of shit”.

In 2016, Mads Mikkelsen, who played Lecter on television, told CBS News that though he could “definitely laugh at some