, senior editor for Intelligencer who has worked at New York since 2012 Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Amazon, Getty Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Amazon, Getty Donald Trump’s “late, great Hannibal Lecter” routine may be his most breathtaking incoherent rant. Yes, he has claimed that magnets don’t work underwater, and musing about whether he’d rather die by shark or electrocution is a regular part of his stump speech. But Trump’s tirade about the fictional serial killer stands apart for several reasons. First, it is exceptionally weird. Second, it is profoundly wrong on multiple levels. And third, Trump thinks it’s so smart and funny that he will not stop repeating it. Critics say the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs “teeters on the edge between psychological study and all-out horror.” The same is true of the presidential tirade it inspired. On a basic level, we know the awful truth about what Trump is doing: He’s demonizing migrants. But since the Republican National Convention, people have been dropping wild theories about why Trump is going about that nefarious goal by heaping praise on a make-believe cannibal. After a harrowing deep dive through old Trump-rally speeches and xenophobic Tucker Carlson clips, I believe I have come as close as one can to explaining the origins of this bizarre bit. But be warned: Somehow the more you learn, the less sense Trump’s latest obsession makes. . When did Trump first start praising Hannibal Lecter? On October 8, 2023, HuffPost reported that Trump “ate up alleged support from ‘Hannibal Lecter’ in a terrifying slip-up at an Iowa rally.” Trump’s remark had been spotted by the X video clipper @Acyn: Trump on Hannibal Lecter: You know why I like him? Because he said on television “I love Donald Trump” so I love him pic.twitter.com/1jYyXKFkjI — RealSandiBachom 📹 (@realsandibachom) March 5, 2024 . Are we totally sure Trump knows what “political asylum” is? Yes. Here’s an example of him describing how asylum applications work, and his plan to end “endemic abuse of the asylum system,” in November 2018. Trump said: The biggest loophole drawing illegal aliens to our borders is the use of fraudulent or meritless asylum claims to gain entry into our great country. An alien simply crosses the border illegally, finds a Border Patrol agent, and using well-coached language — by lawyers and others that stand there trying to get fees or whatever they can get — they’re given a phrase to read. They never heard of the phrase before. They don’t believe in the phrase. But they’re given a little legal statement to read, and they read it. And now, all of a sudden, they’re supposed to qualify. But that’s not the reason they’re here. This merely asserts the need for asylum, and then often released into the United States, and they await a lengthy court process. The court process will takes years sometimes for them to attend. Obviously Trump did not write this, or any other speech about the intricacies of the asylum process, on his own. But it’s quite clear that he doesn’t think “asylum” means migrants are trying to sneak into America’s mental institutions. . Are people from mental institutions really pouring into America? No. The most awful thing about the Hannibal Lecter rant is that the underlying point Trump is making is false; he’s just trying to gin up fears about migrants. In early 2023, FactCheck.org and CNN extensively researched Trump’s claim about foreign countries emptying out their mental institutions. Neither outlet found any evidence to support it. CNN even asked the Trump campaign for supporting evidence, and they failed to provide it: Trump’s campaign was unable to provide any evidence of the existence of a news story about a no-longer-busy doctor at a South American mental institution – and the campaign also failed to provide any evidence that South American countries are emptying mental health facilities to somehow send patients into the US. Representatives for two anti-immigration organizations told us they had not heard of anything that would corroborate any of Trump’s story, as did three experts at organizations favorable toward immigration. CNN’s own search did not produce any evidence. Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, told FactCheck.org, “As far as I can tell, it’s a total fabrication.” “It’s hard to prove a negative — nobody’s writing a report saying ‘Ecuador is not opening its mental institutions’ — but what I can say is that I work full-time on migration, am on many coalition mailing lists, correspond constantly with partners in the region, and scan 300+ RSS feeds and Twitter lists of press outlets and activists region wide, and I have not seen a single report indicating that this is happening,” he told the outlet. . How did Trump even come up with this? Fidel Castro did send people from mental institutions to the United States — but this happened decades ago, and the Cuban dictator did not send “millions” of people. When CNN asked the Trump campaign for evidence to support his claim, one of the articles Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung supplied was a 1983 Washington Post article about the Mariel boatlift of 1980. Per CNN: Cheung did cite a report that late Cuban despot Fidel Castro included mental health patients in the Mariel boatlift of 1980 (they made up a small percentage of the people involved in the boatlift), but that was 43 years ago; Trump’s stories have all been present-tense claims about events purportedly happening during Biden’s presidency. So why is Trump conflating this historical event with the current situation at the southern border? As The Wall Street Journal explained in 2017, the Mariel boatlift “is at the center of an unresolved, sometimes bitter argument among economists, hinging on a basic question: When foreigners come to the U.S., does their presence drive down the wages of native workers?” That year a Harvard professor published a study claiming that the Mariel boatlift did hurt American workers. While other scholars disagreed, many Trump allies began citing the 1980 incident in their anti-immigration arguments. Here’s Tucker Carlson discussing the Mariel boatlift on his now-canceled Fox News show during a September 2022 segment in which he claimed the white-supremacist “great replacement theory” is a “statistical fact”: . Does Trump know Hannibal Lecter isn’t a real person? Probably, but at times it doesn’t seem like he does. At his October 2023 rally in Wildwood, he mused, “Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he?” . Is the actor who plays Hannibal Lecter pro-Trump? No, though Trump thinks he is. At the same New Jersey rally, Trump explained that he loves the actor who played the psychopath because he’s a big MAGA guy. “You know why I like him? Because he said on television on one of the — ‘I love Donald Trump.’ So I love him. I love him. I love him,” Trump said. Trump on Hannibal Lecter: You know why I like him? Because he said on television “I love Donald Trump” so I love him pic.twitter.com/1jYyXKFkjI