Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in The Silence of the Lambs: No, Mr. Lecter isn’t a Republican candidate for office in Jonathan Demme’s Oscar winner. If he were, he wouldn’t be wearing a mask. Anyhow, twice-impeached former U.S. President Donald Trump has lauded him.
- At his most recent fascist rally, an increasingly unhinged Donald Trump – the signs of fast-encroaching dementia couldn’t be more clear – has praised and congratulated The Silence of the Lambs cannibal Hannibal Lecter.
- What next? The former U.S. president and current (presumptive) Republican presidential contender using and/or disseminating Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideas and expressions? Oh, wait.
Sounding increasingly unbalanced, Donald Trump extols Hannibal Lecter – perhaps a candidate for a cabinet post in the U.S. presidential contender’s future ‘unified Reich’?
In some way or other, the world of cinema has always been intertwined with the world of politics – and vice versa.
In the United States, for instance, populist politicians have always made a point of denouncing “decadent” and/or “communist” Hollywood. In decades past, lives and/or careers – see Larry Parks, John Garfield, Marsha Hunt, Ingrid Bergman, Jules Dassin, Joseph Losey, Anne Revere, Dalton Trumbo, etc. – were ruined in the U.S. because of such attacks.
At the other populist end, politicians have happily posed next to Hollywood celebrities and/or embraced their endorsements (e.g. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Katharine Hepburn, John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley, George H.W. Bush and Bruce Willis, Hillary Clinton and Meryl Streep).
In the other direction, movies about or inspired by real-life politicians have always been a big-screen fixture – e.g., George Irving’s To Hell with the Kaiser!, Henry King’s Wilson, Costa-Gavras’ Z, Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men. Besides, a good number of movie people have gone on to either run for or hold political office – e.g., Glenda Jackson, Helen Gahagan, Gina Lollobrigida, Eva Perón, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ronald Reagan.
Even so, the author of this article can’t recall having ever heard of a politician lavishing praise on a movie cannibal. That is, until Donald Trump.
The madness of Führer Trump
Currently under 88 felony indictments (down from 91 several months ago), the former United States president, presumptive Republican nominee in that country’s upcoming presidential election, and a possible convicted felon in the very near future – remember, Donald Trump’s election interference/falsification of business records trial will be coming to a close next week – has been showing alarming signs of cognitive decline. [Update: Donald Trump has been found guilty on all 34 felony charges. He will be sentenced on July 11.]
For starters, the soon-to-be 78-year-old, looking and sounding increasingly frail and haggard despite his trademark fake orange tan and dyed bright-yellow wisp of hair, has been slurring through chunks of his speeches, at times rendering them all but unintelligible.
Trump has also been having trouble pronouncing certain words (e.g., “infrastructure,” “applicable,” “obstacles,” “origins”), forgetting names or getting them repeatedly wrong (e.g., Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Nikki Haley/Nancy Pelosi, Hungary/Turkey, Javier Milei/Argentina), and he seems unable to focus on one topic per sentence, rambling on incoherently about, let’s say, windmills killing mackerels because the corrupt judge built a border wall around the freezing climate hoax courthouse just like Al Capone, the late, gagged Al Capone, who, by the way, would you like to buy his Trump-endorsed, gold-plated biblical sneakers for $299.99?
‘The late, great Hannibal Lecter’
At his most recent Nazi-adjacent rally, held on May 11 in Wildwood, New Jersey – attended by about 4,000–7,000 people (if you look at photos/videos of the event); or 80,000 to 3,500,000 people (if you look at photos of crowded concerts in Rio de Janeiro and Germany [and read articles by ABC News and CBS News hacks and facsimile]) – Donald Trump wanted to compare migrants at the U.S.’s southern border to Hannibal Lecter, best known as the cannibal (played by Anthony Hopkins) who, when not feasting on the organs of people he has murdered, helps FBI trainee Jodie Foster catch another serial killer in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 Best Picture Academy Award winner The Silence of Lambs, itself based on Thomas Harris’ 1988 novel.
The problem is that during his speech, Trump, in what has become the norm, lost track of what he was going to say, thus failing to make a direct connection between migration and cannibalism. Making things even more confusing, he went on about Hannibal Lecter as if the Silence of the Lambs cannibal were a real-life individual who had passed away. (Note: Lecter doesn’t die in any of the books or movies in which he is featured.)
As a result, it’s unclear whether his adoring rally-goers understood that the word salad they were being fed was an attempt to warn them that migrants are coming to the United States not to “steal their jobs” but to have them for dinner.
Here is Donald Trump:
“Has anyone ever seen The Silence of the Lambs? The late [sic], 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.”
Trump then proceeded to attack migrants with variations of his usual Adolf Hitler-inspired rhetoric, demonizing them as entities that are “destroying our country.” (In previous speeches, the expression Trump used – right out of Hitler’s Mein Kampf – was that migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”)
‘Unified Reich’
Now, regarding Donald Trump’s latest brush with Nazism – something that in any civilized society/functioning democracy would have killed his political prospects then and there – this is what happened:
Someone with access to Trump’s account on his disastrous social media company Truth Social (a measly $770,500 in revenues in the first quarter of 2024 [down 31 percent from the previous year]; more than $327.6 million in the red over the same period) posted a promotional video in which we see – mostly by way of news articles related to the late 19th-century/early 20th-century German Empire – what the United States of America will look like under the second Donald Trump regime.
“What’s next for America?” reads the main headline.
Besides Trump schmoozing with Holocaust deniers (that’s real life, not video ads), what’s next includes “peace through strength” and a significant increase in “industrial strength and production” as a consequence of “the creation of a unified Reich.”
M movie poster: One of cinema’s best-known classics, Fritz Lang’s 1931 German thriller M traces the hunt for a child murderer (Peter Lorre) through the noirish streets of Berlin. Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, penned the screenplay. You’ll find a bit more about M further below.
Nazi, moi?
Needless to say, the term “Reich” is associated with Nazi Germany (“the Third Reich”), though in the immediate context of the “Donald Trump for Kaiser” ad the word refers to the unification of the German nation, which took place about six decades before Adolf Hitler’s ascendancy.
Indeed, every Nazi-normalizing hack at, say, The Associated Press or The Atlantic, will tell you that, really, there was no Nazi Germany prior to the 1930s. That being so, how could the use of the word “Reich” in the pro-Trump video have anything at all to do with Hitler and Nazism?
Never mind the fact that clever Nazi and white supremacist/nationalist propaganda (including those by people who, however oddly, look about as “Aryan/European” as a Mayan or a Tuareg) is always delivered with a built-in alibi. “See, we couldn’t have been there because we were here.” Or “We couldn’t have been pushing Nazi propaganda because the Nazi-sounding text found in our ad predates Adolf Hitler.”
Something else: It goes without saying that Trump and his henchmen and women blamed the posting of the Nazi-adjacent video on an intern. Or maybe it was the coffee boy. Just rest assured that Donald Trump himself had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Minor detail: The “unified Reich” post remained available on Trump’s Truth Social account for several long hours after the Nazi connection was made public.
You can stop fascism & Nazism
Notwithstanding the just, simply awful state of the American economy – what with unemployment under 4 percent for 27 consecutive months (the longest stretch since the late 1960s), the stock market hitting record highs, inflation (and greedflation) cooling dramatically since its post-COVID heights, and wages outpacing price increases – and his ardent support among tens of millions of fascist, Nazi/White Supremacist, and Christian Nationalist Americans, Donald Trump will lose the next presidential election.
The downside: Rest assured that he and his brownshirts – or rather, his red-ties – will not accept their loss. For one thing, it will likely mean jail time for the increasingly decrepit old man known to be dozing off (and, as per unconfirmed reports, farting uncontrollably) at his own New York City trial.
Oh, what to do?
If you’re in the United States and you’re determined to prevent a fascist takeover of the country, you must cast your ballot for the Democratic presidential candidate (no matter how deeply flawed, the only other viable contender) and down ballot. In addition, you must make sure everyone you know understands the dire risks Trump and his fascist/Nazi posse pose to the very survival of the U.S. and the world.
If you’re not actively doing that, you’re – even if by default – supporting the Adolf Hitler-quoting, Hannibal Lecter-congratulating, semi-senile (alleged) serial farter and (confirmed) women’s reproductive rights denier, who, by the way, also happens to be the U.S. president of choice of the far-right/racist and Christian fascist movement everywhere on the planet, including those who would love to wipe out the Palestinian population in both Gaza and the West Bank. And Israel along with them.
Never, ever forget that.
‘The late, great Nosferatu’
An aside: In case you’re wondering, there’s no evidence Adolf Hitler pulled a Donald Trump by lauding or congratulating Max Schreck’s blood-sucking Count Orlock (seen in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 horror drama Nosferatu) or Peter Lorre’s child murderer Hans Beckert (seen in Fritz Lang’s 1931 drama M).
To the contrary, Hitler and the Nazis despised “blood-suckers” – a term used as a weapon against Jewish people. As for Peter Lorre and Fritz Lang, they both had Jewish background (Lang on his mother’s side) and had to flee Nazi Germany, eventually settling in Hollywood, where they would have long and fruitful careers.
notes/references
Image of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs: Orion Pictures.
M movie poster: Nero-Film.
See also: Robert De Niro honor rescinded after the two-time Oscar winner denounces convicted felon Donald Trump’s fascist threat.
See also: What’s missing from the George Clooney v U.S. President Joe Biden drama.
“Donald Trump Praises Hannibal Lecter – What Next?” last updated in June 2024.
