Today, Explained - The late, great Hannibal Lecter

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Donald Trump keeps referencing the infamous fictional cannibal in his speeches. Intelligencer’s Margaret Hartmann attempts to explain why. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy with help from Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Margaret Hartman. I'm a senior editor at New York Magazine's site Intelligencer, and my beat for the past few years has been Donald Trump being weird. I've been writing a lot about strange rants that he keeps repeating at his rallies, and some of those include claiming that magnets don't work underwater. Give me a glass of water. Let me drop it on the Magnus. That's the end of the Magnus. He did a bit of a pirate impression when he was trying to describe something Robert E. Lee said, which the general did not actually say. And they were fighting, never fight uphill me boys, but it was too late. And most recently, he has been praising the late, great Hannibal Lecter. And that's a rant that just makes no sense on any level, no matter how you cut it. So I decided to dig into that recently. What Margaret found as she dug and what it tells us about where the former president, convicted felon, Republican candidate is at these days.

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You still wake up sometimes, don't you? You wake up in the dark. And here today explained. Yes. Okay, Margaret, for people who don't watch, you know, early 90s seminal suspense thrillers. Yep. Can you just tell people who Hannibal Lecter is? Sure. So in 1991, there was a movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster. Has anybody seen Silence of the Lambs?

It was about a serial killer who was also a cannibal named Hannibal Lecter. Who's the subject? The psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal the cannibal. It's a great film, and it won a lot of Academy Awards. And the Oscar goes to... The Silence of the Lambs. You know, you've probably seen the image of Hannibal

completely restrained in a straitjacket with a mask over his face. This is not really reflective of any way that mentally ill people are actually treated. This is really a fantasy. And that's why it's so weird that Trump keeps citing it. The late, great Hannibal Lecter. Can you kind of break down the basic components of Trump's riff on Hannibal Lecter? How does it usually go?

So there's a part in Trump's stump speech, which is about vilifying migrants. We have people that are being released into our country that we don't want in our country. And he says that they are coming from prisons. They're coming from prisons and jails. They're coming from mental institutions, mental institutions and insane asylums. That was originally the part of the stump speech that said he'd just say that and move on. He's trying to scare people,

make them think of migrants not as normal people with families fleeing persecution, trying to get into the United States to create a new home for themselves and their families. It's another variation on Mexicans are rapists, which kicked off his whole political career. They're rapists and some, I assume, are good people. So when he gets to the part of his stump speech where he says that migrants are coming from

prisons and mental institutions, he stops himself and says, actually, they're coming from insane asylums and that's worse than mental institutions. They always say, sir, please don't use the term insane asylum. Then he asks. Silence of the Lamb. Has anyone ever seen the silence of the lamb? The late great Hannibal Lecter. And then he sometimes adds more into that and says that he's a great man. He's a wonderful man. Then he'll repeat lines from the movie. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? Excuse me,

I'm about to have a friend for dinner. Is this walked by. And then the crowd chuckles and Trump moves on. When did he start doing this bit about Hannibal Lecter in his stump speeches? So the press first noticed him doing this in October of 2023. You know, insane asylum is like Silence of the Lambs stuff. That's serious stuff. That was the first time that anyone caught him praising Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal Lecter. How good an actor was he? But it didn't really get that much coverage because it actually weirdly coincided with the Hamas attack on Israel. So obviously, the news was focused elsewhere. He kept saying it for many months. And then it really started to catch on in May of 2024 during a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey.

The late great Hannibal Lecter. And then he just kept running with it and kept repeating it and repeating it. And eventually he mentioned it during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last month. You know, the press is always on me because I say this. Has anyone seen Silence of the Lambs? My mouth just dropped open. It was very late at night. And I thought, like, am I hallucinating what is happening right now? How is he possibly saying this at the Republican National Convention? I guess I have to ask, do we know if the president realizes that Hannibal Lecter is not a real person? At times it seems that he does not know, but I'm pretty sure he does.

I don't think he knows the name of the actor who plays Hannibal Lecter. So he'll say Hannibal Lecter. How great an actor was he? I believe he's referring to Anthony Hopkins. One of the, well, funny or troubling things about this rant is none of the actors who played Hannibal Lecter have ever praised Trump. I believe that he's mixing up John Voight and Anthony Hopkins because John Voight is a Trump fan. President Trump is the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln. But at one point, Trump said that he has to praise Hannibal Lecter, meaning the actor,

because he went on TV and said that he loves Trump. He said that a long time ago. And once he said that, he was in my camp. I was in his camp. I don't care if he was the worst actor. I'd say he was great to me. And Anthony Hopkins has said nothing of the sort. But John Voight is a very prominent Republican in Hollywood.

So I believe that's who he's picturing. Well, out of respect to Anthony Hopkins, Sir Anthony Hopkins. Yes. Do we know how Sir Tony feels about the former president? We do. So years ago, he had said that he doesn't vote. He doesn't really pay attention to Trump. That was the nicest thing he'd ever said about Trump was that he doesn't pay attention to him.

But when he found out a few months ago that he had become a part of Trump's stump speech, he started laughing, said he didn't know that. And then he said, Hannibal, that's a long time ago movie. God, that was over 30 years ago. I'm shocked and appalled what you've told me about Trump. That was his comment on it. So maybe not a huge fan. No, it does not seem so. And we should note here that Sir Anthony Hopkins is alive. Is the character Hannibal Lecter dead? Is that why he's the late, great Hannibal Lecter? Why Trump keeps saying he's dead is a bit of a mystery. The character is not dead in any of the movies, any of the books, any of the TV series. I have no idea what he's referring to. Very sadly,

one of the five actors who played Lecter has passed away, but it was a French actor who played him in a kind of obscure Hannibal film. So I don't think that Trump is referring to that. I think he's just confused. Okay. Do we have any idea why the former president is doing this? Do you have theories? You're probably the person who has spent the most time thinking about this on the planet. Yes, maybe unfortunately. So a theory has been going around the past few weeks online that Trump started saying this because he's confused about the asylum process in immigration versus insane asylums. And that's why he just started ranting about Lector. He's confusing asylum seekers with the people from nut houses

in South America coming across the border. And every time he mentions asylum, he thinks of Hannibal Lecter. I do not think that that is the case. If you look at how this evolved, a lot of Trump riffs evolved because he's doing these stump speeches, he's doing these interviews, and he just, kind of like a stand-up comedian. He just keeps repeating and repeating and repeating and adding little embellishments. So I went back through a lot of speeches he's made over the past two years,

and you can see when the claim that migrants are coming from prisons and institutions first emerges. That's the base of this strange rant. In January 2023, he started saying that Central American countries are emptying out their prisons. And they're emptying out their mental institutions. Then a few months later, he started mentioning Silence of the Lambs and commenting, they don't want me to say insane asylums. The word you're not supposed to use anymore. Words you're not supposed to use.

Somehow he thinks that insane asylums are a much worse version of mental institutions. An insane asylum is a mental institution on steroids. Of course, it's just an outdated term for the same thing. So then he just threw out the name Hannibal Lecter, but he wouldn't really elaborate on it. He'd just throw out the name as a reference to kind of get a scary picture in listeners' minds. Hannibal Lecter was a serious psycho, right? He's not just talking about people in regular mental institutions. He's talking about the scariest, most terrifying villains you can think of. They're coming into our country.

He just kept adding to that rant and adding to that rant. And over many months, we got to the point last October where he's full on praising Hannibal Lecter. The late great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man. So the central thing he's saying is a just something completely vile, but it has the cadence of a joke. He's saying that Central American countries are sending people from insane asylums who they know are horrifying criminals who are going to commit violence against Americans. There is no evidence for that. Multiple outlets have fact-checked that. It seems to have grown out of actually something Fidel Castro did, but way back in 1980.

So in 1980, there was something called the Mariel Boatlift, and Fidel Castro did send some people from mental institutions to the United States, and they wound up in Florida. U.S. officials say that among the 120,000 Mariel refugees were hundreds of hardened in a piece Tucker Carlson did on Fox News in 2022, where he was advocating for the Great Replacement Theory. So let's say you wanted to harm the United States. What would you do? Well, what did Fidel Castro do in 1980 with the Mariel Boatlift? He opened his prisons and mental hospitals and sent him to Miami, thereby changing Miami forever. He's talking about how Central American countries are emptying out their prisons and mental hospitals and send them to Miami, thereby changing Miami forever. He's talking about how Central American countries are emptying out their prisons and mental institutions. Venezuela is doing something very similar. Venezuela is opening

its prisons and sending them here. There's no evidence that this is actually true, but that kind of got into the right wing rhetoric and started appearing in Trump's rally speech. And they're coming in from insane asylums which are closing all over the world. It's not just South America. As much as it's ridiculous and you want to laugh at it, it's really horrific what he's saying. But that's kind of like Trump in a nutshell. He's saying absolutely appalling things,

but somehow making you want to laugh along with him. And that's kind of the weird dichotomy we've been dealing with throughout his political campaign. The wildest part to me is that by the end of the movie, Hannibal has escaped a U.S. asylum and he's stalking his next victim in the Bahamas. So at its core, this is a story about the U.S. exporting or unleashing its most dangerous criminals to a foreign country, not the opposite. Margaret Hartman, Intelligencer, New York Magazine.

You can subscribe at nymag.com. We reached out to the Trump campaign to see if they could help us further understand the Hannibal riff. We were being very demure, very mindful. Anyway, they never wrote back. So when we're back on Today Explained, we're going to ask a health and science journalist what this whole bit tells us about how the former president's doing these days. I mean, I see this. I like it. It's so incredible.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Boom. OK. Pshew. Boom. Today Explained is back and Gideon Gill is with us. He's the managing editor at Stat. So we're a digital news health site. We cover medicine, life sciences, health care. But we also we cover the health, a lot about health policy and politics as well. So we do from time time to time, write about the president.

Statt's been writing about the former president for a while now. Yes. So we actually, as far back as 2017, we wrote a story that was a linguistic analysis of then the new President Trump. And we talked to experts on cognition and linguistics and psychology who noted that his speech patterns had changed quite a bit since, you know, since the 1970s and 80s when he would speak in complete sentences and fairly complex sentences. Becoming wealthy or becoming successful or becoming whatever the word is when you say

becoming anything, I think it largely has to do with incentive and drive and enthusiasm. He was now his speech patterns were a lot of breaks and jumping around. And we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen. And President Xi was enjoying it. And I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded. And so we thought, well, it's been seven years. There was a lot of discussion about President Biden's possible cognitive decline after his debate performance. And both he and former President Trump have aged. And so we thought it was worth going back

and taking a look at what's become of his speech patterns. And what did you find? Yes, so, you know, the thinking behind this is that the presidential candidates haven't released their medical records. President Trump does say that he's taken not one, but two cognitive tests. I took two of them and I aced them. But he doesn't provide any details or even say what the tests were. So there's been a lot of research, actually, that changes in

linguistic patterns go hand in hand with cognitive decline. And so we thought looking at his speech patterns was a window into his brain when we can't see his medical records. We talked to a number of experts on memory and cognition, and they said that from listening to various clips of Trump since this year compared to 2017, that they've noticed a continuing increase in jumps in the middle of a sentence from one topic to another. So he's doing it even more than he used to. He's doing it more than he used to. And there's this word they use to describe this called tangentiality. But it basically means these sort of digressions that come out of nowhere.

It sounds like a good descriptor for his four years in office. Yeah. I'm not going to go there. I'll do it for you. Okay. In the article, my colleague Olivia Goldhill,

who was the reporter and writer in the piece, cited some examples. So one was a speech that he gave earlier this year where he began in this passage mocking President Biden's ability to walk through sand. When he was in the sand and he was having a hard time lifting his feet through the sand, because, you know, sand is heavy. And suddenly in mid-sentence, he shifts to talking about Cary Grant, the old Hollywood icon. And he's sitting on a bathing suit. Look, at 81, do you remember Cary Grant? How good was Cary Grant, right? It was just within an instant that

that happened. I don't think Cary Grant, he was good. I don't know what happened to movie stars today. And then there was another speech he gave earlier this year where he was riffing on something called debanking. They want to debank you and we're going to debank. Which has to do with this idea that banks are ending people's accounts because of their political ideology. They want to take away your rights. They want to take away your country. The things you're doing, all electric cars. And he suddenly started talking about electric cars and the cost of electric cars. If you want an electric car, good, but they don't go far. They're very expensive. They're going to be made in China. That's why I think I'm going to get the autoworkers to vote

for Trump. You know, we're having great, great talks. What does this tangentiality, be it about, you know, Hannibal Lecter, Cary Grant, electric cars, debanking, tell us about where the former president's at mentally. And I know that we're talking about this without having given him a cognitive test ourselves. Yeah. So because the way you speak is controlled by different parts of your brain. So your linguistic fluency reflects in some ways the workings of your brain. So your prefrontal cortex, which is where you're the seat of your higher order cognitive functions like working memory, judgment, understanding, planning, as well as the temporal lobe, which is where as you're speaking, you go to search for and retrieve the right word for what you want to say.

Your verbal fluency reflects the functioning of those things. And as you age, it's natural for those parts of your brain to not quite work as smoothly. And so we've got to be careful because, you know, none of the experts we talked to have examined the former president, they emphasize that we can't conclusively say anything. But there is the possibility, it's indicative of some sort of cognitive decline. On the other hand, the explanations can be totally benign. They can range from he's under a lot of stress. He didn't get a lot of sleep. So there are very benign explanations like that. he's under a lot of stress. He didn't get a lot of sleep.

So there are very benign explanations like that, but then the possible explanations also range to it could be early cognitive decline, possibly early dementia. I mean, the man was recently convicted of dozens of felonies, so presumably he's under some stress, not to mention running for president, against a new candidate. Poor guy.

Do you think there's a chance this is all just part of his personality, like it's all a bit of an act? You know, I think one feature that a number of people talked about in his speech is repetition, which is clearly, I think, you know, maybe related to that. He gets a laugh or applause, so he would repeat it. And he'd love to have you for dinner, you right there. He'd love to have you for dinner. But I do think that it likely goes beyond that because it's progressing, according to the experts we talked to. So if it was just his conscious style that he was adopting, I don't know that it would change that much over time.

You know, there are some other aspects of his speech that actually, or what they call all or nothing thinking, which is indicated by the use of absolute terms like always, never completely. We've suffered the worst inflation we've ever had. NAFTA, the worst trade deal ever made. There's never been an invasion like this anywhere. Withdrawal from Afghanistan, the worst humiliation in the history of our country. Under my presidency, we had the most secure border and best economy in the history of our country, in the history of the world. And we interviewed a

University of Texas social psychologist named James Pennebaker, who took complete transcripts of 35 interviews that Trump has given since 2015 through this year. And he actually ran it through statistical software that looked at things like word frequency and such. And one of the things he found was that there was a roughly 60% increase since 2015 in the use of these absolute terms. And that in addition, he now uses far fewer positive words than he previously had, and includes more references to negative emotions. And this can be, he says, a sign of depression, which is interesting to think about. But he also pointed out that another

person whose all or nothing thinking has gone up significantly is President Biden's. No longer a contender for president, it turns out. Indeed. Do you think voters should be concerned about what you guys found? I don't want to tell voters what they should be concerned about. That's really not my role. But the one thing that's clear to me is he's often very hard to understand. You know, even just last week, he was asked a question about the abortion pill, Mifepristone, and his answer was very confusing.

Sure, you could do things that will be would would supplement. Absolutely. And those things are pretty open and humane. But you have to be able to have a vote. And all I want to do is give everybody a vote. And the votes are taking place right now as we speak. And as a result, there have been days of articles about what did he mean? So that's sort of, to me, the one very clear thing is his communication style can be very confusing. That's something voters should take into account. Gideon Gill, StatNews.com.

Abhishek Artsy made our show today with help from Victoria Chamberlain. We were edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Andrea Christensdottir and Rob Byers. I'm Sean Ramos from the rest of the team. Today Explained includes Halima Shah, Miles Bryan, Harima Wagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Patrick Boyd, Amina Alsadi, Miranda Kennedy, and the late, great Noel King. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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