As he campaigns for a second term for president, Donald Trump has taken his attack on migrants to the next level.
But a shocking new low came during an interview with the right-wing Right Side Broadcasting Network Monday, as Trump proceeded to invoke a horror movie character to describe migrants.
“They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know, insane asylums, that’s Silence of the Lambs stuff,” Trump said. “Hannibal Lecter, anybody know Hannibal Lecter? We don’t want ’em in this country.”
The line drew laughter from the audience at his Mar-a-Lago estate, where the interview was taking place. He also compared migrants’ languages, bizarrely, to languages from Mars, and then made the claim that cities where large numbers of migrants have gone don’t even have youth sports anymore.
“We have children that are no longer going to school. They’re throwing them out of the park. There’s no more Little Leagues, there’s no more sports, there’s no more life in New York and so many of these cities,” Trump said.
This line was seized upon by the Biden campaign, who posted video of it on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Trump claims immigrants have ended sports in New York: There's no more little leagues, there's no more sports pic.twitter.com/fJ14nqG3Mp
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) March 5, 2024
It’s only the latest outlandish remark he has made about migrants in recent days. On Thursday, during a visit to the southern border, Trump claimed that many of the migrants arriving in the United States are people “who don’t speak languages.”
And if that anthropological impossibility wasn’t absurd enough, Trump on Saturday confused President Biden with former President Obama and mistook the country of Argentina for a person, among other gaffes.
Meanwhile, media reports are full of stories about Biden’s supposed decline in mental acuity, despite Trump’s slip-ups and missteps veering into far more dangerous territory, echoing rhetoric like that of Adolf Hitler.
