During a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey on May 11, former President Donald Trump praised fictional serial-killing cannibal Hannibal Lecter and confused President Jimmy Carter for tennis great Jimmy Connors.
All of these moments and more are explored in the podcast "Shrinking Trump," which is hosted by a doctor duo, psychologists Dr. John Gartner and Dr. Harry Segal, who examine the head of the 45th president and discuss his purported mental decline.
"'Silence of the Lambs' — has anyone ever seen a 'Silence of the Lambs,'" Trump asked in an apparent tangent while railing against immigrants coming into the U.S. after being freed from "insane asylums."
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"The late great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man," Trump told the crowd. "He oftentimes would 'have a friend for dinner' — remember the last scene 'Excuse me, I'm about to have a friend for dinner!' and this poor doctor walks by — 'I'm about to have a friend for dinner!'"
"But Hannibal Lecter congratulations. The late great Hannibal Lecter...."
Gartner, a former part-time assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, thinks that Trump can't discern between the serial killer character in the movie and real life.
"So I think the biggest thing is he's speaking about a fictional character as if he's real," he said.
Segal, a senior lecturer in psychology at Cornell University, added that Lecter's also a character who "doesn't lose at the end of that movie."
"Trump is quoting the last minute of the movie where you see him off to take revenge by eating the doctor who had put him in jail so it also has that sense that Trump has that he can never be caught; that he will always win."
When he gets words wrong, Gartner accused Trump of being "such a shameless showman that when he realizes he's made a mistake he just riffs on."
As to why defendant Trump is reportedly napping while seated at trial for weeks fighting falsification of business records charges in New York, Gartner concludes "it's not normal."
He added: "No one can remember it ever happening and you know why? People with dementia fall asleep un uncontrollably during the day and even though he knows he's being ridiculed for it, he can't stop."
